2017 Rocket Mass Heater Workshop Jamboree

Okay, so since you said they should have contacted me I checked my primary spam filter and I think I found the contact. Thank you!

Edited:  Thanks Chris! I think we'll get it worked out via e-mail now!

Jocelyn,
Can you check on my email status too, please?  I signed up for the last session but have not seen any replies other than the paypal one.

thanks,

Rob

Yes, will do. Poor Renee has been a bit hamstrung waiting on me for a few things and I am a bit strapped with a family health crisis. Sorry for the delays folks!

Yay, emails! So I will be driving from the Denver area; seeing as this is over a 900 mile drive I'm planning to leave Wednesday, hopefully drive 2/3 of the drive, stay somewhere along the route, finish the last leg Thursday and get camp set up. I'm concerned that tent space will be taken up at this point.

It's good to see there will be showers there; how about some way to wash clothes? 12 days camping is more than I've done in one stretch and I've done the Rainbow Gathering a few times back in the day.

I'm assuming there'll be places to charge laptops, phones, battery packs, cordless power tools.

That's my concerns for the moment. This is 5 weekends away? Am I counting this properly? Damn I have much to attend to.

Later!

There are plenty of tent spaces, just a limited number of tent pads at base camp. (I think we have 5 or 6 tent pads, which are sand-filled rectangles made with logs.) Base camp is rocky and hilly, and those who don't mind the climb, some times prefer a quieter tent spot way up the "volcano" (where there are not tent pads but plenty of grassy areas to pitch a tent). In the past, we have had folks pitch their tent right in the parking lot behind the shop (we call that area Arrakis), which would be the least hiking, though not exactly that private or quiet.

There is a manual, hand-operated washer that we store in one of the shower stalls to keep it out of the elements. It can be pulled out and used to wash clothes and there are clothes lines for drying. Otherwise, the nearest coin-op laundromat is less than 10 miles away.

Yes, we have special USB chargers, two of them that take 10 USB cords at once, and lots of other power around the shop and the library (I'll explain more in a minute).

Note that the shop is also what we call the auditorium, and it is at the bottom of base camp where most of the jamboree will take place. The shop is a large, metal building with a bermshed around it. The shop has one door that is large enough to let a semi truck in. Parking is typically behind the shop in Arrakis. Though there is another, small parking lot (the turtle lot) across the driveway from the shop.

The garage and library building (fka the office or the Barony of Bacon) is up the driveway from the shop and the parking, and next to the Fisher Price House (which is the double-wide where Paul and Jocelyn live and where the cooking will happen). The garage is a small stick-frame building (not a metal building), with a normal-sized garage door, and has a library space on the north side of it with a few desks, books and magazines. Some times folks confuse the shop/auditorium with the garage/library. We use shop and garage separately and distinctly to mean two different buildings, so I figured that bit of orientation or semantics might help.

We typically send all the other e-mail info AFTER we've received your registration form. So if you haven't filled out a Google form for the jamboree, please check your spam or let us know and we'll resend it. There are a handful of participants who haven't yet filled out the registration and might like more details sent to them!

Special deal for part 2 and 3:  9 days of rocket mass heater goodness for $700!



https://richsoil.com/rmh-workshop.jsp

Question from today:

We really want to attend a workshop on building our own Rocket Mass Heater, but we're out of the country until the end of October, so we will miss the jamboree. Will you be running any other workshops after October this year, or do you recommend any others in _____?

To which I replied:

Paul's plan is to have RMH workshops every fall (usually October, but could be September) so next year is a possibility! Keep an eye out on the forums and the daily-ish email. It's not likely we'll have another one this winter this year.

As for other RMH workshops, I'd recommend watching these forums:
--workshops forum:  https://permies.com/f/175/
--find your regiional forum:  https://permies.com/c/3

Or better yet, create a thread in one of the above forums to make a request!

I just got word that Tim Barker is having a family emergency and cannot make it.

There's still room - we'd love to have you join us!

To sign up, and/or to make sure we're all moving along, here's how it all flows:

Go to richsoil.com's rmh jamboree workshop payment section, select and pay for which sessions you want

Paul will confirm that payment was received

Jocelyn or Renée will send you a brief registration form to fill out

After the registration form is filled out and returned by you, Renée or Jocelyn will email more details and add you to a private jamboree forum

The registration form can be filled out multiple times. Please fill it out again or contact us if your travel plans change, or if you did not provide your travel details the first time.

It begins!

As always, everything started days ago and many things have changed.

Peter's "minnie mouse" has been taken out of the red cabin and moved to the love shack.  Although most of the installation is waiting for the official event to sart tomorrow morning where peter will be talking about all of the details of how it works.  

Donkey's "4 inch batch box for a tiny house" was going to be in the love shack, but is now going to be in the red cabin.   And that design was going to put the mass under the bed, but now it sounds like it will be a large vertical stratification chamber.

Here is a PUBLIC access link to the album of all pictures I shot over the course of the RMH Jamboree of Workshops... In-Joy!

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10214418088664572&type=1&l=465af9235c

Yesterday morning I said something along the lines of "batch box heaters are total fucking useless pieces of shit ....  until they have a proper door."   Apparently, Peter was gearing up to kill me for a moment there.    The need for a proper door easily adds three to six days of welding to a build that would otherwise be about two days of a much lower DIY project.  

And then ...  somewhere around mid day ...  Donkey made a slightly sloped cob door for the lid of a glass pot.  Apparently he got the idea from mud.   This adds 20 minutes to the build instead of three to six days.  

This is a huge game changer for batch box rocket mass heaters in a long list of ways.

As we are starting things this morning, I mentioned how one of the problems we are facing in getting folks to hear more about rocket mass heaters is how people will build a batch box system featuring everything but a proper door and then leave it.  The result is that the remaining people will experience what is left and conclude "rocket mass heaters suck".   I was informed this morning that those people are dumbfucks, so who cares about them?  I pointed out that we need to countering misinformation.   The response is that we don't because we have already won.   I pointed out that we are still trying to swim upriver and was told that this is also wrong.  

So, I present exibit A:   google trends.

The moral of the story is that if we sit back and wait for it all to be sorted out, we will do poorly.   We need to push and be vigilant.  

I’ve used a USSC barrel stove kit firebox door and frame for 3 builds now and they’re really simple.

Here are some photos of the 2017 Rocket Mass Heater Jamboree, in no particular order. All photos courtesy of Attilio Cesare.

And more photos from Attilio Cesare.

And the fun continues! More sneak peeks into the Rocket Mass Heater Workshop Jamboree, courtesy of Attilio Cesare.

All photos courtesy of Attilio Cesare.

All photos courtesy of Atillio Cesare.

And here are the last of the photos from the Rocket Mass Heater Workshop Jamboree, courtesy of Atillio Cesare.

So AWESOME Cool to see these photos after being there for much of the event.  Can't wait to see more talk and video about how it all went once you're finished.

Tracy Wandling wrote:And here are the last of the photos from the Rocket Mass Heater Workshop Jamboree, courtesy of Atillio Cesare.

Oh, those are not the last of the photos I AM, and will BE, shooting!!  All those pix and many videos, as well as all the current and future pix/vid I shoot, can/will be viewed via the link I shared in my post within this thread above...

I went out to base camp a few days ago to check out the jamboree! There are some really cool innovations this year in the RMH world!! I took some video of the event and published it on YouTube:



I recorded a bunch more content that will be used on Paul's channel over the next several weeks.  

More photos from the 2017 Rocket Mass Heater Workshop Jamboree!

And a couple more. Stay tuned for more photos of the Rocket Mass Heater Workshop Jamboree!

Attn Peter.

Did you get time to try it?

http://donkey32.proboards.com/thread/1205/discworld-riser

paul wheaton wrote:
Peter van den Berg



Born 1st of March 1946 in The Hague, Netherlands. Lived in the same town since.
Formal education: Cabinet maker up to master.
Skills: Woodworking, bricklaying, plumbing, welding, plastering, electrical wiring, composites, making molds.
Work: Cabinet maker for 17 years; composite specialist and mold maker at Fokker Aircraft for 17 years; master of boats for Delft University among others, 14 years; retired since 2011.
Interested in efficient wood burning, mostly by way of masonry heaters for the last 30 years.  Tried to make a living building those heaters but gave up after 5 years.
Since 2007 investigating and developing rocket heater variants. Designed and built his own passive, energy neutral house.

Peter's devious plans for the innovators event

For the innovator's event: some experiments done by some people, including myself suggest the direction of the riser in a batchrocket core doesn't need to be vertically up. That is, as long as the flames coming from the firebox are going through a 90 degree turn. So I'd like to do a horizontal "riser" coupled to a batchrocket combustion core.

A "riser" going down from the firebox might be too much to ask but a definite conclusion could only be established through experimentation.

A second experiment, given there's enough time, could be a J-tube Evans' style with an added detail which make the batchrockets "tick".

The workshop after the event could be: a small kitchen heater with a cook top and hopefully also an oven. The heater core could be anything from a standard J-tube up to one of the experimental core mentioned above. This workshop would be taken place in Allerton Abbey, as off-grid as they come.

Peter, have you had the time to try the discworld riser?

http://donkey32.proboards.com/thread/1205/discworld-riser

Hi Max,
I don't know what you mean by "discworld riser" since I read the whole thread but couldn't download the skp file. Can you be a little bit more specific?

Peter van den Berg wrote:Hi Max,
I don't know what you mean by "discworld riser" since I read the whole thread but couldn't download the skp file. Can you be a little bit more specific?

Well, Horizontal riser, kind of like what you were suggesting in your workshop description. My idea was to make it inline with the firebox. But, a vertical sidewinder with an horizontal riser could work.

Great fun everyone. I look forward to seeing you next year.
--Uncle Mud