[permaculture] small cooking woodstove / mass heaters / urban coppice
Keith Johnson
keithdj at mindspring.com
Sun Oct 7 23:23:40 EDT 2007
Just because not everyone is familiar with the principles of mass
heaters, here's a nutshell version, ad lib.
High-temperature-combustion mass heaters make the best use of many kinds
of non-log dry carbonaceous material, i.e. stored sunlight (thus Scott's
recommendation of the traditional bundles of sticks and twigs used
instead of logs for centuries by cultures around the world) by burning
it with the draft wide open for maximum temperature / oxidation (1500F
+/-) plus least residue and fumes. The heat is retained by the lengthy
and massive convoluted flue which can also be oven, cookstove,
furniture, floor, wall, waterheater or bed depending on how it is shaped.
If one wished to take a parabolic lense and focus it into a hole in a
mass heater (as Mollison has suggested) and get the heat into it that
way, well, that would make your carbon fuel go further....ditto
microclimates, sunspace, animal heat, passive solar, summer heat stored
in insulated rock wells, etc, etc. If by growing our own food we reduce
our need to earn the money to buy food, then by growing our own twig
fuel from renewable coppice we reduce the need to burn trees. Cities CAN
grow carbon.
The combustion of carbon for heat is likely to be with us for some time
to come. Let's be smart in our use of it and get the highest yield.
There are always many solutions and rarely, if ever, any
one-size-fits-all solutions.
I lived in a forest-based ecovillage where the air quality in winter
could be very bad due to people not knowing how to use woodstoves
efficiently (or using crappy woodstoves) and a tendency for air
inversions in the valley. If everyone had mass heaters and used them
properly the difference would have been significant. Translating this
same tech en masse to the city is probably not recommended but as a
proper percentage probably doable. A good urban forest would help
enormously. Cities have to literally become MUCH greener.
lbsaltzman at aol.com wrote:.
> Human control of fire began with Home Erectus and is probably a good 500,000 years old as far as paleo-archeologists can determine.
>
> Human control of fire is a relatively
> recent phenomenon. What did we do before that?
--
Keith Johnson
"Be fruitful and mulch apply."
Permaculture Activist Magazine
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