Just Joined

Great to be part of this group, and to be seeing everyone’s developments and constructive comments in the topics and discussions. I was inspired to join you having viewed many of your major contributors’ videos on YouTube recently, and being impressed by the collective desire to share and improve.

I am based in South Devon and have been building stoves for personal use over the last 30 years or so. I have also worked on rural development projects in Africa and am well aware of the fuel cost and health implications of poor cooking facilities in subsistence economies.

Intrigued by the rocket combustion principle, I recently turned my simple garage wood stove (glass door, but primary air only) into a rocket stove test bed by dropping in a pre-welded mild steel rocket unit and sleeving it up to the top exit of the stove. The test unit that I fabricated from 3-4 mm mild steel has a steeply inclined square fuel tube, with an offset to induce turbulence in a circular flue, which has hot air secondary combustion. Rudimentary insulation keeps the combustion area hot, and I can get the steelwork glowing underneath it.

Sometime soon, I will probably restore the stove to batch burning with a decent secondary air supply, but in the meantime I can mess about with rocket settings and minor mods, knowing that if things get smokey, I can still shut the front door and send everything up the flue, and/or kill the overall air supply. Before I do that, though, I’ll try to fit in a larger rocket fuel hopper to see if gasification is possible within the 380 mm wide x 260 deep x 475 high space available within the existing stove.

Apart from the above, I am currently making a stainless 150 x 250 x 250 mm outside/inside barbecue/water heating/cooking/space heating stove for a small yacht, and improved garden barbecues and car camping stoves will follow.

Thanks again for all you ideas and airflow/combustion discussions to date. I’ll put some of my stuff up when I learn how to upload photos.

welcome to the forums

only started building and using a rocket stove for shed myself but have now built a few different versions

im moving up to the boiler type soon

you sound interesting with your builds so looking forward to your input on here as well

to upload pics its a 7 day wait unless you have a youtube account or can pass info to a mod to post your pics up for you until you can do

also have a look at garys stove as thats heats up a large space and has some clear pointers to improve upon

Thanks for those comments, gadily

Just looked at Garys stove, and it has inspired me to extend the flue and downdraft part vertically above the stove, as that's where I have space. I'll start in the summer, and keep everyone informed of progress,

you could also check here as well

https://woodstoves.forumotion.co.uk/t554-latest-workshop-heater

garys stove proves that the system can heat a large area with the use of a rocket burner

2 different systems on how they preheat that incoming air into it

Welcome Teignburn looking forward to your contributions and developments.
Thank you for joining in on the ongoing discussion.