[Stoves] Oversized stoves / thermal insulation

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Andrew and All

>> I did not check how low they can be run, because pellets are not my 
>> favour, but I saw a pellet stove in working, burning only about some 5 
>> or 10 pellets at once.

>Yes this is how pellet stoves work,

We have to address this 'smaller stove' issues pretty promptly. There is a
real need for long term provision of small amounts of heat continuously.
Water heating is a pretty good example as well.

The Yurt (which is a Russian name for a Ger) needs about 4 kW continuously
in January in the middle of Asia. If it is well insulated by a blanket it
only needs 4 kW.

Two things are making this problem harder: 1) people are not working on 2 kW
stoves and 2) the Europeans are driving everyone towards 'low smoke fuels'
by which they mean semi-coked briquettes. To make a semi-coked briquette
costs money so the fuel is about three times the price of coal. On top of
that, it has a much higher heat value per kg because so much if it has been
removed (the high hydrogen and oxygen portion). The result is that we would
be faced building a tiny stove with a fuel consumption of under 450 grams of
coke per hour.  Frankly, that is a very difficult problem. 450 g is about
350 cc. I would like to see an example of a clean burning, high temperature
stove that consumes 350 cc of fuel an hour. Wow. That would be amazing.

The alternative is to build heat storage units like brick walls (which don't
hold very much heat in spite of their popularity) or expensive things like
water. Almost everything comfortable involving heat storage needs
electricity to manage properly.

It seems that to burn semi-coke or coal on that tiny a scale will need stove
innovation, materials development and fuel processing. The very small pellet
stoves are probably a good place to start: very small amounts of fuel loaded
into a tiny burning chamber with an auger feed system.

Regards
Crispin