An Engineer Burns Wood

[wooduser]

Engineers can be people with interesting ideas, and this is a You Tube video about the way an engineer thinks and lives in his world. Among other things, he heats only with wood, and so do the three tenenats who live in apartments in the building he owns.

He designs and makes his own wood stoves too, and tests them to see how well the theories he has are working in the real world.

I found it an interesting way to consider heating with wood.

 

[bholler]

Dick hill was a great innovator in the 70s and 80s and has contributed greatly to the industry. That video is not really a great representation of his contributions. In that segment his ideas sound very dated. But if you read some of his papers he is a facinating guy with great ideas.

 

[begreen]

There are several old posts here about professor Hill's stoves and designs.
http://www.hotandcold.tv/the_professor.html
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads...ocket-mass-heaters.160043/page-9#post-2215114
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/dick-hill-wood-gasifier-inventor-is-96-today.132685/
https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/re-weve-lost-a-good-one-richard-dick-hill.155511/

 

[wooduser]

Thanks for the reference, Begreen.

I read through the stick furnace paper and found lots of interesting things about wood combustion in it ----I could even understand a good deal of it!

It's interesting that that effort to build a furnace that's high in efficiency, low polluting and safe to operate has little to do with the EPA wood stoves of today, and his furnace was a lot more complicated, using two fans to control combustion in the stove.

So there must have been some huge leaps in development that led to the much simpler EPA certified stoves. Perhaps I'll find out how that process of development happened one of these days.

And there's still lots more good stuff to read there!

 

[Manly]

Knowledge is good.

 

[vwmike]

Watched the video start to finish, and what a neat old guy! Not so sure I'd be brave enough to try burning a homemade masonary stove in my own house

 

[jetsam]

I love that guy! That is probably exactly how my kitchen would look if I was single.

 

[peakbagger]

Tom in Maine a member on this site worked with Dick for years and he has long running radio show called Hot and Cold that featured Dick as co host for years. Sort of like Car Talk for home heating and home repairs. Dick retired very early from the University of Maine but remained a professor emeritus for decades and did a lot of research as he had access to grad students. The apartment he lived in was in a house he owned and the residents were all engineering students who put up with his ongoing research.

Some of the research projects were pretty innovative and I expect Tom knows a lot more or them. One I heard about was a test to prove how useless stove btu ratings were. They supposedly set up a small stove in field and put a very tall insulated stack on it. I don't know the height but think it was in the 50 foot range. They then fed it kiln dried finely split wood. They had some instrumentation on it but I think the real goal was to over fire it to the max. I believe the stove got cherry red and put out a lot of heat. I am not sure what failed first.

Another project was to build several 4' by 4' buildings of identical dimensions but different constructions and insulation types and thicknesses. This was in the days when log cabins were hyped as being super energy efficient so he had a log cabin or two in the mix. Each had an exterior door and that was it. The interior held a light bulb hooked to thermostat and a wattmeter. He set the thermostats the same and installed them out in a field with equal sun and wind exposure for I believe an entire year. I think the results were the log cabins scored very low and conventional construction was king.

Another project was a superefficient home with a lot of masonry mass in the interior. It was super tight. Unfortunately concrete in Maine is made with granite as aggregate and the granite gives off radon so no one could move in until they put in an air to air heat exchanger. It was built with themocouples installed in the walls floors and ceilings so they could track heat loss to specific areas of the house.

In addition to the small household boilers he built a couple of large versions. I got the chance to be a boiler slave one weekend day for a very large forest service greenhouse. We had to weigh the wood before feeding the boiler for several hours while a grad student recorded info. It had a several thousand gallon storage tank.

Dick was brilliant but wasn't political, he got a lot of industry and government dollars into the university but had no interest in running things. He would much rather be playing around in lab with a bunch of grad students and took great delight when the proverbial "light bulb" went on in students eyes. Unfortunately he didn't suffer fools gladly and managed to get on the wrong side of the liberals in the state who tended to be non technical sorts who moved to maine to get away from the real world. Dick ended up on the wrong side of some arguments like being an advocate of nuclear power as means of reducing global warming and air pollution. He also pissed off folks when he pointed out that money pumped into residential alternate energy was far better spent insulating folks homes. He had the facts and wasn't afraid to use them. I think there are few of his lectures on Youtube. They aren't dumbed down.

 

[wooduser]

[QUOTE="

Dick was brilliant but wasn't political, he got a lot of industry and government dollars into the university but had no interest in running things. He would much rather be playing around in lab with a bunch of grad students and took great delight when the proverbial "light bulb" went on in students eyes. Unfortunately he didn't suffer fools gladly and managed to get on the wrong side of the liberals in the state who tended to be non technical sorts who moved to maine to get away from the real world. Dick ended up on the wrong side of some arguments like being an advocate of nuclear power as means of reducing global warming and air pollution. He also pissed off folks when he pointed out that money pumped into residential alternate energy was far better spent insulating folks homes. He had the facts and wasn't afraid to use them. I think there are few of his lectures on Youtube. They aren't dumbed down.[/QUOTE]



Environmentalists are like any other selfish interest group. They want what they want and they certainly aren't going to let science and the facts get in their way.

I'll be reading up on more of his experiments, Somehow he manages to do science without needing a billion dollar government handout.

 

[peakbagger]

The bummer is that a lot of his fun projects were "pre internet" so finding information on his projects on the net is tough..

 

[wooduser]

Watched the video start to finish, and what a neat old guy! Not so sure I'd be brave enough to try burning a homemade masonary stove in my own house

Heh, heh! I'm guessing he doesn't have any fire insurance!