Modern Heater 27 Masonry Heaters Images

What is a masonry heater? How does it work? Why is it so effiecient?Masonry Heaters and Bakeovens – Modern Masonry Heater

Some can be fueled with gas depending on your preferences and its accessibility. Carbide is able to absorb extreme temperatures and then release heat slowly. We need to look at the location where you want to put the stove and chimney before providing a quote for the stove, chimney, floor protection, and installation.

The right size, location, and style are crucial to optimal performance. This thread is now 5 years old, the original stove has been dismantled and a new one built. That is, the house is fully heated and cooled by the energy of the sun entirely.

The other clear fact is that many people have built rocket stoves and are using considerably less wood than they did with a standard cast iron wood burning stove.

There are 2 parts to the improvement: 1. Do you have visible smoke going up your chimney most of the time when you are burning wood now? Were any of the tested units based on bells instead of flues? Thew were not testing bell stoves, just flu based contra flow. Even when these light-weight stoves test relatively efficient under ideal conditions, the test is rigged in their favor (graded on a curve where 85% counts as 100%).

Under test conditions, you have dry wood, and operators with enough experience to know that burning it clean produces more energy than a smoldering, smoky fire.

Next, these stoves go out into the real world, where they are rarely operated under ideal conditions. The biggest difference occurs at night, when most people heating with a thin-walled woodstove try to ‘bank’ a fire to keep embers alive in the stove all night.

Most stoves smoke a little even when running relatively hot; they may be extracting 70% to 90% of the fuel value at full burn (at a guess).

If you also are in the habit of burning wet wood, you lose something like 50% (can be more) of your fuel value to drying the wood while already in the fire, and to steam extinguishing the secondary flames.

If you switch to a heater that uses 1/2 to 1/3 the wood per year, your tiny woodshed is suddenly adequate to your actual needs, which means you are now burning drier wood.

Especially the first two years, if you are enjoying two-year-seasoned wood left over from the switch. This might easily take you down to 1/4 or less, if wet wood was part of your problem before. The 1/10 the wood was based on anecdotally reported experience, several people who said they swapped out an older woodstove for a rocket mass heater in the same space (otherwise unchanged), and the wood use dropped from 4-5 cords per winter to something like 1/2 cord.

Or using the rocket heater for primary heat but continuing to use a parlor or kitchen stove (they don’t separate the wood sources for each stove).

Sometimes they estimate by wood delivered; sometimes they estimate by number of armloads per day. We sometimes see smaller drops if the person had previously optimized their wood heat quite a lot, and a rocket was their last and only change.

In one case, the owner reported using about half the wood, but was splitting that wood between her new rocket and a previous wood-burning kitchen stove.

Masonry heaters are so heavy (and expensive to install), that nobody wants to switch from one to another!

But bear in mind that most of them have done a lot more masonry heaters and maybe one or two rocket heaters, since rocket heaters are not as easy to permit here.

Then find the theoretical fuel value of the wood (not the value adjusted for heat loss to smoke). We also weighed every stick of wood we burned for two months straight, in addition to doing the usual rough estimates by volume for the entire season.

In the first case, the calculation result was that we were extracting 95% to 100% of the fuel’s theoretical value. I think we may have burned a little more, but still less than the calculations predict. These numbers appear to have greater margins of error than the result we are trying to find. I would not trust them for your purposes. I don’t know of any lab that is currently set up to do these tests at any reasonable fee, as they’d need the heater to be enclosed in a ‘standard’ space and track the heat output over many days to “see” the storage effect.

I might need to do a crowdfunding campaign, to build the budget to do some of these tests or get the equipment for continuous monitoring in a random facility like our house.

I could use a little discussion to get my mind solidly around one of these two options. They can claim a high rate of efficiency because masonry heaters are storing nearly all the heat being produced. The system for immediate release (a steel drum in the rocket heater) vs. Consequently, some people cover their steel drum with cob. A masonry heater doesn’t have any steel, so it is slow to heat up. A masonry heater only needs to be fired intermittently because of the quantity of refractory material storing the heat. Both systems yield a pleasant sort of heat which is nicer to live with than forced air.

Masonry Heater Plans

Firebrick flues rather than plainer masonry bells?

Also, what size space is your heater going to be heating?

Do you feel that homemade adobe bricks will hold up to the thermal stresses of a masonry heater?

I understand, being able to use mortar of the same material as the blocks means the entire assembly has the same coefficient of expansion, and this helps prevent cracking.

Ideally, you have it at the middle so the heat can reach everywhere. On the positive side, the house is small, a hair under 1000 sf. It will be pretty simple- a rectangular space with a center column to hold up the ceiling. I wasn’t meaning to say that adobe/cob wouldn’t work well as a heat storage mass, just that they aren’t as optimal as other options.

I would have to imagine that they would be very similar to brick given their density. Michigan gets cold and stays cold, without a whole lot of day/night temperature swings. So responsiveness is a low priority for me. I need it warm for four straight months!

By the way, you don’t necessarily need a barrel. I have gotten this, a stainless steel column, from the wineyard of an acointance. It cuts the uglyness of the barrel, and adds a bit of mass. Agriculture collects solar energy two-dimensionally; but silviculture collects it three dimensionally. I am similarly more inclined towards a masonry heater for the aesthetics and decreased need for frequent burns. The cost was putting me off, but your info has changed that factor. I also have to look into what my local building office will allow me to get a permit for. Replace awkward entries and gain space in closets with sliding modern barn doors. Marble fireplace packages will allow homeowners to luxuriate with roaring flame in style. This thread is now 5 years old, the original stove has been dismantled and a new one built. That is, the house is fully heated and cooled by the energy of the sun entirely.

Ecco Stove E Masonry Heater