Now that transaction fee storm has passed I'm back to heating my living space primarily with wood in a rocket mass heater instead of Asics.
https://v.nostr.build/Ee2K.mp4
Wood is burned in the small firebox and heat radiates from the barrel warming the space quickly while the fire burns.
As the exhaust gasses make their way to the chimney, they pass through ductwork in a plywood box filled with pea gravel.
The majority of the heat from the exhaust is transfered to the gravel before exiting up the chimney. By the time the gases exit the box, they are cool enough for me to put my hand on the chimney pipe.
After the fire burns out, the heat absorbed by the pea gravel slowly radiates out into the living space until the next fire is burned and the gravel is recharged with heat once again. I built this rocket mass heater for a fraction of the cost of a wood burning insert, with no special tools, materials, or skills.
It has been an unusually warm November and December here at the homestead. Normally we have to start burning wood in the rocket mass heater early November to stay comfortable but this year, the bitcoin mining dehydrator was enough to stay warm and do some food preservation simultaneously.
Transaction fees started climbing and I was shocked to see the most efficient miner I had approaching break even at my electric rate.
I didn't have the circuit to run it wired yet but this bump in fees was the motivation I needed to get the miner hashing. Coincidentally, the weather also started to get colder finally so getting the miner up and running was a win/win.
It successfully kept us and our guests warm through the holidays, even earning some Bitcoin beyond the cost of power at times, all while allowing us to save our firewood.
We did have to fire up the rocket mass heater a handful of times, but so far we've burned less than half the amount of wood compared to previous years. This is thanks to the combination of the warm weather, and high transaction fees allowing us to stay warm with heavily subsidized electric heat.
This might be the first winter we make it through with wood leftover for the next year, typically I'm scrounging for the last couple weeks.
#permaculture #permies #homesteading #selfsovereignty #meshtadel #rocketmassheater #woodburner #bitcoin #bitcoinmining #plebminer #rmh #grownostr
Rocket mass heaters should be the central design feature of underground pole shift survival structures.
nostr:nprofile1qqsy6q3ua80awknlxp6m368qssqghct6ra6scca4meepumhcswkuwegppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcpzamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumn0dahx2uewvdhk6tc8vdatl has there been work done to incorporate an ability to cook food with a RMH? Barrel cooktop or is that chamber too cool?
The barrel gets plenty hot to cook on, there's no examples that come to mind that I could link to right now but I know I've seen people doing it.
It's not as easy as the perpetual stock pot in the fire place all winter because usually the RMH only needs to burn for a few hours a day. So you could cook a big meal in the morning on it, eat breakfast and lunch, then cook dinner on it for the evening fine.
There's definitely a way to use it to do the majority of the cooking if you wanted to.
i think the trick would be to pack a massive amount of mass right next to it that is FULL of powdered charcoal, as i believe it is possibly the best thermal storage material after water but with the ability to store heat above boiling point
Why is charcoal good for thermal storage? I would imagine the powder would need to be tightly packed to be effective. Do you have a link to more information about it?
my hypothesis is that as it isn't liable to burn until about 4000 degrees, in a metal case it is a massive thermal sink
what makes a "thermal store" is about its latency between absorbing and re-emitting the heat it absorbs... the problem with metals is they are conductive, and thus they re-emit fast as the heat goes in, and then goes out
a decently packed mass of charcoal powder has a lot of air spaces between the dust and the carbon itself is a poor conductor, but it is not a bad conductor, and it can hold a very high temperature, and thus it acts as a store
put it this way, the same thing applies to electricity, i think... a super capacitor is the highest capacity electrostatic store currently known, and is literally two chunks of powdered charcoal interfaced by a thin layer of insulating glass, which can withstand the thermal effect of the electrostatic discharge
i think if it holds and leaks electricity efficiently it probably also holds and leaks heat the same way
I'm having a hard time imagining how to effectively charge the charcoal with heat.
that's ok, i put the idea out there, it's not hard to test with something like an old, shitty aluminimum pot to test how much it can raise the temperature of a container of water you drop it into
you can compare it also to boiling water in same pot, or fill it with some oil, and see how much it raises the temp in the same conditions
