For those of you with a lot of scrap wood that have been piling up and in the winter it snows where you live, you might seriously want to think about making a wooden stove of of a water heater container.
Remember though, this will probably void your house fire insurance.
The goal of a rocket stove is to burn a relatively small amount of wood at as high a temperature as possible, resulting in more complete combustion, and to extract as much heat as possible from the exhaust gases. To generate high combustion temperatures, rocket stoves separate the combustion, heat extraction and exhaust functions. They have insulated internal chimneys to generate a strong draft for vigorous combustion. My design uses a down draft combustion chamber. Scrap wood is loaded directly on top of the existing burning wood inside the combustion chamber.
Also, if you are in the SF Bay Area and you need a water heater, don’t forget to call my best friend Josh who’s a plumber in San Francisco and specializes in water heater installation/replacement.
