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Every so often we invite folks to join us for a weekend to build their own CottageRocket. This is Tim's. He built it to heat the sunroom of his Florida tinyhouse the few weeks of the year that it gets uncomfortably cold. Since this video it even has a dome grill top and pizza stone for baking.
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In which we visit with Kirk Mobert at Paul Wheaton's Permies.Com lab in Montana and see how his Cyclone Tiny House Heater is working after one year in service.
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This building has a special place in my heart. Most of the build I spent recovering from a heart attack, doped up on Metopirol sitting in a wheelbarrel giving directions to my amazing Mud Sisters as they learned by doing and I learned how to do by sitting on my butt.
Read Lloyd's entry on The Shelter Blog
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Read More at Mother Earth News.
Throwback to an article I wrote for Mother Earth News awhile back. Sadly we lost this work of art to a fire. The Phoenix treehouse has since risen in its place. More on that later.
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February 2020 was finished off with an epic Mud Family Tour of the southern United States from Texas to North Carolina building Rocket Heaters and teaching cob workshops and meeting up with friends old and new. As we go into anti viral social distancing mode we are looking for silver linings in our clouds and one of them is that we have time to catch up on our posting. We thought we would lead off with this excellent…
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In 2013 our friend Merlin Jacov bought the "Love Bus" to live in but soon found himself spending more on propane to heat the darn thing in Cleveland winters than he would have spent on the rent he couldn't afford--about $30 per night. He heard how our home made rocket heater had dropped the heating bill for our double-wide from $1000 some months for propane to less than $100 per year for hardwood scraps from the flooring mill down the street. So he brought the bus to us and we fitted her out with a rocket heater made mostly from scrap metal and…
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Cleaning the paint off your barrels so they don't offgas into the house and make you sick is an important part of building a Rocket Mass Heater. We've done it with a sand blaster (long and messy). We've paid a barrel refurbisher to do it (very nice job but expensive at up to $40 per barrel). We've thrown them in a bonfire (inefficient and dirty but fun, just don't breathe and don't roast…
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In which we wander around Ray Cirino's home and studio checking out his and his friends' creations including a rocket stove powered pizza oven on a trailer in the shape of a dragon.
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The paint on a used barrel is not meant for the high temperatures in a Rocket Mass Heater so you can either slowly poison yourself as it offgasses in the house over the next few months as the you use the heater OR you can clean the paint off. I have found barrel refurbishers who will charge me $40 or so to beadblast the barrel and I must say those look really nice but that's about 4x more than I…
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The last day of our Rocket Mass Heater Workshop. Our crew was awesome. We were able to build this in four days instead of five (including prep). Even though it is hot August (the worst time to fire a rocket and get it to draft) AND it is still very very wet our RMH is warming up nicely with a little help from a fan, turning the house into a bit of a sauna.
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The crew is going gangbusters on this Rocket Mass Heater. We have the body of the bench and the burn chamber built.
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The Rocket Heater is starting to come together. We have laid out the shape of the bench and the burn chamber and now we are laying a cob floor for the stratification chamber (bell) inside the bench that will warm our butts. Watch for Part 3 coming soon
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In which we are breaking up the clumps of clay and really crumbly sandstone from the site to make cob. This soil doesn't have much structure. You can actually break the "rocks" by hand and they shatter into sand. If you put them in a cob wall as is they would crumble over time. The good news is there are also chunks of pure clay in this soil and when we break them up everything sticks together…
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We're here with Uncle Mud at the Mother Earth News Fair, learning how to build with mud and straw!
Posted by Mother Earth News on Sunday, October 23, 2016
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In which we check on one last rocket project from the 2019 Wheaton Labs Appropriate Technology Course, melting broken glass into something more interesting in a Rocket Heater. Here's the idea: Melting bottle glass requires sustained temperatures up to 1600 degrees Fahrenheit with a long slow cool down to strengthen (anneal) it. So where do I find temperatures like that without a massive expenditure…
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In which we have built a Deadly Ray Gun (prototype 1) to melt broken glass into something useful. SPOILER ALERT It doesn't work yet because it doesn't get hot enough except in a tiny area, but Josiah is already building a better one. But this is a good explanation of the principles of the thing and the challenges of melting glass with the sun. Watch our progress at https://permies.com/t/118371/…
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In which we explore the amazing Turtle Island Preserve in North Carolina USA where primitive living skills and culture are kept alive.
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It is always fun to visit Deanne Bednar at Strawbale Studio but this install was especially fun as we FINALLY got a good heat source in a sauna we started in 2014 and got to share the CottageRocket design with a whole bunch of lovely folks in Michigan
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In which Heather Mud shows us how to sculpt cob over a concrete block building insulated with repurposed foam.
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Then we will try to melt glass with it.
