Dick Hill’s Latest Adventure

My friend Dick Hill, who will be 92 in October, has been working on a masonry stove for an apartment in his house.
He has enlisted the assistance of a professional mason to construct it and is presently waiting for the masonry to air cure for 30 days before firing it.
It will be heavily instrumented and data will be coming in the autumn.

We have been talking about the design for about four months.
I realize that this is not a hydronic unit, but most of you know him as the Godfather of Gasification Boiler design.

This is the kind of project that helps keep him going. There is a lesson here for us youngsters.
I keep meeting his "students" some of whom are now in their 80's.

Elegant heater- and excellent way to live life!

its a trick! i see the electric cord. cant figure out the damper below the cooking area per diagram. secondary air intakes are interesting too

I'm not in my 80s but I had him in class . So did my brother. I'm so glad I can hear him wax poetic about cooking wood and other subjects most every Saturday. Glad to see pics after hearing him talk about his new stove

Pretty cool. You must have to have a great draft to get the exhaust pulled around all those corners?

The wire is for a light for a show and tell he was doing.
We shall see how it draws when he fires it up. The damper is stainless steel and is in a stainless steel
connector that ties both sides together. The baffles at the top are moveable.
He loves to tinker (don't we all!).
There will be a lot of thermocouples in this.

He is waiting four weeks for everything to dry.
I have tried to get him to burn some paper to check the draft, but he is more patient than I am.

I will report back in a couple weeks.

Tell Dick it's no good cause it's not EPA approved.
We need more guys like Dick Hill around.

I heard you gode him into firing it up. You should be ashamed.

I think DH said that after a certain weight the stove becomes EPA exempt

Ha! Good to see! I've got a couple of Jetstreams and spent quite a while trying to track him down to ask a few questions when I found out he still does public radio!

I think you run them so hot that the draft problem just doesn't exist.

whats the questions?

At the time I was tracking down how his design made it from the lab to the various companies and if he had any influence on the repackaging of his test model. I did track down several of the living founders of the Jetstream company but all their technical staff had passed away.

Reading up on his research it sounded like I'd find him an interesting person to chat with (I'm a mechanical engineer who likes spending more time in the shop than at the drawing board).

http://hotandcold.tv/woodfiredfurnace.pdf this may work

Awesome, BLIMP! Just the kind of paper I love to pore over in my spare time.

Check out the date as well. Some folks seem to think everything significant regarding wood burning was discovered since the EPA got involved. Plenty of good science, engineering, and design work went into things back in the burning Renaissance of the 70s as well.

principle for jetstream, modern gassifier, & epa stove is the same! & ironically its AVOID OVERGASIFICATION. :lol:

that is very nice. A small waist-high masonry heater sounds like a perfect project for a smaller room (or apartment). What an inspiration!

Dick has finally fired the unit for the first time this week. It works well.
It only draws to one side, depending on which side gets hot first. He is happy with the performance and will have data on it
as he fires it more.

He is renting the apartment to s student and while the student is at school during the day, he is testing the stove.
What a pip!

I will pass along information as he generates it. Apparently, he has another student tenant who will use this project for a paper.

That's interesting. I've noticed a similar behavior with my old Jotul #8 stove downstairs; if the wood happens to ignite on startup more to one side than the other, the stovetop on that side gets disproportionately hotter and despite my best efforts to stir the wood or shift it to one side, stays that way for a while or even the whole burn cycle (sometimes a ~200F difference in temp between one side of the top vs the other). It doesn't seem to favor one particular side either, as sometimes it's the left and sometimes it's the right.

i saw the electric cord & think it is really a masonry stereo that plays heat! i see 2 woofers & 2 tweeters

I wonder why maple produces such a greater percentage of ash per weight than any other species listed?

I'll bet you he *rocks out* hardcore when he's playing with that thing. Tom can you confirm?

Shame he doesn't hang out here!

Here are some new photos of Dick Hill's masonry wood stove. He turned 92 on Friday and hosted a
group from ASHRAE.
The stove is running pretty good. He is having a glass door made so he can watch the fire.
Apparently the exhaust shunts to one side or the other, it does not flow equally to both sides.
No efficiency numbers yet, but he is testing it every day.