![]() Having ensured complete combustion, and hence maximum heat generation, only then do we think about using the resultant heat. Conventional wood stoves are sucking heat away from the combustion chamber for cooking, space heating or with ‘wet back’ water heaters, meaning the unit just can’t get hot enough for combustion to be complete, resulting in smoke. We are culturally trained to associate smoke with fire but with rocket stoves, sometimes when there is no smoke, there is still fire! When combustion is complete, what comes out the chimney is pretty much only carbon dioxide, meaning no smoke: smoke means incomplete combustion, unburned fuel, or wasted energy. This lack of oxygen chokes the combustion, leading to cool burns, incomplete combustion and lots of smoke and creosote. In conventional wood stoves the air intake is small, and adjustable to even smaller. It gets really hot, the wood burns beautifully, and you hear the air roaring as it charges through the system. This incoming air flows into the feed tube and across the burning wood – creating the same effect as pointing a big air-blower at your fire. As the fire starts, and the burn tunnel heats up, the rising hot air races up the heat riser, drawing lots of air behind it. Rocket stoves are open where the wood is fed in, allowing lots of oxygen to be drawn into the unit. This distinctive sucking of the flames down into the burn tunnel, and the resultant ‘roar’ is what gives rocket stoves their name. ![]() In a rocket stove these compounds are sucked into the insulated and very hot ‘burn tunnel’ of the unit where they combust, releasing even more heat energy to drive the rocket process, unlike a normal fire where they are blown out the chimney. When wood is burned it releases volatile compounds that we recognise as smoke or soot or creosote. The main difference between a normal fireplace or woodstove and a rocket stove is that rocket combustion is close to complete. HOW ROCKET COMBUSTION DIFFERS FROM NORMAL COMBUSTION If you are good at scavenging bits they can cost virtually nothing to build, and when you prune your fruit trees you can get the fuel you need to cook dinner, heat your home, and enjoy a nice hot shower. That’s right – you can build these systems in a day or two, and then watch them turn twigs into heat far more efficiently than most wood stoves, with far less set-up cost. they are easily built from common materials.they can use wood typically considered too small to call firewood.they can reach very high temperatures, and can be hooked up to almost anything we want to use that heat for.they offer close to complete combustion of the wood, meaning they are hyper-efficient and burn super-clean. ![]() Rocket stove combustion systems deserve attention for a few reasons: Rocket stoves are an example of appropriate technology which can cover all of those needs, cost you next to nothing to build, and just a few sticks to run. Words and images by Joel Meadows and Dan Palmer of VEG‘s App-Tech workshops Most of our household energy requirements come in the form of space heating, water heating or cooking, with these making up a large percentage of our monthly bill. So if your not renting like I am you can be way more efficient and do something permanent.This article first appeared in issue six of Pip Magazine Australian permaculture magazine. It's configured to burn pellet's and is disasemblable in about 50 mins. ![]() One note my rocket stove is uninsulated and vents under a deck floor so all the heat is lost to the air on purpose. The rooms 8 feet wide by 16 feet long, that's a pretty swank sauna and i build it over gravel so I know I broke allot of insulation rules and it still works. If i didn't have all that glass the tempurature would be even higher, the outside temps were around 50f at harvest times, the only thing you might have an issue with is the excessive loss of humidity over time but if your in a sauna for more than 2 hours you've probably passed out and are on your way to the next life. With all the unisulated walls of glass, and gaps in the roof the room dry's at 86-95 F. It was a brutal first construction for a single person to do with two metacarpal fractures in their hand after falling off a roof in a midnight canopy building session. It will work, i built a rocket stove dehydrating room, and it's a pretty drafty affair seeing how I used salvaged roofing and glass walls. ![]()
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