[Stoves] ***SPAM*** Re: An Old 'Rocket Stove' from the 1970s

[alex english]

Hi Julien,
I worked for a stove dealer back in 81-82 and we installed one in
eastern Ontario,  in the garage of an old brick house  with a modest heat
storage tank in the basement, if I recall. The concept made sense but there
were a host of problems that ended up in court. The  refractory casting in
the base fire zone failed. It needed to be fed too often to go overnight.
So perhaps it was a sizing issue.  Any  standard wood stove  at least
heated the room it was in during the coldest days. The Jetstream jacket
losses just went into the garage. Hydronic heating doesn't offer a quick
ramp up like a box stove. I think the installed cost  was 10 or 15 times
that of a standard wood stove. I'm sure the customer liked something about
it:)
Alex

On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 5:24 PM Julien Winter <winter.julien at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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