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Post by dustylfc on Nov 2, 2015 8:27:09 GMT -8
Thanks dcish
Would you think the bricks being double skin and laid the way they absorb to slowly or is this what you planned being you have kids running about
Maybe one skin wouldnt heat as much as to burn skin ?
But thanks for sharing it's. All good
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Post by DCish on Nov 3, 2015 5:50:28 GMT -8
The double layer of bricks was definitely intended to give a long thermal cycle. Since heat travels through brick at about one inch per hour, that gives me a bench that is cold for the first 5 hours of firing, and never really gets that hot -- safe for the kiddos, and really smooths out the heat curve of the stove. Since I'm the primary stove feeder but I'm gone for a long stretch of the day, it's nice to be able to get a good fire going and know that folks will be comfortable while I'm out.
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Post by DCish on Jan 18, 2017 15:02:22 GMT -8
Quick update: Well into another season with this setup, and it continues to perform well. When I cleaned the chimney at the start of this season, there was nothing more than a small amount of fine, dusty soot after last heating season. Inside the bell is another story, coated with glassy, black creosote. I'm not too worried about it since the hot gasses are directed away from the walls into empty void and cool quickly, making the risk of ignition nil, but I still don't like how dirty the regular old box stove burns. I'm inching along on my Walker Core Variation experiments, but completion is a long ways off yet due to limited time availability. Still, very glad to have the bench running in the mean time.
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Post by DCish on Dec 30, 2018 19:19:07 GMT -8
Quick update... still running strong! Here's a pic of the thermometers after the fire is up to temp feeding a cold stove.  Input temp around 800*F, bell exit temp aroud 100*F, stack temp 200*F (damper leakage bumps up the bell exit temp, so the final flu temp is higher - which is fine by me, keeps the chimney drawing well). |
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Post by DCish on Dec 31, 2018 6:59:24 GMT -8
Ok, been wanting to post this for a while, but didn't have the pic until now. Now that I have mass after my stove I try to run it in efficient burn mode, which means running it close to the upper limits it was designed for. Every once in a while I mess up and let it run harder than I intended before I catch it and turn the air down. This morning that happened, and I snapped a pic of the thermometers to show what I find so amazing. Even with over 1000*F going into the bench, the flu temp after the mass is still barely over 100*F, and the final chimney temp after damper leakage is just 250*F. I find this to be an inspiring illustration of how well thermal mass can perform. It really doesn't take that much surface area to harvest an incredible amount of heat that would otherwise be wasted!  |
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Post by DCish on Oct 21, 2019 11:07:02 GMT -8
Great. Google+ shut down before I got my pictures harvested and re-hosted. Not sure when I'll have time to fix that...
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Post by Jura on Oct 21, 2019 12:14:59 GMT -8
Great. Google+ shut down before I got my pictures harvested and re-hosted. Not sure when I'll have time to fix that... Weren't the pics supossed to be transferred to the google photos service ? I didnt use google+ but once the big brother shut down the Panoramio service, all my pics from there were migrated to google photos. You may delete this msg after reading as it brings nothing to the subject |
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Post by DCish on Jan 31, 2020 15:32:28 GMT -8
Thanks for the tip, Jura. I just went digging and was able to find the first photo of the thread there, and got it shared and re-posted. I'll see how much of this I can rebuild.
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Post by DCish on Jan 31, 2020 22:10:25 GMT -8
Rebuild complete - could have been worse, only one photo permanently lost. I dread rebuilding my batch box experiment thread, though - it'll be hard to figure out which photos go where. Fingers crossed.
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Post by Orange on Feb 8, 2020 12:25:58 GMT -8
great project, tnx for the pics! I was also wondering is it possible to add mass to a standard stove, now I know it is. I'm still not sure about combustion efficiency, if for metal box stove is 81% and for BB 91% than it isn't that big difference if your heat extraction trough mass is good. But you have creosote in bell, it will be interesting to see what happens when you insert BB. donkey32.proboards.com/thread/3586/bb-box-stove |
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Post by DCish on Feb 10, 2020 14:01:39 GMT -8
Yeah, life has gotten wicked full with other tasks, so this is only creeping along, but the dream is still very much alive and well! A box stove rated at 81% efficient is only that efficient when operated in the "sweet spot" (pretty much wide open), not smoldered along as one normally operates such a stove. Having the bench in line after the stove allows me to run it close to its most efficient burn regime and store the excess, so I am very confident that I am getting much more efficiency than I originally did, both on the combustion side, and the heat harvest side. I've stacked a bunch of soapstone on top of the stove to soak up more of the heat so that I can run it nice and hot for longer without baking myself out of that room. I'll have to add a couple of pics for that as well.
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Post by DCish on Feb 10, 2020 16:05:21 GMT -8
Pics: Found a place that make soapstone countertops and got permission for some dumpster diving. Bought an old tile saw and sliced the scraps into regular shapes so I could get 3 layers of stone (not all quite the same thickness, but oh well). The bottom (fourth) layer is just a boarder of 1" square strips that form a channel for air to flow through. The pipe goes up through the ceiling and through another room to an inline fan that sucks air between the stove top and the stack of stones to come out the bathroom floor under a carpet. Run it for half an hour and the place is something like a sauna. The warm, moist air exhausts to the house for humidification.   |
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Post by wisc0james on Feb 11, 2020 16:46:55 GMT -8
Great pictures. I think that for most people, this is going to be a more appealing upgrade than jumping from a box stove to a RMH. Something I want to try in the future, for sure.
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Post by DCish on Jan 27, 2022 5:54:16 GMT -8
Greetings to the forum! Sadly, an employment reshuffle sucked my brain pretty heavily for the most recent couple of years, but I think I'm free enough to sustain some re-engagement here a bit, and I couldn't be happier. By way of a quick update on this setup... there is really nothing new to report... seven years in and it is humming along, still heating the house well. Looking around the forum, so much has been happening, I've got lots to catch up on!
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Post by permiekev on Nov 11, 2022 20:11:19 GMT -8
Greetings to the forum! Sadly, an employment reshuffle sucked my brain pretty heavily for the most recent couple of years, but I think I'm free enough to sustain some re-engagement here a bit, and I couldn't be happier. By way of a quick update on this setup... there is really nothing new to report... seven years in and it is humming along, still heating the house well. Looking around the forum, so much has been happening, I've got lots to catch up on! Welcome back! You've got a very similar soapstone heater to me, I'm thinking of adding a bell to mine too. Mine is made by Woodstock the model is a progress hybrid. It has both secondary reburn (I think this is like a gassification) and it also has a catalytic element that gets engaged after 350f. You mentioned that you ran yours in efficient mode, were you engaging a catalytic element then? I ask because this changes the burn path and I was curious if draft was a problem when the element was engaged. |
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