New Ovens With Thermal Mass Installation

It has been an interesting day today as we modified our wood oven design to incorporate a lot of thermal mass and now it has a third chamber filled with smashed tiles and concrete to create this thermal mass and our testing showed it was still emitting usable heat after 7 hours and this was with 1 hours burn time using the minimum quantity of wood so a morning burn for 1 hour would provide heat all day and a 2 hour burn in the evening would see it emitting reasonable heat all night and all on a bucket of wood.

With the concept showing much promise and people desperate for winter heat we rapidly produced 6 of these and today (Saturday) we installed 5 of them for people who cannot afford to eat let alone heat and eat and they ran for the first time; they were installed by a relation of a friend who does this professionaly and had the relevant qualifications and experience and his professional opinion was they were very well made and very easily installed and everyone fitted first time and he particularly liked the telescopic flue which went straight into the flue liner and could be easily locked.

With everything in place it was time to seal them and the joint paste requires the heat to cure it and as the thermal was damp it required the heat to evaporate off the moisture so the dried sand would fully dry and fill the voids in the smashed tiles and concrete for maximum conduction of heat throughout the thermal mass and the first burn filled the room with steam for about 15 minutes as it evaporated the moisture off and cured the jointing paste and dried the sand out.

Our first one was installed before 10am and fired and the temperatures noted and it heated the whole house with the internal doors open and it got hot and at 8pm it was still warm and emitting heat and the occupants went from wearing coats to wearing shorts and once she knew they would possibly be getting a wood fired oven with thermal mass she has her kids out with her collecting any wood they could find and a local building site ran a teleporter round filled with wooden pallets which her children broke up and as we delivered them all a 1 tonne bag each and seasoned wood to fill it; she sent her children with us to fill other recipients 1 tonne bags.

Five houses now have heat and the ability to oven cook during this crisis.

Assassin do you have a photo available please ?
I filled our smokeless hods today and was shocked to find we have used 80% of our 600kg ..
I thought it would last well beyond the new year
I haven't been filling it so had no clue ..
This sounds a good idea ..
Our stove is a 5 kilowatt I bought as ex display around 15yrs ago it does the job but what you have described sounds so much more efficient ..

I dont have photographs but you can add thermal mass to most things and the more thermal mass you have the longer it will emit heat after the fire goes out and if you simply put a pile of bricks around your fire you will generate some thermal mass which will emit heat.

Have you tried making your own paper logs as all you need is paper, I use shredded from the shredder, wood shavings or chips or sawdust and of course you have horse muck and you use the proportions of 2 parts paper to 2 parts wood to 1 part horse muck and put this in a bin and add water, mix and leave for a couple of weeks and it breaks the fibres down and you need to stir it and I have a wood saw blade on a large shaft which goes into my drill and this chops and mixes it.

Once mixed and stood for a few weeks it goes into a jig and us compressed with hydraulics which removes the water and compresses then into pucks which we get 64 of at a time and these go into the greenhouse in the middle of summer where they sit on concrete slabs for a few days to dry out.

We have a wood store which these dried pucks go into and this has a small log burner which is lit in winter and keeps the pucks dry and they are distributed through the village as everyone has a log burner and some simply burn pucks while others use a mix of wood and pucks.

We do this on an industrial scale and usually have three large stainless tanks on the go through winter which are filled with paper, wood and muck (we use cow as we can easily source it for free) anf they have large mixers built in and we have a large drain to get the slurry out and this is pressed early in the summer to get the best drying heat for the winter.

Sorry Assassin I didn't get a notification of reply. .
We do put a large stove top kettle we found in a charity shop for £5 on the stove so the hot water gives heat also ..
Bit limited for space around the stove to stack bricks etc ..
but yes we have trialed muck and cardboard thos year and are making a press ..
We get s lot of cardboard through our buisness ..
This year we are just ripping and rolling it but this year coming going at it great guns ..
We're just a bit short of space we litrally have stock on pallets covered in the garden ..
If folk havnt got a stove a simple baking tin Terracotta plant pot and tea lights can make a difference in a cold room for not a lot of outlay ..
Tried and tested and relied upon in previos years ..