[Greenbuilding] Rocket heaters

[Keith Winston]

Hi Norbert! Great to hear from you. I've sent a client over to Heatkit 
recently, hopefully they'll be getting in touch with you.

So even though I realize some may see it as a conflict of interest 
(since you sell masonry heaters), I would be VERY interested to hear 
your thoughts on the Sedore. Are you familiar with it at all? I've 
always respected your opinion on this stuff...

And thanks for your thoughts on measuring wood stove efficiency. I would 
think efficiency would correlate with particulates, only because I would 
think more "particulates" would get burned in a high efficiency appliance.

Keith


Norbert Senf wrote:
> At 08:28 PM 1/24/2008 -0800, Reuben Deumling wrote:
>   
>> This is all very interesting. I would be curious to know what sort of metric
>> one might hope to use to compare stoves such as this one to other, older,
>> designs.
>>     
>
> Very interesting question.
>
> Coincidentally, I'm currently spending a lot of time measuring masonry
> heaters (a type of wood stove):
> http://heatkit.com/html/lopez.htm#current
>
> It is a lot more difficult to compare apples to apples in this field
> than one might imagine. Defining a standard method for fueling the
> stove is just one problem.
>
> There are two ways to measure efficiency - with a calorimeter room,
> and with the stack loss method. Almost everybody 
> who measures (few do) uses the stack loss
> method, because of the difficulties and expense involved with building
> and using a calorimeter room.
>
> For stack loss, you use a flue gas analyzer to measure flue temperature, oxygen
> and CO in the stack. This allows you to calculate efficiency if you average
> it out over a burn (either hot-to-hot with a 
> standardized load, or cold to cold).
>
> You can also measure particulates, but this is 
> quite a bit more difficult. You need to dilute
> the smoke with air first, so that most of the 
> semi volatiles will condense, the way they do
> in the atmosphere. We are using a Condar portable 
> dilution tunnel (see link, above, for details).
>
> I would venture that for residential scale 
> woodburning to be even remotely useable on a large
> scale in densely populated areas, that you are 
> going to be a lot more interested in
> measuring particulates than you are efficiency. 
> Particularly since efficiency numbers
> of various types get tossed around with abandon 
> by the marketing types, most of who seem
> to have skipped grade 10 science.
>
>
> Norbert
>
> -------------------------------------------
> Norbert Senf---------- mheat(at)heatkit.com
> Masonry Stove Builders
> 25 Brouse Rd.
> RR 5, Shawville------- www.heatkit.com
> Québec J0X 2Y0-------- fax:-----819.647.6082
> ---------------------- voice:---819.647.5092
>
>
>
>
>
>
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