New wood burning stoves can be pretty efficient at turning most of the wood into CO2, water vapor, ash and heat, getting that heat from Stove to Chilly Willy is still wildly inefficient. We tend to get uncomfortable when we’re cold. So why bother with any heating at all? Because in cold weather we humans have inadequate heat generation. A house doesn’t give a hoot, in fact, it will last longer if it isn’t heated. Ianto writes:Ī gigantic cultural deception: We have been persuaded that houses need to be heated. If we can mass-produce a five dollar heater that cooks food safely, does indoor heating comfort need to be so out-of-reach? The challenge of dwelling in health and warmth with plenty of fuel isn’t limited to the third world. A masonry heater can be installed for 10 or 20 thousand dollars and will last for generations, providing a pleasant kind of heat from its mass a wetter, more comfortable form of heat than a metal box stove, which burns to the touch, and cools down as the fire dies. The Finnish Masonry Heaters used in very cold climates like Russia and Northern Europe have a lot to teach us about efficient space heating, but are very complex in their construction, requiring a highly skilled designer to size the heater, and a skilled mason to stack the bricks, which form the smoke’s path through a complex labyrinth of channels, as the gases cool down and give their heat to the bricks. Working with the problems of human comfort back at home in rain forest Oregon, Evans started playing with storage of the heat produced by these fuel-efficient wood burners. Today, Ianto Evans teaches people to get off the treadmill by living simply, in hand-built homes with renewable energy, and food growing. Knowing what we know about indoor cooking health, if we can warm a pot of soup with minimal fuel and minimal smoke, can we also create indoor comfort, warming bodies? It’s all about the proper conditions for complete combustion. The stove’s “L” shape or “J” shape contributes to an ideal mixing of the combustion gases for clean burning. The opening in the stove in which the fuel is fed, the chimney on which the cook pot sits and the gaps–around which the gases flow past and around the cookpot–are very carefully sized to control the amount of oxygen mixing with the burning fuel. The chamber in which the wood burns is of a size to reflect back on itself, also maximizing the burn by helping it stay hot. The chimney is insulated, maximizing its interior temperature, thus helping the fuel burn completely. The rocket stove burns cleanly and almost completely, and it does so by means of a combination of materials that is it built with, and geometry. Ianto spent a lot of time cooking and speaking various languages with third world women in their smoky kitchens to come up with the Lorena Stove. What Makes a Wood Burning Stove a Rocket Stove? The stove he and his colleagues developed is still in development by organizations like Aprovecho, and Ashok Gadgill’s Stove Lab at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, among others. He traveled to kitchens in Africa and Central America spent time with (usually) women in their kitchens, and cooked with them. Ianto, a Welshman, a recovering Professor of Landscape Architecture, and likely the best Ecological Designer there is, was one of the developers.
![j shape rocket burner j shape rocket burner](https://www.primalsurvivor.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/8087990310_a4a7e5c039_z.jpg)
The Lorena Stove that Ianto Evans developed in Guatemala is one such stove. In the 1970s, a research group of fire scientists in an organization called Aprovecho Research Institute were challenged to design a wood-burning device that was easy to reproduce out of inexpensive materials, that would burn the wood so well as to emit very little smoke. Fuel scarcity, poverty, and indoor pollution, not to mention health issues like asthma showing up in the kids, and greenhouse gasses from all kinds of inefficient combustion, drove aid organizations to look into the kitchens for the problems and the solutions.
![j shape rocket burner j shape rocket burner](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0f/00/4a/0f004aacabfc6e680ee91c3859921004.jpg)
Rocket Stoves were invented as a solution to the problems of third world communities, cooking in enclosed spaces with scarce fuel resources on three-stone hearths (three equally-sized rocks supporting a cook-pot over a wood fire).
![j shape rocket burner j shape rocket burner](https://lautonomieauquotidien.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/AAQ-Rocket-Stove.jpg)
![j shape rocket burner j shape rocket burner](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/31/5f/bc/315fbc6989e312c28c145f70347b197f--rocket-stoves-rocket-stove-heater.jpg)
It’s remarkable how many people from all walks of life have heard of them, whereas ten years ago, they were limited to natural builders and cookstove improvement nerds. Stand around a bonfire in any backyard USA, a cold beer in one hand, and the guests turning like pigs on a spit to keep one side of the body or the other warm, and the notion of the “rocket stove” often comes up.
#J SHAPE ROCKET BURNER LICENSE#
For license to excerpt, contact me & see the fine print, page bottom. This article serves as an okay introduction to rocket mass heaters for the layperson.