underfloor heating system with a rocket mass heater
 

Hot off the press!

This gal, Erica, shows off a new rocket mass heater design featuring underfloor heating. She says the whole thing was built for less than a hundred bucks.

http://www.youtube.com/paulwheaton12#p/u/0/6lUCOowOmJ8

Thanks for watching!

What is she using for mass?

I think the idea is to get the ducting sealed well, and then fill with dirt - then put the wood floor back.

We use soil to build adobe home here in this part of the country. Soil, dirt, is an excellent insulator.

thats quite an idea...I love to read about things like that, gets my gears turning...

How do you get the ashes out?

Propane? The pipe looks like gas pipe and not wood. Sam

Since the mass will hold the heat for days, you typically burn one short fire per day. Most folks grab out a handful of ash before starting a fire. Some will use something like a shop vac.

That looks like a really good idea. I look forward to hearing how it works once the whole thing is put back together and the floor finished again.

I like the bypass idea. I'd like to be able to use a rocket stove for both cooking and heating, but was a bit stymied by the thought of heating all that mass in the summer.

Kathleen

Thre are also rocket stoves for cooking. That's where a lot of this "rocket" stuff got started. In africa. They came up with a way to cook that used something like ten times less wood and produced nearly zero smoke.

It's called Ondul and the Koreans have been doing this for a thousand years (literally). That is why the Koreans (and Japanese) have a "floor" tradition vs the Chinese who have a "chair" tradition.

Oh,

You might tell her to install a carbon monoxide detector if any thing alive is going to occupy that shed.

They have a similar contraption in their house and no concerns about CO.

You can see the one in her house in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/paulwheaton12#p/u/12/_jfag47dRCs

Very cool. It would be good if she filled that cavity in the floor with stone, then layed the plywood and the wood floor.

There is a book that explains everything about mass heaters you could ever want to know. The premise is that the fumes and everything burns much more thoroughly. My husband is designing one he will build into our house.

Ok,

Don't listen to the voice of experience. Carbon Monoxide can be present in this type of system; United States Forces Korea prohibits US Servicemembers from residing in traditional Ondul heated housing because of a Carbon Monoxide threat (gad fired Hot Water Radiant is availbe in 99% of buildings built in the last 30 years so this regulation basically stems from the 1960s and 1970s). A carbon monoxide detector/alarm would be cheap insurance.

Any and all unvented systems are banned here due to the carbon monoxide being something that KILLS YOU without warning. It doesn't smell, you can't see it, the first warning you will get is when you pass out and then, you die. This type of furnace is unvented and is banned by the state of KY for this reason.

It sure seems like this "furnace" could be modified to make its design safer, just not have the opening that you feed wood into inside the house, or vent it outside. Not that big a deal and if it only saves one life, seems like it would be worth it, to me. But then, I am not pushing books and don't have $$$ clouding my objectivity.

Check out article (from National Institute of Health) quoted below.

http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1999/107-7/focus.html

There are dozens of potential environmental health hazards in the home but the most dangerous are combustion gases. Oil- and gas-fired furnaces, water heaters, ovens, wood stoves, charcoal grills, and fireplaces all produce combustion gases. These gases may include carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, nitric oxide, sulfur dioxide, water vapor, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, and various hydrocarbons.

By far the most hazardous of these is CO. In 1997, the American Association of Poison Control Centers' Toxic Exposure Surveillance System reported 20,930 cases of CO poisoning from all known sources, including 191 life-threatening cases and 37 fatalities. CO is formed when a carbon-containing fuel such as kerosene, charcoal, wood, or gasoline, is incompletely burned. Natural gas in the United States does not contain carbon, but CO may form if the gas is burned without an adequate air supply.

CO is colorless, odorless, and tasteless, which makes its presence all but undetectable to humans without the use of special equipment. When breathed, CO combines with hemoglobin to form carboxyhemoglobin (COHb), which disrupts the flow of oxygen to the body and brain. CO's potential to kill is well known, but the bigger story may be how many people suffer adverse health effects from chronic and often undetected exposure to low levels of the gas. Symptoms of CO poisoning, which include fatigue, headache, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, so closely mimic the common cold that exposures may not be properly diagnosed.

fire In 1985, physicians at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky examined 55 patients admitted to the emergency room with flu-like symptoms for possible CO poisoning. Blood tests revealed that 13 of these patients (24%) had COHb concentrations of 10% or more, indicating subacute CO poisoning. Writing in the July 1987 issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine, authors Michael Dolan and colleagues stated, "The literature is well supplied with reports of patients with subacute CO poisoning who were misdiagnosed as having influenza and sent home with disastrous consequences. Emergency physicians must be aware of the protean presentations of CO poisoning and include it in the differential diagnosis of patients with flu-like illness to prevent the return of patients to hazardous environments."

In addition to causing flu-like symptoms, studies show that chronic exposure to low-level CO may also cause poor vision, retinal hemorrhaging, and behavioral impairment (specifically, the inability to judge the length of time that sound signals lasted in a controlled ......

Do you have the name of that book?

The korean stoves (Ondul) of similiar construction do have the opening to feed the stove on the outside and there are still occassional deaths...the flue pipes that wrap around under the floor are masonry and the crack on occassion. I wouldn't trust steel pipes to be 100% airtight either--you never know--an animal may get under there and dislodge something.

The rocket mass heaters burn very hot and very fast, and then the heat lasts for days. So I think the risk of CO is greatly minimized.

How so? Amount of heat and speed of burning has little to do with CO, as far as I know.

Thanks!
-Mick

Apparently, once the fire gets going, a rocket mass heater produces almost purely steam and CO2.

Plus, the CO from a conventional wood stove has a lot to do with slow (cool) burning and how a chimney works.

Here is a video showing a bit about a rocket mass heater exhaust:

http://www.youtube.com/paulwheaton12#p/u/56/wyeGvxfWkfY