The Cob Mob, Karyn Stillwell Temple and Jason Temple, retrofitted their little cottage’s sheet metal fireplace with a Rocket Stove thermal mass heater.
The stove features a heated day bed/sitting platform and utilizes the existing chimney flue.

“The heated day bed/seat coming out into the room works well for this space; it gently partitions the room into two spaces.  At the end of a hard day’s work the day bed is THE place to find me sprawled out on my back, healing my sore muscles.  Our heat seeking Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy also covets the stove and spent every winter evening laying on it when we weren’t.  In this photo he is forgoing the soft pillows in favor of the serious heat coming through the blanket (necessary after 4 hours of firing).  This picture was actually taken the morning after a firing, everything is still hot.” - Jason Temple

Karyn and Jason live in Australia, where they share their knowledge and passion for cob.  They offer design consultation and assistance to those involved with natural building projects, and work with schools and community groups to develop cob projects that improve their local environment, get people working together and having fun.

See more photos at their Stoves and Ovens page »

Oh, there are many neato things about rocket stoves. Efficient burning; the heating of a cob bench ( that makes you feel so good ); the sculptural shapes. Nothing so far as amazing as this… Your tea doesn’t get cold!

I’m a fan of tea. Seems like you have to drink it while it’s warm and there’s only a short window of time where it’s at the perfect temperature. Not on top of the rocket stove.
I boiled the water in a tea kettle, poured it in the cup and left the cup on top of the stove and every time - Mmmmm warm. Progressively warm tea. What a joy!

Donkey’s dual rocket stove

I’m thinking about my next rocket stove, planning, drawing, scrounging and researching rocket stove mass heaters. While surfing the interweb I visited rocketstoves.com to see if there was anything new. I found a link to the rocket stove forum at Rocket Stoves… Experimenters corner. Thanks to Donkey for setting this up. I look forward to reading through the posts.

A while back, I posted about my experiences constructing a Rocket Stove.
Since then I’ve added the finishing touches to the Moonunit Rocket stove.

It was a project within a project. It’s guts, made of firebrick, a 55 and 30 gallon drum, vermiculite and clay and stove tubing, went together pretty quickly, but it took me a while to finish the mass part. Several tons of earthbags, urbanite, rock, sand and cob went into building up the mass. The finish floor swallowed much of the body of the stove, about 1 1/2 feet worth. What was left, above the floor, turned into a organically shaped bench and bed.
Continue Reading…

View photos here »

I experimented with the plans that Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson prescribed in the first draft of ‘Rocket Stoves to Heat Cob Buildings: How to Build a Super Efficient Wood Fired Heater‘. I gotta tell you that it didn’t sink in the first time I read it. I understood it in principle, but it just seemed counter intuitive. The smoke goes down instead of up? Every time I’ve seen fire and smoke it goes up.

The rocket stove is a efficient wood burning device. All the heat is stored in the thermal mass; cob bench, soil bed, wall or floor. By the time the smoke leaves the building it has lost a significant amount of heat and transfered it into the building. So much that you can keep your hand on the chimney top. It’s mostly hot air and moisture leaving the flue.

The rocket stove is a down-draft heater. The oxygen hungry fire sucks air into the mouth of the stove. The fire and air move down the horizontal burn tunnel, in this case made of fire brick, and up into a insulated internal chimney. The insulated chimney was constructed with a clay tube embedded in vermiculite and clay, embedded in a metal cylinder. Then the hot air and smoke moves into a 55 gallon drum, cools ever so slightly, releasing heat into the building and sinks / is pushed into the 8″ horizontal stove pipe. The pipe is embedded in a cob bench, releasing the heat into the thermal mass of the bench there by storing it like a battery. From the bench the pipe leaves out of the building.

Updates:

Here is a of Ianto’s Rocket Stove book.

Read a review by Ocean Liff-Anderson at Dirt Cheap Builder.

The second edition, Rocket Mass Heaters-Superefficient Woodstoves You Can Build (and snuggle up to) is available here:
http://www.rocketstoves.com/