Hi guys ... (and any gals of course who might be into this malarkey).
I found this forum by complete accident: I was Googling around trying to find an email address for ppotty1 - and found this place. Beut.
20-odd years ago found me living in a crog-loft cottage high-up on Moel Tryfan in North Wales, which I'd bought from a friend. It had stone walls 3 feet thick, a massive inglenook fireplace, and was heated by an single small Jotul box stove. The warmth from that box stove really surprised me, but it quickly became clear that the lion's share of the heat came not from the stove itself, but from the 8 feet or so of vertical steel pipe which formed the flue.
Fast forward 15 years and I'm freezing my what'sits off in south Lincolnshire, in a bungalow with no working heating. So I buy me a s/h Hunter multi-fuel stove and hook it up with great expectations to the central heating system. I should have been as warm as toast, but 90% of the heat was going straight up the chimney. And that's what I put up with for the next 10 years - hundreds of pounds-worth of coal each winter, just to keep the chill off the place. Barmy.
About 5 years ago I decided I'd had quite enough of this, and with my experience of living on a Welsh mountain in mind, I started to think about making a 'coal box'. This was to be a stainless-steel box containing a burning coal-fire - located in the centre of the room (i.e. 'central heating' !) with a fan driving air into the box, and with it's flue running back and connected (somehow) inside the Hunter multi-fuel wood-burner. I had visions of a glowing red-hot box, and yours truly not having to wear three sweaters in order to just keep warm.
It never did get built - as there were too many unknowns involved. But it was whilst Googling around to see if any other lunatics had done something similar, that I came across the 'rocket stove' at Permies. Although this was of interest, there are an awful lot of dubious ideas being aired over on that site, and so I shelved that idea pro tempus.
So now we're roughly at 2012-3, when the price of coal around here suddenly went vertical, and which coincided with me stumbling across a local pallet yard offering free firewood - AND - which also coincided with me discovering ppotty1's videos about making a steel workshop heater, instead of the Permies' clay design with a couple of tons of ballast for heat storage which, although I appreciate makes sense within a 'hippy' system, isn't really something I could imagine ever doing - even if it does make sense as an efficient storage heater system.
And so I scrounged around this site and put together a QD (Quick 'n' Dirty) rocket heater - or rather a 'rocket-assisted wood burning stove' - which is now entering it's second winter unaltered, and as a result of which I've been really warm for the first time in many years. And for free - which is one helluva bonus.
Story to be continued over at the 'show us your stove' section of the forum. See you there.
Colin
(masquerading here as 'heavy oil')
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