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

[Julien Winter]

Hi Folks;

It is good to hear that Dick Hill had so many friends.  I am not surprised,
because I dug up a little history on him.  He died in 2016 at the age of
97.  The  Bangalore News published a short biography.  I have attached it.
He was quite a dynamo.  His generation was the same as my dad, and they
lived through some big World events.  My generation has had a relatively
quiet time.  Not so for the younger generations that will spend their
working lives in the upcoming decades.

Cheers
Julien



On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 8:18 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
>


-- 
Julien Winter
Cobourg, ON, CANADA
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