check this stove out

Insert average toilet/chili/burning joke here

BeGreen said:

If it is he's going to need a royal flush to clear the pipes or he'll end up with a full house. %-P

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Definitely gets my vote for cleverest riposte of the day!

In the Tempcast Masonary Heater that I put into my last house, the smoke entered the chimney at the lowest point of the structure - about one foot BELOW the bottom of the firebox.

I didn't think it would work very well; but I was wrong! A "banana" box of 2x4 and 2x6 trim ends would take off like a blast furnace - heating the masonry and with no visible smoke out of the chimney. After about 2.5 hours I would close the chimney top damper and the heater would warm the house for 24 hours. In the cold weather, I would sometimes have another fire in the morning.

I wanted to take it with me when I moved, but it weighed in at around 9000 pounds!! I guess I should have bought a Tulikivi. Apparently you can take them apart and move the heater to another location!!

Cheers.

BeGreen said:

If you look at how a good masonry stove is designed, there are often several passages where the smoke goes downward. This wouldn't work well in a flue that had neutral or negative draft, but should be ok with a flue that has strong natural draft. I saw low exit kachelovens in Europe too. It's counter-intuitive, but they seem to work well.

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If you really want to see some upside down, thoroughly exhausted exhaust, Google on "Rocket stove mass heater", and check out the links like this:

http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp

http://www.richsoil.com/images/rocket_stove_butt_warmer_4.gif

These folks get the exhaust going down, then sideways, up, back down again, sideways under an earthen bench that stores the heat, then oozing out dizzy and spent onto the ground.

I wonder how the Tulikivi gets the draft going from a cold start. I lived in a rural house in Japan that had a long room divider wall massive heater. The flue on one end of the wall and small firebox on the other. There was a cleanout at the bottom of the flue that you burned a few wadded up newspapers to start the draft, then you lit off the preloaded wood in the firebox. It worked great, but the house was so drafty that it was hardly worth the effort. The wood fired o-furo on the other hand was the berries. Boil in that for a while then run across the dog trot and hop into bed. Stayed warm all night. Mornings were no fun. By the second winter, I never gave the arrangements a second thought.

The outhouse was in the house. Surprisingly, it didn't smell. In two years, they never pumped it to my knowledge. I had used them as a kid, so it was no novelty, but occasionally stateside visitors would stop by. The expression of horror on some after a trip to the inside outhouse was priceless. More than one little kid was scared to go potty.

Having the flue outlet below the inlet was a puzzler for me, but I realized that incoming gas at, say, 1500 F can push 500 F gas out of a level or lower vent pretty easily. One problem is that the flue pressure has to be positive for this to happen, at least to start ( a stack after the outlet can produce a net draft, but it has to be warmed up first).

As I understand it, the firebox has to have a short vertical draft into a "heat exchanger" area where flue gas cools significantly, loses buoyancy, and is then pushed down through a lower exit. The short, hot draft from the firebox is enough to overcome the buoyancy of the cooler, deeper exit path.

One unexpected result is that startup should have a better draft than when the exit temperature is higher.

KWillets said:

Having the flue outlet below the inlet was a puzzler for me, but I realized that incoming gas at, say, 1500 F can push 500 F gas out of a level or lower vent pretty easily. One problem is that the flue pressure has to be positive for this to happen, at least to start ( a stack after the outlet can produce a net draft, but it has to be warmed up first).

As I understand it, the firebox has to have a short vertical draft into a "heat exchanger" area where flue gas cools significantly, loses buoyancy, and is then pushed down through a lower exit. The short, hot draft from the firebox is enough to overcome the buoyancy of the cooler, deeper exit path.

One unexpected result is that startup should have a better draft than when the exit temperature is higher.

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Thanks for the explanation KWillets, I did not understand that.

I think the rocket stove's firebox is remarkable--it's a cylinder, open at the top. Firewood sits vertically, burning from the bottom, with the bottom draft drawing away smoke! Firewood length is not much of an issue.

Quite ingenious. I wonder how well they work.

kick ass masonry heaters if i were to build a house this is my #1 choice heard guys heating the whole house all winter with 2 chords of wood.