[Stoves] An Old 'Rocket Stove' from the 1970s

[Julien Winter]

Hi Folk;

Richard Hill patented his stove in 1981.  Vertical Feed Stick Wood Fuel
Burning Furnace System.  US Patent 4,473,351.   The patent was assigned to
the University of Maine.
https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/4473351

Besides referencing a 1944 patent using a vertical stack of wood fuel,
there is no reference in Hill's patent to any prior art that burned stick
wood only at the bottom.

There were attempts to commercialize the stove, and they are described in
this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetstream_furnace

The first company went bankrupt because they over-spent  their financial
capital on North American promotion.   Howerever, the stove didn't seem to
succeed in the long run.  I suspect that was because of their inclusion of
a water heating system and dependence on electricity made the stove too
complicated for the market.  Oil-fired furnaces were easier to use.

If they had a natural draft, hot air furnace, history shows that they would
have succeeded.  That was what got me and our neighbors excited about
the Harrowsmith article (in the previous email).  In the 1970s, there were
still a number of historic farmhouses that heated using a wood fueled
convection furnace.  They looked like a huge octopus in the basement.  We
had a regular schedule of taking down the flue to clean out the creosote.
All the same, the occasional house was lost to a chimney fire.  We were
swimming in wood fuel, and every spring we had to clear the farm fields of
dead-falls.  We were always worried that our 150-yr-old farmhouse would
burn down.

Richard Hill's contribution to biomass combustion seems to have been
forgotten.

Cheers,
Julien


On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 10:15 PM Julien Winter <winter.julien at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi folks;
>
> When I got involved with TLUD stoves back in 2012, I also saw rocket
> stoves, I knew I was looking at something familiar.  This has been bugging
> me ever since, and I had to go back to see if my memory was right.
>
> Through the 1970s and 1980s, my family had a cow collection in Eastern
> Ontario, Canada.  We used to subscribe to a country living magazine called
> "Harrowsmith." Every month, we would read the magazine from cover to
> cover.  One issue in 1980 described a new stove that was developed at the
> University of Maine in the 1970s, and commercialized in Prince Edward
> Island, Canada.
>
> Mariner, R. 1980.  "Superfurnace: It Walks, It Talks, It Crawls on Its
> Belly Like a Reptile …"  Harrowsmith, number 27, volume 7, April 1980
>
> What a name for an article!   I have attached a copy.   I discovered that
> there are devoted fans of Harrowsmith that have kept all their old copies,
> and they have a Facebook page.  If you have a vague recollection of an
> article, they will start sleuthing for it, then post photos of the pages on
> Facebook.  That was a lot more efficient for me than driving to Trent
> University to look through microfiche film.
>
> Back in 1980, I wanted to build one of these stoves, but I ended up going
> to graduate school.
>
> The stove was based on the research that is reported here,
> Hill, RC 1979 Design, Construction and Performance of Stick-Wood Fired
> Furnace for Residential and Small Commercial Application US Department of
> Energy, EC 77-S-02-45. 30 p.
>
> Hill's stove was a forced draft stove, but in principle, he had designed
> what we now call a rocket stove.  It has primary air burning char and
> pyrolyzing wood, with gases burning up stream.  The wood is preheated and
> dried before it starts to burn.  The article says that you can virtually
> burn green wood.
>
> You can find a copy of Hill's bulletin on-line, and I think Bioenergy
> Lists has a copy.
>
> Cheers,
> Julien.
> --
> Julien Winter
> Cobourg, ON, CANADA
>


-- 
Julien Winter
Cobourg, ON, CANADA
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