Rocket Mass Heaters Rocket Me

I woke up this morning and started reading a book called Rocket Mass Heaters, Superefficient Woodstoves You Can Build (and Snuggle up to) by Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson of the Cob Cottage company. I wanted to share this as a follow up to my last post regarding thermal mass and better ways to heat space. Rocket stoves rock! The interns at Yestermorrow built one while I was there for a course last summer. Mmmmmm, cheap, efficient heaters. Here's a quote right from the book. My instructor Elke used to build with Ianto and Linda Smiley so the book I was reading from had Ianto's signature.

“We live in a surprising time. Every so often one can wake up to a societal myth that one has accepted all one's life. The myths that houses need to be heated permeates North America and society has encapsulated this obvious fable in law. Building regulations have demanded that whether you're home or not, every single corner of the interior of your house should be heatable to an equal 70°F. Let's be clear. Provided you don't let the water freeze, your house could not care less whether it's heated. The inhabitants are the only beings who count. We want to heat people, not houses. Once we understand this, the situation gets much easier.

Humans, like all mammals, are self-heating. We have our own internal stoves, burning food to make heat. But as we become less physically active and spend more time indoors, we have become used to wearing clothes to slow the loss of our autonomously generated heat. In an unheated building we can adjust our comfort by adding clothes or through activity or by surrounding ourselves with warmth or through all three.

Houses heated by forced air or furnaces depend upon our bodies being on contact only with the warmed air inside the house. A house can contain an awful lot of warm air, of which only a very small proportion ever comes in contact with us. All of the other heat is effectively wasted. Air, being one of the best insulants, certainly isn't a fast or efficient way to warm up, and escapes easily.”

Rocket Mass Heaters
Superefficient Woodstoves You Can Build (and Snuggle up to)
Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson, Cob Cottage Publications