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This is the feed tube, where the wood is going to go down in, uh
vertically rather than going in horizontally like
most wood stoves.
And I'll use another little stick here, and you can already
usually feel, sometimes the match actually gets blown out
because it's getting pulled already down
so we don't have that strong of a pull right now but it'll get started.
So I'm pushing it all the way down, where it will catch
the paper and the kindling that i put in there.
You can hear that rocket effect already.
And now if you look down in there you can actually, you can really
see the flames getting pulled into the combustion chamber.
That tower that's inside of there is insulated with rock wool so that it creates
a heat differential, so it's very hot inside of that tower, and cooler
on the outside here so it really, that makes a heat pump so that that heat goes
whoosh and just pulls up and really get that rocket effect of like whoooo
with the wood burning.
We constructed the base out of the fire bricks
that create this heat pump effect that I talked about.
The pipes come out of the bottom of that,
the regular stove pipe, just silver stove pipe.
It comes over here and there's actually
a clean out over here that you can get to.
We laid a bed of vermiculite,
and we put rocks around it,
and then we laid in the stove pipe going down here
and we turned the corner and then again
and come back up this way and then we go along
where that little seating bench is there,
and turn the corner and go up and out of the house.
The creosote alone, I mean, the chance of chimney fires with this is almost non-existant,
and that alone, especially when you live in the environment I live
in an all wood house in the middle of the woods
Also the comfort level of having the heat radiating
into the room all of the time, that was very appealing to me
because I have been living without a back up heat for so long
that i'm used to fluctuating heat in my house
Both upstairs and downstairs will be 65
to 68 degrees [Fahrenheit] when I wake up in the morning.
Where as before, I would go to bed and it would be 68 when I went to bed
but when I got up, upstairs would be maybe 60
and downstairs would be maybe 55.
It was next to nothing to build this thing,
and with all those people helping,
people are very intrigued by these projects too,
and it's a wonderful work project you know,
and a way to build community around doing really neat things.
People come for home tours.
I usually start outside, I meet them out there, and I point
I have two chimneys, one is for my cook stove, one is for this stove
and i ask them to identify which stove is going right now, can you tell?
And they'll say, "Neither one is going."
because you can't see any smoke coming out.
You have to look hard and you can see the little shimmer
of the heat coming out if you really look.
So that's a testament to how cleanly that wood has burned.
I took this can and I just flattened one side of it
so I can scrape it down inside of the burn chamber, the combustion chamber.
And this bag, we're filming this on February 16th
I believe, and we started operating this stove on September 20th roughly
So that's five months or so.
That is all of the ash that I have collected from the stove
during that five months.
Not wanting to be connected to the grid
and have a bill that I have to pay and that kind of thing
I'm creating my own power, and my own utilities essentially.
I get the wood here, as much of it off the land as possible and
that's how I heat my house.
Having a rocket mass heater was a wonderful thing
because it continues to heat the house
for many many hours and even days after I've had the fire.
There's that and then electricity. I've scavenged
used solar panels and parts.
I've had to buy new batteries now, once or twice.
I collect rain water. I strain it through cloths and clean it up.
I don't drink that, I drink spring water.
We have a spring on the property and I get it from friends.
There's a lot of people that feel like
because I live this way, that I feel morally superior or something like that, and that's
just really not the case.
This is part of my process, this is part of the continuum of my
trying to live a way that works for me, and that I feel does work better for the planet.
I do have a sense that Americans and Western civilization has gone
a little too far perhaps, and we use more resources than is, you know, sustainable.
It's a system that we're all just funneled into
and we don't have any choice in it to so great of a degree
but we actually do.
What is one thing you can do, that makes some small difference, that puts you in
that frame of mind to be thinking
"what can I do that makes it a little better?"
"What can I do that uses less resources?"
These things become ingrained into your life,
and suddenly you don't think about them anymore
It's just not a big deal, and those are the things, those little steps.
It's very hard to step out and make
major changes in your life,
so make some small ones.
I think culturally, there are these shifts that happen
thousands of people, millions of people perhaps
are all just having these slightly different, new ways of
thinking about things.
And all of a sudden, WHAM, there's a cultural shift.
All of a sudden, everybody's doing that.
Where did it come from, how did that start?
It started with people bringing a canvas grocery bag
to the store with them, or whatever.
Those kinds of things, what ever it is.
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