Ultra mini super micro little bitty woodstove question

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Vanlife

New Member
Nov 16, 2018
6
Quinnesec michigan
Okay, to preface I live in upper michigan and last year we had ~3 weeks of -20 weather without factoring wind chill.

My local high school's shop class is required to build woodstoves as its final exam and as a result woodstoves are very abundant in my home town. A friend of mine has offered to give me one sold to him by a student. Now this isnt the standard woodstove, its 5x5x7 all 3/8 plate, and has an ash catcher and a grate. Very very small, originally I was worried it wouldn't flow air well enough to work but after a few trial runs it seems to actually burn pretty well provided you can break wood up small enough to fit and that it has a chimney fitted.

We were planning on putting it inside a truck topper for a little mini camper setup, bit the truck has since been sold, now I own a full size e350 van (237.8 cubic feet to be precise) and I was wondering if you guys had any info as to whether this would be sufficient to heat my van with some minimal Insulation.

I'm probably going to try it either way but ideas and input are valuable to me and I will consider all comments
 
Show us a picture and there are multiple people running tiny wood stoves in their vans/buses/campers/RVs
 
Doesn't sound very practical on a lot of fronts, but mainly due to the small fuel charge. A candle under a clay pot might provide the same amount of heat, but burn longer.

In a van you really want to watch safety and CO levels.
 
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All I can imagine is some variation on these rocket stoves, which are awesome for camping and cooking but not so much for heating
 
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So I did have the dimensions a bit off, turns out its 5.5 wide 7.5 deep and 7.5 tall, however I thought it had a 3" chimney but it turns out to be 2" I have some 3 inch double wall stove pipe and I'm wondering if stepping it up to that would work or if I'd be better off getting like 2" exhaust pipe and wrapping it in heat wrap like a header? Can you even get stove pipe in 2"???
 
I don't know if you could heat anything with that... by the time you break up wood sufficiently to get it inside, the wood is going to be very small and have a high amount of surface area. Think 15-30 minute reloads when it gets going.

This is of course a guess but I have built rocket stoves that have similar firebox sizes.

Not saying that it won't put out any heat, saying it will be a full time occupation while you're using it.

You could Dutch it up with some thermal mass- cover it in firebrick. You waste a lot of heat because of the insulation of the bricks, but the upside is that the bricks store some heat and its poor thermal conductivity means the heat is released slowly- so you can have a short hot fire and get a small amount of heat for a much longer time. (It's a net BTU loss of course because more goes up the flue, but it saves sitting there stuffing in matchsticks all night.)
 
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Very interesting idea, similar to like the idea of a basket of rocks on top of a sauna stove? Soaks up heat and releases it over time? I'll look into firebrick for sure, thanks for the input
 
Vanlife said:
Very interesting idea, similar to like the idea of a basket of rocks on top of a sauna stove? Soaks up heat and releases it over time? I'll look into firebrick for sure, thanks for the input
Click to expand...

The Dutch do that with stone-plated electric heaters (the whole thing including the bricks is inside a sheet metal housing with handles on it) . They run them during low electric rate hours and turn them off before the rates go back up. Unlike a wood stove, there is no efficiency penalty for doing that, because the heat generated doesn't have a flue to escape from.
 
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