[Stoves] ***SPAM*** Re: Stoves Digest, Vol 162, Issue 6
Norbert Senf
norbert.senf at gmail.com
Sat Feb 24 13:09:25 CST 2024
I remember the Harrowsmith article on the Jetstream, and also the Hill
furnace.
I heard of one installation of a Jetstream outside Ottawa that had a leaking
concrete water storage tank, which was poured on-site. What happened was
that the tie wires for the forms went through the concrete and rusted out,
causing
a leak. The dealer who installed it, needless to say, had already gone
bankrupt.
You could call it a Rocket Stove, although updrafting a hot gas is not ideal
from a mixing point of view. With downdrafting of a hot gas, you get ideal
mixing.
(Buoyancy theory, or laws of hydrostatics). There's a great explanation
by Groume-Grjikailo in his 1923 book "The Flow of Gases in Furnaces"
on pages 88 - 91.
https://archive.org/details/TheFlowOfGasesInFurnaces/page/n107/mode/2up?view=theater
Downdrafting furnaces therefor have a theoretical advantage for clean
burning.
In the real world, the main issue is with startup, until a good draft gets
established.
I vaguely recall from Hill's paper that his CO numbers were not super low,
by modern standards.
Here's a recent experimental downdraft furnace that burns at 0 ppm CO
during a brief
portion of its batch burn cycle:
http://www.heatkit.com/research/2018/Stove%20Design%20Challenge/2018%20Stove%20Design%20Challenge.htm#Wittus
Cheers .............. Norbert
On Sat, Feb 24, 2024 at 1:10 PM <stoves-request at lists.bioenergylists.org>
wrote:
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> From: Julien Winter <winter.julien at gmail.com>
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] An Old 'Rocket Stove' from the 1970s
>
> 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
>
>
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2024 19:02:03 -0800
> From: alex english <aenglish444 at gmail.com>
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: [Stoves] ***SPAM*** Re: An Old 'Rocket Stove' from the
> 1970s
> Message-ID:
> <CA+6hwOqWw==
> 8P3d_5gz939HtQ6KuMewyb57x0TH7UgBi30hUoA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > Stoves mailing list
> >
> > to Send a Message to the list, use the email address
> > stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
> >
> > to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page
> >
> >
> http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org
> >
> > for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site:
> > http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
> >
> >
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2024 19:17:34 -0800
> From: <tmiles at trmiles.com>
> To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'"
> <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] An Old 'Rocket Stove' from the 1970s
> Message-ID: <000001da66d0$03832cd0$0a898670$@trmiles.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Julien,
>
>
>
> Thanks for the memories. I met Dick Hill in 1979 when we worked together
> to present a panel at the first ASME conference on wood heating appliances.
> The ASME was involved in discovering wood heating following the energy
> crisis of 1973. We saw thousands of ?tin wonders? made to heat homes with
> wood that were emitting black smoke into the air. My friend Dr. John
> Cooper, then at the Oregon Graduate center, found that 60% of the
> respirable particulate in the Portland airshed was from wood smoke so he
> convinced ASME to hold a conference or wood heating appliances in Portland,
> Oregon. I was the local representative and Dick was the seasoned ASME
> member. We organized a great panel with people, like Dr. Jay Shelton, and
> Skip (ACS) Hayden, Combustion and Carbonization Research Laboratory,
> Canada, who were active in improving wood stoves. I learned a great deal
> from Dick at that time and in the years that followed. He was a well liked
> and respected professor at the University of Maine in Orono. I have since
> met and worked with many of his graduates.
>
>
>
> Dick incorporated a lot of sound combustion principles in the Jetstream.
> On that is not described was orienting the forced air so that the air jets
> impinged on the wood like blowing on the coals. This stimulated the
> evolution of gases and burned the char in direct contact with air, like
> blowing on a fire. The gasification was then followed by staged combustion
> at high temperatures as described in the information you cite. We were
> tempted at the time to incorporate Dick?s Jetstream in our home office
> hydronic system. It is not surprising that later stoves deployed similar
> concepts that dick used in the JetStream. It is also not surprising that
> Hampton couldn?t sell many units. Household and commercial scale boilers at
> the time were not as popular as they were, and still are in Europe. It took
> several years for the European stoves to catch on in North America. We
> usually saw them picked up first in Canada, like our friends on PEI who we
> had worked with burning straw.
>
>
>
> The conference led to the evolution of the Oregon smoke charts and
> emission standards which reduced the number of inefficient stoves on the
> market and influenced what became the EPA standards. We had lively
> discussions in the 1980s in a chat group I maintained on a ?dial up
> bulletin board? (BBS) which I later moved to this list in about 1996 with
> access to the internet. The focus at that time turned to cookstoves.
>
>
>
> We met Larry Winiarski in 1976 when he built us a gasifier for straw. (I
> had known his professor at UC Berkely when he was working on pulse
> combustion.) We often discussed basic combustion principles as he did for
> the rest of his life and to the benefit of us all.
>
>
>
> Kind regards
>
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
>
>
> From: Stoves <stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org> On Behalf Of
> Julien Winter
> Sent: Friday, February 23, 2024 5:19 PM
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] An Old 'Rocket Stove' from the 1970s
>
>
>
> 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
> <mailto: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
>
> -------------- next part --------------
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> >
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2024 23:13:23 -0500
> From: Julien Winter <winter.julien at gmail.com>
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] An Old 'Rocket Stove' from the 1970s
> Message-ID:
> <
> CALv4xTz_zBo3zr_UaO2F5gGM2Xz930ZR2TTj1JqWDE_YyXO59Q at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> 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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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
>
> _______________________________________________
> Stoves mailing list
>
> to Send a Message to the list, use the email address
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>
> to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page
>
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>
>
> for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site:
> http://www.bioenergylists.org/
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of Stoves Digest, Vol 162, Issue 6
> **************************************
>
--
Norbert Senf
Masonry Stove Builders
25 Brouse Road, RR 5
Shawville Québec J0X 2Y0
819.647.5092
www.heatkit.com
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