Testing the Limits – Adobe Heaters in Argentina
I have recently built three single-skin masonry heaters in Argentina using unfired bricks and would like to share some thoughts and an account of the experience. All three were based on the design presented by Alex Chernov at the 2012 MHA Annual Meeting at WildAcres, with minor modifications to accomodate brick sizes, hardware, and site considerations.
I have spent the past 4 years living in the Patagonia region of Southern Argentina. Natural gas is cheap and widely distributed, but many people here, and in neighboring Chile, continue to live with wood fires as part of daily life for much of …
Portable Rocket Mass Heater from Paul Wheaton of Permies.com
Rocket mass heaters are still evolving. I have made gobs of videos about them, written articles about them and discussed them on my forums. And I have now spent a fair slice of time with Ernie and Erica Wisner coming up with some design enhancements. The focus has been on rocket mass heaters for renters, for wood floors and a new aesthetic.
For renters, can we create a rocket mass heater that can be loaded onto a truck in an hour? Can we also make one that can be taken off of a truck and built in under an hour? …
New Rocket Oven design by Flip and John
John and Flip Anderson have been working with Aprovecho Research Institute and building smokeless cookstoves in Haiti. They came up with this neat “rocket oven” design that answers some of the questions I get from folks about combining the dome oven design w/rocket technology. By simply using clay and organic matter and applying principles of mass and insulation they have created a beautiful, versatile, oven that can do significant baking w/very little fuel. For more about their work on developing business opportunities and helping with deforestation problems, goto www.RechoRoket.com. Here are a couple of their videos (they’re also working on …
Download a gift for Christmas, 2012: How to Make a Rocky Mountain Dulcimer
“In the end, we shall have had enough of cynicism, scepticism and humbug, and will want to live – more musically.” This quote (Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo), came to me from a friend, just before Christmas, as I was finishing this gift book about how to make a gorgeous-sounding 3-stringed instrument from scrap wood and cardboard. Details and story in the book, so more people can make their own music with their own neighbors. There’s an onscreen version below, and a (very amateur) sample of what it sounds like. A $10, (full color!) paper version is also …
Build Your Own Barrel Oven Book!
Hand Print Press has published a new book about a hybrid style of wood-fired oven called a Barrel Oven!
Build Your Own Barrel Oven
A Guide for Making a Versatile, Efficient, and Easy to Use Wood-Fired Oven
The tools for a sustainable future continue to grow! In this book, Max and Eva Edleson offer a comprehensive guide for planning and building a practical, efficient and affordable wood-fired oven. The Barrel Oven offers surprising convenience because it is hot and ready to bake in within 15-20 minutes and is easy to maintain at a constant temperature. It can be the seed …
Mud Mural at Colorado State University Pueblo, with Kiko Denzer
Maya Aviña teaches fine arts at CSU in Pueblo, Colorado. For about the past ten years, she’s been immersed in natural building, which she has also made into the focus of her research at the college. Last year, she invited me to come be an “artist in residence” and do a mural project. The challenge was to bring life into dead space: a bleak, harsh, hard-edged, institutional (college) courtyard of grey and yellow concrete pressed down by massive, overhanging soffit walls of more cast concrete. It looked (and felt) like a pen in a zoo designed so the animals below …
Cob + Firebrick = Masonry Heater Experiment
When I was 27, I moved back to my hometown in northern Minnesota to start a small organic vegetable farm. I sold produce to the wife of a stone mason, and he was looking for help in the winters. I told him I didn’t know anything. “Don’t worry,” he calmly replied, “I’ll train you.” I learned, of course, that hauling an endless supply of block and stone from one place to another doesn’t take much training. But he also handed me a copy of David Lyle’s history of masonry heaters. Three years later I was working for Albie Barden, building …
Roberto Monge’s Oven Story
Roberto Monge’s father – Alfredo Del Transito Monge Menjivar – grew up dirt poor in a jungle village in El Salvador, one of 8 surviving children in a family of 14. By good luck and hard work, he earned a law degree, found paying work, got married and started a family. I didn’t know him, but according to his son Roberto, the elder Monge felt indebted to his campesino roots; when he had to choose between a military dictatorship or a revolutionary people’s movement, he chose the latter, later assuming the position of Attorney General of the Poor in the …
Masonry “Heater Hat” Videos: Construction Details
This little heater hat has worked superbly! I think it’s a great do-it-yourself option for anyone interested in turning their box stove into a much more efficient, cleaner heater for their home or shop. However, I’m reluctant to publish formal plans or how-to info as I’ve built just a couple of heaters, and I consider this one to be an experimental prototype. (If you’re inspired to try something of your own, take good care; be sure to include a better clean-out design that what I allowed for here, and send photos!)
A heater in the home poses serious risks — …
Lily Gordon, 16, helps build ovens in Tanzania
David S. Cargo, who assembles info about community ovens for the St. Paul Bread Club sent me a link about Lily Gordon, a remarkable young woman, now 16, who has been helping villagers in Tanzania to build ovens so they can make their own bread (previously, bread had to be transported from so far that it would often be inedible when it arrived).
At the age of 11, Lily Gordon started raising funds for the village of Shirati, Tanzania. For her 11th birthday, instead of gifts, she asked her friends to bring money for the children of Shirati. The party …
Ovens, builders, a new (oven) book for German readers
Out of the blue one day I got a phone call from a guy named Ian Miller. He said he had built a few ovens, baked a fair amount of bread, was married to an Austrian and (among other things) interested in translating Build Your Own Earth Oven into German. With that began an adventure that is now resulting in a new (German!) edition of the book, published by Stocker Verlag, out of Austria (they also publish Austrian permaculturist Sepp Holzer, which makes it even more of an honor). Very interesting to let go of the book and let someone …
A yurt of sticks and mud
2011 has been a year of yurts, w/two opportunities to try out this simple design of sticks and mud — a more permanent adaptation of the traditional, portable, Mongolian design. One was for a friend and neighbor. The other was a workshop at Aprovecho Institute, as part of their sustainable shelter building series. Lots of people helped! Both were made with locally harvested bamboo and fir poles (arranged reciprocally to make a self-supporting, conical roof w/a central skylight, which I’m still trying to figure out how to cover cheaply…) Here’s a little picture book about the whole process.…
Open publication
Guest Article: An Earthen Oven Odyssey by Joe Kennedy
I have been making earthen ovens for over twenty years now. I made my first one in 1991 when I was working with architect Nader Khalili at CalEarth in the Mojave Desert. We were making a lot of adobe bricks at the time (friendly Persian-sized ones – 8”x8”x2”) and also building domes of regular fired bricks. I’m not sure what got it into my brain to make an oven, probably an old picture of the ovens at Taos Pueblo. One day I made a round foundation of adobe bricks in a mud mortar bed right on the ground, then hammered …
Spoons, 2010
carved from green wood: roughed out with a hatchet and/or a northwestern style adze, then shaped and finished with crooked knives and a straight blades (click on the thumbnail for an uncropped view of the entire photo). Some of the detail work is done w/little burins. The bowls I carved with a crooked knife, straight blade, and a neat jig designed by Bill Coperthwaite (author of A Hand Made Life). Bill’s spoon is the little yellow (birch) ladle with the scooped indents where the handle meets the bowl — his addition to the tradition of spoon design. After I started …
Solstice, 2010: bring in the mud! (into the house, that is)
This time of year I don’t usually get too muddy, but I brought some mud into my office last month so I could have a better and more efficient source of heat — finally! This little “heater hat” effectively turned my little iron box stove into a mini-masonry heater — with an oven! (note the wooden door on the right, just above the iron stove door). The wood that used to over-heat me, briefly, in the morning, now keeps me comfortably warm all day, and into the next morning (depending on how long I fire it and how cold it …
waterglass for binding earthen surfaces & pigment
“Waterglass” for protection & paint
Waterglass has become my preferred binder in places where it’s needed. The chemical name is sodium or potassium silicate. It’s an inert mineral compound similar to window glass, but under heat and pressure, it’s soluble in water. I get it from a ceramic supplier for $9 a gallon. It’s clear, viscous, and pours like heavy cream. It dries into a clear, brittle substance that crushes to a fine powder, but it has significant binding power, and is used in some refractory cements, as well as numerous other industrial applications.
I’ve only discovered it in the …
