rocket stove – Tamiz Solutions

Masonry kitchen stove

admin — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 15:13:57 +0000

We builded a new small heater that we think will be very popular. This stove combines direct heat and stored heat. It is a fast and simple build, but it performes really well. This stove responds to many of the neads expressed by the people here. Learning for Winiarskis design principles I figured that a pushing the fire in a narow gap under the coock surface should result in a more effective heat transfer. (Sketchups are on the way) This stove is amazing to coock on because on one side you have frying hot temperatures and on the other side it is suitable for slow boiling and simmering food. The design makes the coocktop a more effective heat-exchanger than it normally is. I would sum up this stove like this.

Small mass (300 kg) with quick response (sunny days in the winter can get quite warm and heating a big mass is not always desiered) It can be put on a wood floor without reinforcements.
Instant heat. It can throw off a signifficant amount of heat directly from the coocktopp. This heat comes instantly after the fire is going.
Effecient for cooking. The coocktop is ready in two minutes! It boiled 3 liters of water in 12 minutes.
Burnchamber suitable for baking one bread after burn. Grills can be done on the coals to.
Clean-effecient burn with secondary air provided in the back.
Movable ( it can be carried by four men or slided on the floor to be put in a corner of the room for the summer)
Cheap! This stove costs 35 azn in materials, that is less than 50 $. It can be builded in one day!
Chimney temperature is low, but increases significantly if you burn it more than 1-2 hours. Mabe it can be completed with a bench to extract more heat.
Works with the standard 4″ chimney that they use here.
It can be suited with a small water-heatexchanger.

The family that are testing it lives in a mountain village where the winter is hard. They are reporting that it so far works great, heats much better than their old stove, uses significantly less wood, burns cleaner. It hardly neads any atention to continue burning. It is much better to cook on. It dosent nead to be cleaned often ( the old stove neaded chimeny sweep every month!) The draft is much better ,the door can be opened for fire gazing (and provide light when the electric is gone) It retains the heat pretty much through the night and leave some glowing coals to the morning so it is easy to light it up again. It makes the room dryer as it is provided with a more stable heat-source It will last longer before they nead to change it. We would say 10 years with minor maintainance.

The rock-bucket rocket

admin — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 07:34:45 +0000

I got the idea of this stove construction reading a book on how they used to heat medival castels. Offcourse this is a radical downscale of the concept, but the function is somewhat the same. I really like the simplisity of this construction. And I like to think that the “organic” unnsymetrical channels formed by the rocks somehow works better together with the natural flow of gases than channels and chambers… This is neither a bell nor a channel system. It becomes something in between. I know that maintaining a good surfface/weight ratio is important for a good working stove. And I cant think of a more interesting way to obtain that.

I rebuilded the firebox four times, and there is some critical things to consider. The airgap in the back of the burn chamber should be thin enough to shoot the air as a laminar flow along the back edge of the chamber for secondary burn of the gases up in the tube. (Thanks to both Alex Chernov and Ekonomka for learning more about that) Thats why it doesnt work as well having the exit at the front or middle position over the chamber. This setup showed in the movie works ok, but I think it will work better if I make the chamber deaper and have the wood laying dow keaping the airgap in the back clear through the whole burn. The burn dosent nead a lot of air to maintain combustion. Ratio 1/3 or 1/4 compared to firebox exit seams ok including gaps around door.

Cleaning it is also an issue. The best way seams to be knocking on the barrel now and then and vacuming at the flue exit. But probably once a year it is good to take out the rocks and clean it throughly. That means that constructing it with a removeable lid seams necessary.

Compared to the rocket mass heater we here have a stove that dosent nead to be constructed permanently in a house. And it dosent nead a special foundation. It will work with a standard 4″ flue that they use here. It burns down the wood in one go with minimal maintainance of the fire. It burns almost as clean as the RMH? It gives a very hot cooking surface.Its total cost for a selfbuilder is about 20$!
On the down side it “only” retains heat for about 8 hours after the burn. Other negatives??

Some questions to be answered. Will it be sufficient to heat a livingroom space throught the winter in this climate? Will it give the fuel savings that we are hoping for?

I will have this construction tested through winter to heat a friends livingroom, and come back with some reports on its performance.

If you ever do this construction yourself, I would love to hear about your experience with it.

Read our Blog!

The original stove

admin — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 08:58:43 +0000

I had a very encouraging trip to a nearby village recently, and it gave me some additional information on design needs. But first and foremost it was very encouraging to be so well received. It is always encouraging to build friendship as making friends is important and people even make friends and partners online with the help of site like chatsex online. It looks like this can be one of the places we will start to spread our ideas.
This is a photo of the original kind of stove found in most villages around here. They have to clean the pipes monthly because of the creosote build up in the 10 cm flue pipe ( sign of bad combustion) And with only 1mm sheet metal in the construction, combustion temperatures end up way below the point where most gases are consumed. The expected life of this stove is one or two years! So there are plenty of room for improvement to this design.To keep this going they need two truck loads with wood to stay warm in the winter. (That is aproxemently 80 meters of 30cm wood or 25 square meters). The good thing in villages is that because of the high thermal mass in the buildings the house stays comfortable during the night as the walls gives of the heat they have charged. This households man is a little bit more clever than most because he let his pipe run through the room upstairs, and the boards between the rooms had purposefully half centimeter glitches between them so that the heat could come through. It actually worked ok. Almost like in floor heating upstairs. But he is very exited to try out a different stove that will save wood, and save him the work of cleaning the flue pipes every month.He also expressed the importance of the stove being good for cooking, so this is something we have to emphasize in our design, as it can be a deal breaker. If we succeed in his house he wants to introduce this stove to all the houses of his village. He wants to partner with Tamiz and learn how to make them. In this way he will make him self a small income, at the same time people in the village will save money and increase their comfort + the big end product for us all is that we are reducing emission and cutting of a valuable forrest. This is how change can come, by knowledge and training village after village. Our hope is that once the rock is thrown and proved its impact, the idea will start spreading like rings in water….

Testing out chimney stones for rocket-stove video…

admin — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:38:03 +0000

In Azerbaijan it is comon to build chimneys very lightly of these kind of stones. They are made localy, but you have to pick the nice ones, because many are delivered with cracs from the manufacturer… They will work fine, but i dont expect them to last for 10-15 years like some have reported with their constructions. On the other hand they build really quickly…

Portable rocket stove video…

admin — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:17:51 +0000

Here is a video of the outside testburn of the rocket stove currently heating my kitchen very nicely…

Sometimes looking back brings you ahead…

admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:51:01 +0000

Almost by coinsident i stumbeled over this old book written before the oil-age on the topic of warming and ventilating. And it is full of global insights on heating, almost forgotten by many now. I found that the rocketstove bench is originally a Korean idea, and widely used there until this day. And so many interesting facts about wood-stove development around the world. A clean burning woodstove with secondary burning developed in sweden already in the late 1700 !! A must read for a pyromaniac

Portable rocket stove burning well !

admin — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:10:23 +0000

Hey

Just wanted to show you our latest creation under testing. It is a portable type of “rocket-stove” or “zimmovar sobase” that we call it in Azeri. It burns fairly effecient. It dosent have a bench connected yet, only about 5 meters of horisontal pipe working as convectors. It is not enough to take out all the heat from the smoke, but i guess it is down to about 70 celcius. The system is a 4″ system. It has a heat riser ratio of 1 to 3. It is insulated with sawdust-clay and has some thermal mass. Total weight more than 50 kg. It burns about 7 kilos of wood through a 12 hour burn. It heats a fairly poor insulated kitchen with high sealing (about 75 kubik meters of air). I have an electric heater doing the same job pulling 2,5 kw. For being the first prototype we are quite happy with its performance, it still need some changes in design, but overall very happy!! The best thing is the stove price 50-70 manat ! It will pay back its cost easely in one winter! For the market in Azerbaijan we think it is important to come up with this portable model since many people live on limited space and like to move their stove in the warmer seasons. We still do expect to build more mass heaters in the mountains.