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um, I just read otherwise the other day…. searching…. here we go:
Quite beautiful stuff there Dan and thanks for printing it. I can imagine one of these would be pretty welcome up there in the frozen north.
Whereas down here today, as thor mentioned earlier, it’s downright overwarm and sticky humid, an overnight low of 72F expected, all signs of a front coming in, so rains tomorrow (yay! welcome rain).
It has been rather frozen here. Fortunately, I stocked a lot of wood. But I’d still like to have one of those in the living room instead of my cast iron woodstove.
I used to work with a father son team of flooring guys from Portugal whose “real” specialty was building woodburning ovens rather like these, though theirs were meant for the out of doors, one side for baking bread, the other side with an oven, grills and seating for hosting large gatherings of family hell bent on eating gobs of lamb and sausages, I think.
Also beautiful things, these were, though made of stone rather than tiles. And damned tricksy to build, to hear them tell it (to the extent that one could make out what the hell they were saying in their extremely poor English).
One of the major advantages of the steinoefen is that the stoke-hole, the place where wood goes in, doesn’t have to be in the room that gets heated. It’s easy enough (well, if you’re going to build one in the first place) to arrange it so that the stoking takes place on the other side of the wall. That, in turn, means that the Prince need not suffer dealing with the Lower Orders trundling firewood in and ashes out and keeping the fire stoked. If the weather changes, and his room gets too cold or hot, the Prince can of course have the servants flogged, which will improve their weather-prognostication ability. It also means that the air supply comes from outside, which means fewer drafts.
A friend and I spent a memorable evening in a bar heated by one of those things. Its major disadvantage, after the fact that it takes hours to change the temperature, is that because the heating method is radiation and the temperature is quite low, it doesn’t heat anything at all that’s more than about two meters away. It’s remarkably comfortable up close, though.
The major skill required in designing a tile stove is keeping the exhaust temperature high enough to warm the chimney and keep the combustion products rising. If the combustion fumes get too cool they will pool in the room, displace the air, and smother the occupants. By all accounts this is a sufficiently regular occurrence in Siberia that it occasions no particular notice.
Tile stoves are ideal Green technology. They are bloody expensive unless you have skilled slave labor available, require continual skilled maintenance (again, you can’t afford it if you have to pay for it), and are awkward and inconvenient to regulate when it’s possible at all, but they’re efficient. Ideal for a society composed of nobles and peons.
Regards,
Ric
I’ve been wanting a Kakelugn for years. But they are pretty pricey to import and no one in town knows how to build one properly.
If I win the lucky lotto I will be starting my kakelugn factory. For the children.
Pretty darn efficient contraptions…
It would be trick to have one that was a wall between several rooms. Large enough so that an internal thermal mass “sandbox” for heat retentions and to embed hot water coils that could allow you to circulate heated water to both a heat exchange style potable water heater as well as to feed convection coils in remote locatons…
These remind me of a Hasha, a kind of external boiler used in Scandanavia to provide hot water for radiators to the house. It can also be run on a very small amount of fuel, due to it’s high combustion temperature, and only need be stoked a few times a day…
These would be very advantageous, and environmentally friendly, here in NYC. But, they would be far from economical unless you had the room to drive upstate and load up on wood once a year. Otherwise, it costs you an arm, leg, and firstborn by the cord…
Kakelugns can be converted to gas, and one teeny bundle of sticks is all that’s needed to fire it up for a whole day.
Plus they are so pretty. Pictures will have to do for me, till I can get one for less than ten thousand dollars.
An oven stove has none of these disadvantages. Because it hardly warms up air, there is no dust circulation. Because the surface of the oven does not become as hot as the surface of a metal stove or a radiator, there is no scorching of dust.
And because the air does not rise, the heat is distributed evenly across the room, instead of rising to the ceiling (or via an open staircase to the upper floors). This means you can open a window upstairs to ventilate the house, without losing energy.
I was wondering about that quote there, until Ric cleared it up by explaining that they don’t really heat the room all that much. It seems to me the good old Warm Morning is still the way to go, I don’t foresee myself cutting a bunch of firewood to feed a stove that mostly just heats itself.
Here’s a modern version, easier-to-put together as it’s inner chambers are not hand built with frie bricks and clay mortar, but in machined modular-assembly form.
The major skill required in designing a tile stove is keeping the exhaust temperature high enough to warm the chimney and keep the combustion products rising. If the combustion fumes get too cool they will pool in the room, displace the air, and smother the occupants.
Those of you considering one of these note this warning carefully. This is quite serious.
A: they use very little wood. Fired once in the morning and once at night.
The long-wave heat doesn’t so much heat up the air as heat up you. It’s very comfortable, hard to describe.
As with any Green-approved technology, it’s wise to investigate all the angles before committing yourself. Solar panels are great stuff, for instance, provided that you’re willing to store and maintain the batteries.
Kakelugn/steinöfenen are great. Just keep in mind: if the chimney gets cold, it will kill you. Good ones have relatively complex setups so that you can establish the draft in the process of stoking them.
Regards,
Ric
I’d think go with the bellows and the little slave child to work ’em while the fire’s up and until all the wood’s burnt or removed and you’re good to go. Or, use an air compressor to feed the sucker wind.
To clarify, B Moe: this is a wonderful gadget if the room is fairly small and the people maintaining it are willing to go to the effort. Under the proper conditions, the room they heat is astonishingly comfortable. Those “proper conditions” include maintenance of the stove and its draft, and ideally having masonry walls in the rest of the room, which absorb the radiant heat and warm the air. There is no particular reason to insist on burning wood in one. Anything that produces a relatively hot fire works. Many of the ones I saw in (East) Germany were fired with soft coal, and the small firebox and strong draft produced a hot fire that reduced the noxious byproducts considerably.
Modern central heating systems have stringent, and rigidly enforced, standards for the amount of heat that must escape the firebox up the chimney in order to maintain the draft. Chimney-pipe nowadays is insulated so that the interior warms up quickly, keeping the draft going as the fire cycles on and off. The same sorts of precautions are necessary with a steinöfen. As a minimum, you should have some kind of carbon monoxide monitor, especially if the stove is stoked from inside the room.
Truly, you are better off with a hypocaust, or the modern equivalent — hot-water pipes embedded in the floor and/or walls, with the water heater elsewhere.
Regards,
Ric
But you fire them with the doors shut, no damping, fire super hot and fast. Once you reach that nice toasty stage, they stay toasty on mostly no work.
Once the thing is warm, you can indulge in little fires with the door open for the pleasure of viewing a fire.
The biggest downside to a kakelugn isn’t much of one now – big open hearth can be cooked over and they provide lots more light. Kakelugns can maybe warm a cup of tea if there is a niche, and they don’t give off a lot of light into the room. For warmth, it’s very little work and very little fuel compared to keeping an open fireplace going
Christ, I feel old. I just did a quick google search and apparently the Warm Morning Company is no longer in business. They made the best wood or coal burning stoves you could find for years, my folks still heat their house with a big ass Warm Morning wood stove in the basement. I wonder if they know it will soon be a collector’s item.
See, that is the thing Ric, these folks are talking about heating a room, we heated a two story house. It needed stoked a couple more times a day, and used a couple of cords a winter, but kept the whole house tolerable through a West Virginia winter.
Short of getting a kakelugn, I’ve considered having a false stoves built. Hot water floors, but also closet space and no asphyxiation. Win, win. win.
That pictured kakelugn is made of wood. I know one person that made one into a bar cabinet.
Here’s a really old kakelugn cabinet, opened to reveal shelves.
Compared to an open fireplace, a steinöfen is wonderful, especially since most modern fireplaces are very, very badly built. They’re ‘way too deep, because nobody knows any more how to do the gas-control necessary to make a Rumfoord design work correctly without smoking up the room, plus the fact that it doesn’t look right to a real estate agent. Also, the good Count failed to take into account the air supply; this means drafts, which rather spoil the effect.
Another advantage of the steinöfen: it burns crappy wood, little sticks rather than big chunks. Feeding it typical split-oak firewood will choke it and generate smoke rather than heat. It actually works better on trimmings and twigs than on the sort of firewood you might buy from a dealer, which is split chunks suitable for a fireplace or iron stove.
Regards,
Ric
In Sweden it was just little slivers in a small bundle I could hold with one hand.
I thought it was all very appealing except for the it will kill you part, which would give me pause except for a I live in Los Angeles and b I live in an apartment in Los Angeles. I’m gonna send that to my brother though.
I’ve never turned on the heat here cause I grew up with electricity and this one is a gas one and I just think it’s all very dubious on the face of it.
oh yay, I’m not the only one. mostly though it’s a fear of “I don’t smell so well, so I’m not sure I would know if I had a gas problem”.
I agree. If I turned it on first thing I would do is open all the windows.
The house I grew up in was built with electric heat, the cost of which went bonkers about the time of the OPEC embargo. So, the wood furnace went in the basement with ductwork for forced hot air to the first floor and exhaust piped up the existing chimney, though that meant the fireplace got bricked in. That sucker would sweat you right out of the house, even on the second floor. With a tree business to supply and 3 sons to manage the wood supply, we had free heat and lots of it. We were the only house in the neighborhood with open windows in 10 degree weather.
I had a wood stove in college that a lot did the trick cause they were doing a tear down next door and so I had lots of wood. It was fun until one time when I really had it roaring I went outside and noticed the chimney was glowing red and then I decided it was one of those things I really didn’t know what I was doing and I’m probably really fortunate nothing bad happened.
Next time I toss too many duraflames on the pile I might go outside and just make sure there’s no glowing.
Most houses are framed with pine and spruce, if you were burning a lot of that in a stove then, yeah, that can be a problem. Too much pine tar build up in a chimney can lead to a house fire.
These are good for getting rid of the creosote-y stuff and leaving the good burny stuff behind. Fill them up with wood, build a fire underneath and start cooking. See the whole process here.
I’ll bet you could rig one of these up to run on wood pellets, with an automated feeder. A computer could probably monitor the changing indoor and outdoor temps and adjust the pellet feed accordingly.
That’d cut down on the need for peasants and the flogging of same (which the proggs would no doubt see as a bug rather than a feature).
I remember seeing a proposal, years back, to use microwaves for room heating. Supposedly the frequency under consideration wouldn’t penetrate below the surface of your skin. It had some drawbacks of its own (mainly that objects which didn’t contain water wouldn’t warm up, which would lead to a — bracing — experience when you sat down on the toilet).
I don’t think it ever went anywhere.
It *was* a lot of pine mostly. I feel very lucky.
Oh, and the number that sticks in my mind for the microwave heater is 18 watts per room.
Wonder what microwave heat would do to the indoor plants and such SBP? Or like smallish pets, say lizards or *gasp* turtles?
I think it’d work fine, actually. As long as they’re made out of meat (or at least water-containing tissues).
I’d want to see some health studies before installing one, though.
I had a turtle adventure kind of today but I will tell that story later. The whole microwave thing makes me think it would make you feel warm when for real you were actually not as warm as you thought. Or something.
As far as microwave heating, I think I will just put on some more clothes, thank you.
If people are anything like Michael Angelo’s tasty lasagna it would probably be sort of sketchy. You’d be hot on the bottom but still cold inside a lot so you would have to nuke and sit for awhile and then nuke again. Then you would be very tasty and sometimes not too bad at all nutrition-wise.
unless you accidentally over did it and became all rubbery. noodles are tricky is what I’m saying.
Reading the wiki, I see that the first RadarRange “was almost 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, weighed 750 pounds (340 kg) and cost about US$5000 each. It consumed 3 kilowatts, about three times as much as today’s microwave ovens, and was water-cooled.” That was 1947.
Better now.
It would be cool if you had big huge turntables in your rooms and all your furniture slowly rotated around all winter.
That’s true. These ones really respect the pasta though unlike lean cuisine and such to where if you do it right you actually get something for real al dente. Also they’re made in Texas so I want to like them just cause of that.
A water-cooled oven?
I have a vague recollection of some case of my husbands that cited non-ionizing radiation experiments that maimed and blinded folks. Workers fried like that tanning bed bride of urban legend fame.
Stuff of nightmares. Which I’ve been having that one again where my mother is still alive and whoops! needs all her stuff back. I “wake up” and it turns out I only dreamed she passed away. What a pickle. Sorry, Mom, I spent it on a kakelugn.
The non-ionizing radiation guys worked around radar equipment. There was a rubber-noodle syndrome of some kind.
SarahW, quite a number of people have been killed or maimed by regular fire, too.
One of the things that I know, and that I don’t know why I know, is that in 1900 Pennsylvania had 30% of its land mass covered in hardwood forest. Today it’s close to 60%. I think I may have learned that on the Louisville Slugger factory tour.
And because the air does not rise, the heat is distributed evenly across the room, instead of rising to the ceiling (or via an open staircase to the upper floors). This means you can open a window upstairs to ventilate the house, without losing energy.
Bullshit.
Fuckin hippy heaters have to obey the same laws of thermodynamics and adiabatics as everyone else.
Easy, Roland. It’s not that he’s a hippie; it’s that he’s a European. If you visit Europe in winter, you will universally discover heating systems on full blast and windows open (must have a bit of fresh air, y’know).
The Powers that Be decided microwave room heating wasn’t practical when one of the engineers’ girl friends discovered that having metal necklaces, e.g., next to the skin is a really bad idea in that environment (true story). The technology is under consideration as a crowd-control measure.
Regards,
Ric
At least it might reduce some of the more egregious sorts of body piercing.
For some reason that’s considered a bug, Dan.
Ric, wasn’t there a worker at an Antarctic station who accidentally cooked himself by snuggling in close to a microwave transmitter dish?
Wait…Louisville Sluggers are made in Pennsylvania? There’s something very, very wrong with that.
Mapquest can’t find a Louisville in Pennsylvania, FWIW.
There’ve been any number of people hurt or killed in that sort of incident, and many more apocryphal stories. The case you mention doesn’t ring any bells, but that means nothing vis-a-vis its truth or falsity.
High-powered radar transmitters are very, very dangerous things to be around. The space between the feed horn and the reflector can have burn-your-arm-off levels of power in it, and it’s invisible. Leaks in the waveguide can result in burns. The problem is made worse by the military’s desire to have things compact and transportable — some of the portable air-search radars can crisp flying birds; normal ones have bigger dishes and therefore less power density.
Regards,
Ric
My former brother-in-law got lit up by an F-15 while he was working on the flightline. Not fun, I gather.
Personally, I never cook birds before I pluck them.
I remember seeing a proposal, years back, to use microwaves for room heating.
Problem 1: no feedback path. You’d want to keep from overheating, which is less of a problem for food than it is for humans. What if your eyeballs heat up faster than the rest of you? Or, worse, your testicles?
Not a problem for women, at least not at first.
Second huge problem is the huge number of conductors in the room. You’d basically be radiating the same wires that are providing power to the transmitter, which might create some novel and interesting effects.
Third problem is the floors and furniture would still be cold, unless you could figure out how to keep them either a) warm, or b) extremely low coefficient of heat conductivity and/or extremely low specific heat. The first means that they can’t transmit much heat to you (or suck much out) because the heat has nowhere to go from the initial contact patch. The second means that even if the heat could go somewhere, the object in question can’t take much energy out of you for a given temperature rise.
All this is from memory, mind you. I never took thermodynamics, and had to self-teach so that I could figure out the rate of heat decay in a discarded orbital kick-stage, as an approximation.
Oh give me a nice cozy swedish tile stove, where the air is not hot but the furniture is warm, and the promise of eyeballs like ABBA.