Burner? Schmurner! Boil With A Rocket Stove

[pdilley]

Its good to know you can still brew in the woods or when the electricity goes out!

If you want to create superheated plasma to bring your wort up to temperature or boil your wort, why not build a Rocket Stove?

The idea is to build a solid fuel combusting stove that is very efficient, once up to operating temperatures even the smoke disappears on the output and its pure flame and superheated gas.

Building the small rocket stove from a mini keg:


Rocket Stove in action:


How to build one large enough to heat your home or shed:


12 Rocket Stoves examined:


A good explanation of using one including no cut vertical wood feed:




Cheers,
Brewer Pete

 

[bkmad]

Reminds me of a site I saw a few years back of a kiwi guy who built a small gas powered jet engine to cool his beers. He had the gas bottle in a tub of water with the beers. I'm not sure of the science of it, but the jet engine consumed so much gas it made the gas bottle really cold.

Just did a search, here it is: http://www.asciimation.co.nz/beer/

So you could boil your wort and cool it with the same jet engine... :icon_cheers:

 

[HoppingMad]

Wow, wood fired pizza. Now wood fired beer!

Keeping the wood going in the thing would give you an extra thing to do on brewday (I'm not much of a multi-tasker and would probably forget to keep it going making for a long and complicated brew session) - but a pretty cool idea for some brewers to have in backup when the gas bottle runs out, particularly those in remote parts.

Hopper.

 

[pdilley]

You can add forced air like when making natural gas burner to make impressive (and scary looking) jet flames but from any combustable material. More efficiency means less fuel and less pollution. Once running, no smoke as with slow combustion heaters. Big plus.

With cooling, I can not remember the name, but they use it for cooling ice cream push carts in other countries. You heat up the device with a source such as alcohol lamp etc. It had a large metal ball connected with a tube with something inside it and it acts like those piezo electric coolers you plug into your car cigarette lighter plug socket.

I like the idea of the Rocket Stove as you can run the long exhaust pipes under a large thermal mass you can sit on (benches) or built into your house (wall) or coupled to a large thermal mass (slab) and get little to no creosote since creosote black oily accretion that builds up inside of chimney flues as a result of incomplete burning of wood or coal. And when running these stoves at operating temperature the combustion is complete and the exhaust plasma is superheated.

It operates on the same principle as the famous Finnish/Russion Masonry Heaters that for some reason missed Australia and are unknown here. Hyper efficient wood burning heat storing devices that were created when all the trees disappeared from the landscape from over harvesting. Now they can run them sustainably on normal coppice plantations and the costs are actually less than natural gas heating due to the high efficiencies.

One example, but probably no the best:


More on Masonry Heaters:


Air/Plasma flow animation inside Masonry Heaters:


You see all the large masonry heat storage in it that radiates out into the home over the next 8 hours after fire is done burning at high temperatures.

Oh and tiny Rocket Stoves have been built to warm greenhouses as well as carried by backpackers and campers looking for quick efficient fuel consumption heating for food and hot cuppas in the woods.

For those wondering how you clean out a rocket stove here:


Cheers,
Brewer Pete

 

[Eater]

Good collation of info BP

Seems very similar to the woodgas stove concepts i have been looking at for portable camping needs, just on a far larger scale. The addition of a fan forced combustion chamber would significantly increase the efficiency i think, but also use its own source of power unless thermo coupled to the heat riser/Flu chamber.

And coming into Dry season up here, where the temp plummets to well under 20 degrees, this could be a goer

 

[Ross]

looking at the carbon deposits on the pot in the video, I'd be reluctant to use for brewing. But a very cool (hot) concept.

cheers Ross

 

[Ant01]

I got one of these XL woodgas stoves from www.stickmanstoves.com I mainly use it for Camp cooking but comes in handy for warming my wine must before I add the yeast, doesn't blacken pots at all. Burns for ages on a handfull of twigs.
Ant