April 30. 2010
Wildacres 2010
The Masonry Heater Assosiation of Northamerica have their anual meeting in april at Wildacres retreat in North Carolina.

I was invited to be there, along with the legendary Heiiki Hyytiaiinen, Albie Barden and a long list of the old guys in this business.
It was just great, and very recommendable for everyone interested in masonry heaters :-)

About 120 people from all over attended.
9 very different masonry heaters where builded up, fired, and pulled down again within a few days.
A lot of talking, discussing, laughing, working, eating, enjoing the magnificant nature etc. toke place.
Live music, Russian theparty, presentations in the auditorium............................

Im just now editing hours of film, that i will put on Youtube in good quality as soon as im done.
I´ll put a notice here when its ready.
 

Videodocumentary from our international work-shop 2009
If you click on "More from ildsjalen" when you are on Youtube, you can se what else i have put on.
Among other things, there is a litlle film from my trip to Austria to learn more about kachelofens.
This is both in a dansih and an english version.

An old secret is no longer a secret

Why is some Danish masonry heaters so mutch better ?

When i, 20 years ago, learned about masonry heaters, i knew a lot about efficient wood-combustion.
What i saw was very good, but when you are a playing human being, you allways try to do things even better.
I made a change in the upper chamber compared to what was the commond Finish fireplace at that time.
This change later on turned out to be a radical improvement.

Why a secret ?
More than one time in my life, i have seen others benefit from my ideas, by calling them their own.
Making hot water from your stove as an exampel.
This idea was so simpel, and so easy to copy, that i thought, that maybe i shouldn´t talk to mutch about it.
(May be find out about the possibilities for a patent and so on).

My custumors knew about  it of course, and the students that i educated, and in fact - everybody could read about it
in the public libraryes where they could find my test rapport, but who did :-)
Now, i find pictures and descriptions on Hungarian and American websites, so why shouldn´t it be on my own.

Here it is:
The centrifugal forced carburator.
In fact just a box with 3 holes !

Here you see the upper chamber in one of my early stoves.

The two small figures (Narsissus and Ecco) are ceramic that just have beed burned.
They are not black, and they are burned all the way throug.
Ceramic will turn black if oxigen is missing for a short time.
So the temperature is o.k. and the mixing of gasses and oxigen has allso been o.k.

When the burning gasses enters the room from the throat in the floor just behind the door,
they can only leave throug the two hools located in the mittle of the sidewalls. (You see one of them at the right of the chamber)
Even gasses has a weight, and are affected by centrifugal forces, and when they enter this room, they are quit speedy
(thanks to Heikki´s invention of the throat), so they are forced into a spiral movement, where the latest gasses will keep up the heat of the first.
Furthermore - burned gasses are lighter than unburned gasses, so they come easyer into the mittle of this stream, and can leave the room
throug the two holes in the side.
The heavier gasses - those who are not burned yet - have to stay in the outher cirkel, untill they find som oxygen and can burn,
this way get lighter (allso because of the differens of temperature) and procide in the process.

This system functions allmost  independently of the temperature of the stove, so the ordinary high contens of Co in the
beginnig of a fire is allmost gone, and the overall average becomes extreemly low.

The system allso means, that you need less space to get a complete combustion.
Unless you put fare to mutch firewood into your firechamber, flames will not occured outside this "carburator".
That means, that you dont have to use anything else than one layer of ordinary bricks between your livingroom,
and the smokechannal just outside the bakeowen.
The temperature just outside the two holes will be less than the 572degrees Celcius that by time will damage ordinary bricks.
More freedom to build - mutch faster heat, if you come home from holliday to a real cold house, and a stove that dosn´t looks like Cassius Clay.

Remember:
This system we have used for allmost 20 years now.
You are wellcome to copy it, but please remember to tell where it came from.

Now we use it in our cookstoves to, but here it is located underneath the fireplace as an accessory
you can use when you don´t cook on the plate, and want a more clean burning and more heat to the buttom
of the cookstove. The "loss" is - no ash-dump, but that´s not so bad anyway.
In this case you off course have to have more than one damper to controll it.
In fact this is not so easy to explaine, but look out on my webpage for upcomming  international work-shops,
where i whould love to tell you all about it.

Quistions are wellcome, but please -  email me instead of phonecalls
Lars

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