I want a pet dragon! I feed it and it breathes fire to keep me warm in the winter…ahhhhhhh!

What am I talking about? Well there is the new/old way of heating and it is called a Rocket Mass Heater otherwise affectionately known as a dragon to some people.

I say new/old because even though these things have been around for decades they are just now becoming more main-stream. People all over the net are talking about them, building them and using them. You can build rocket mass heaters, rocket stoves, pocket rockets, rocket water heaters, etc.

These can be as simple as 4 empty cans for a rocket stove to as elaborate as a rocket mass heater that doubles as a home heating unit, couch/bed and can even have bookcases built in.

People love them, even pets love them. They so nice and warm J

Keep reading to see about getting a free e-book on how to build rocket heaters/rocket mass heaters/ rocket stoves, etc.

Rocket mass stoves can be made out of materials that you can scrounge up and cost as little as $20 or you can buy all new materials and they can cost hundreds of dollars.

But consider the savings. Once you build the rocket mass heater you can have home heat for as little as pennies a day. A rocket mass heater can use as little as 1 cord of wood to heat for an entire winter in cold areas of the country. Your rocket mass heater can even be used for cooking! Compare that to spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars year after year with no end in site. And the cost of heating fuel gets more expensive each year. These companies know that you have to spend that money or you don’t have heat.

Well, they THINK that. Now you know better!

With a rocket mass heater you could heat your home with branch trimmings from your trees or your neighbors. Or you can get a cord of wood dried, split and stacked and you are all set for winter without spending anything other than some fuel for your chainsaw or just do it the old fashioned way if you want and all it costs you is some sweat ( good exercise if you like that sort of thing J LOL

The rocket heater burns the wood so thoroughly that there isn’t the waste that you have with regular wood stoves. By the time the exhaust comes out of the rocket mass heater you basically have

But to see more of the benefits of a rocket heater/ rocket mass heater…

Here are a few quotes from the free e-book (find the link below)

- “most wood stoves burn very imperfectly, that is, not all the energy available in the wood turns into heat. Much of the wood’s potential heat leaves the stove as smoke, particles, and unburned gases. The results include poisoning your downwind neighbors, excessive firewood use, and personal frustration.”

-          rocket heaters “improve human comfort, use less firewood, and cut pollution.”

-“The results are impressive. In my own cottage I burn only about two-thirds of a cord of (fir and alder) firewood a year, while my neighbors average 3–5 cords.”

-          “You can usually tell when any of the neighbors are around by the cloud of smoke coming out of their chimneys. By contrast, we burn so clean that visitors coming into my house want to know how come it’s so snug without the stove burning.”

And finally…

-“ Rocket Mass Stoves have been my only heat source apart from the sun. For seventeen years I have daily been able to evaluate these heaters that suit me

better than anything else I can find”

I am so in love with the rocket mass heater that I want one and I want it NOW! Jlol I will settle for having one installed before next winter.

I have wanted a wood stove for years and just finally managed to build and install ours last fall and now I find out about rocket mass heaters and am like….ugh, if I had only known.

But, we love our barrel wood stove (see our story about that here) and when talking about true self sufficiency /self reliance it is important to have at least 3 options for any need. So having our barrel wood stove and a rocket mass heater in addition to our furnace (for now) is a good plan.

I figure that if the rocket mass heater heats as well as everyone says that they do then we will do away with our furnace our try to convert it to using magnetic heat or some other alternative energy that we can create here at home for pretty much no cost. That makes it better for the environment as well as my pocket J

Anyway, here is a video showing how little wood the rocket mass heater uses (even though these people keep their home at around 70 degrees F and a cord of wood lasts them around 4 months.

I am so amazed and excited at the possibilities!

Now. I know that some people don’t get it. They think that because you put such a small amount of wood in the rocket mass heater that you need to constantly watch it and feed it more wood. That is why it is called a rocket MASS heater. The mass holds the heat and gives it off into your home over a period of hours. So you don’t need to constantly feed your dragon.

Ernie & Erica Wisner have built ove 700 rocket mass heaters and feed their rocket heater about once a day. Heck, a wood stove takes more care than the rocket mass heater does! Don’t get me wrong, I really am happy with our wood stove and will keep it even after we have our rocket mass heater done but it does take some managing to keep your home warm using a wood stove for heat.

Now maybe if we had all of our newer insulated windows installed and had better insulation but how many of you have old windows and not so great insulation? Probably quite a few.

I think that a wood stove is a great way of supplement heating, emergency heating and cooking but it does take some work if it is your only source of heat. Now if you can afford to buy your wood already cut/ split and dried that cuts down on your work immensely but adds to your cost.

Even if you already have a woodstove you might want to consider installing a rocket mass heater like we are. Josh says to me “First you were all about woodstoves, now you’re all about rocket heaters!”

Well, YEH! I want us to be able to be self-sufficient and be able to stay warm no matter what happens in the world. With the high cost of heating fuels it’s just being smart to be prepared. Who wants to choose between being cold or being hungry?

I still want to have solar but it won’t be anything elaborate like we had thought that it would have to be. Solar heat can be as simple and as cheap as the $3 solar heater

And will help to keep the indoor temp up for when we are not here to feed our dragon (rocket mass heater). Say if we went away for the weekend and didn’t want our pipes to freeze? These cheap solar heaters could mean the difference in frozen pipes or not.

Ok, so if you are really interested in the rocket mass heater and are thinking of building one here is a link for you. Download rocket heater e-book.

I am getting a list written up for us to start scrounging what we need and hope to have everything we need to get our rocket mass heater built soon. If everything goes as planned we might not bother getting propane this year. Or, maybe we will just to be on the safe side but if the rocket heater heats as well as I am seeing them I expect that it will be the last year that we buy propane and that would save us hundreds of dollars a year.

Even with the barrel wood stove that Josh built we still have our furnace set at 45 degrees (the lowest setting on the furnace) to keep pipes from freezing. When we get home we get the barrel stove going and get the temp to a more comfortable 65-70 degrees F. But there is still that time when it is cold while we wait for the place to warm up. I am thinking that with the rocket mass heater we won’t have that so much.

Now it may take a little longer for the heat to build up if it gets down to a chillier temp in the house in which case the barrel wood stove could help to take up the slack there as well. Like if you had been gone a few days and it was really cold out. Even with using the rocket mass heater in preparation of being away and having the $3 solar heaters you might still want to have the wood stove to warm things up quick or just for the ambiance of sitting in front of a crackling fire.

But to have a truly low cost heat source with minimal work it sounds like a rocket mass heater is the way to go.

We will keep you updated on our progress towards gathering the necessary materials and building a rocket mass heater to keep us warm during our cold Michigan winters.

For years I have wanted a wood stove. Living in a rural area with lots of trees I knew that a wood stove could be a great source of low cost heat and would be especially nice to have for emergencies.

Our newest furnace uses electricity for it to kick on. It also is sensitive to lightening/power surges. Our old furnace wasn’t like this so we had no idea until we had a storm and ended up having to replace an electrical board that cost over $200 + labor.

Luckily Josh has paid attention whenever we have had to have repairs on this new furnace. He has been able to install new pressure switches (which it seems to go through 1 a year) and feels that if necessary he could install the circuit board.

Hoping not to test that theory, and have to pay over $200 again just for the part, we shut off the furnace whenever it storms and as soon as it is not needed in the Spring.

Unfortunately for a few years now we have been having lightening storms even in the middle of Winter. UGH!

So, it became even more important to get a wood stove installed. So, in 2010 we were determined that THIS was the year of the wood stove! We got the stove pipe at a yard sale. We lucked out. The pipe was brand new and I got them to come down to $25.

Our friend wasn’t so lucky. She had to buy hers brand new and paid over $400- YIKES!

We got everything that we needed to fireproof the area (GOT TO BE SAFE), the fireplace tools (shovel, poker, etc.) we got through free-cycling curbside pickup. We even got a bunch of wood all cut, split, dried and stacked.

All we had left to do was to get a stove. We finally decided to get a barrel wood stove kit when a local store had them on sale. Now all we needed was a barrel. We were almost there!

In looking for a barrel we came across someone that had a brother with a wood stove for only $50. He told us horror stories about how awful barrel stoves are for heat and safety and said that if we took the barrel stove kit back we could get the wood stove his brother had for sale. All it needed was a piece of glass in the one window.

Well, good thing we didn’t take the kit back because the wonderful wood stove turned out to be the real horror story. The glass needed to be replaced, safety doors were missing, no grate, it was very rusty and from the tag on it the stove had been in a fire and shouldn’t even have been up for sale.

Well this delay cost us and we ended up not having the woodstove even though we had everything else we needed for it.

So the Fall of 2011 we were determined that NOTHING was going to stop us now! All we needed was a barrel and our cousin gave us one.

So, on a nice day Josh got out his tools and went to work on turning this mere barrel into a barrel wood stove to supply us with bone warming heat. He finished it in short order. matter-of-fact he was so fast that by the time I thought to take pictures or video he already had it done. Sorry L

So, I took pictures as he was cutting the hole in the roof for the pipe and when he went to start the first fire in it. Well, the first fire with it installed as we had done a test burn in our driveway to burn off any paint on the outside and any residue on the inside as it had contained oil. I didn’t get any pictures from when we wee installing the barrel stove as I was helping Josh and couldn’t help and take pics at the same time.

But here are the pics we do have:

We love our new barrel wood stove. It helps keep us warm- we have our furnace on 45 degrees F and had been warming it up to a comfortable 65 degrees with kerosene. Using kerosene is dangerous. You have to be careful not only of the flames but the fumes too. You have to keep letting in fresh air to get rid of the fumes but in the process you lose heat.

Kerosene is also costly.

Having our barrel wood stove has saved us a lot of money already this winter as well as the fact that we had storms in our area and had to shut off our furnace and by having the wood stove it was not the huge deal that it used to be. We were toasty warm with our barrel wood stove. And we haven’t had to buy any kerosene at all this year.

We will buy some again at some point for use in our lamps but shouldn’t need to ever buy it again for heat.

So, if a regular wood burning stove is too expensive for your pocket then you might want to put together a barrel wood stove. They really are a low cost way to have wood heat and they do produce a good heat.

The barrel wood stove kit cost around $59-$69

A barrel might cost $5 or $10 but you could luck out and have one or get one free

Look around for a deal on a good stove pipe. A Triple pipe is great but I saw a video of someone using regular stove pipe of 2 different sizes and then he used the old fashioned pink fiberglass insulation in between the 2 pipes. This seemed to work fine for him. You might want to research this a bit more to be sure it will be safe.

Also, make sure that you fireproof everything, find out the correct clearance for your stove and situation.

We used old fashioned bricks we had on hand for directly on the floor, placed cement board over that and behind the stove. We then placed cement blocks as high as the top of the stove on 3 sides to further fireproof it. We want to eventually put ceramic tile down besides what we have already done in order to fireproof it even more but for now we have been using our barrel wood stove all winter without problems.

Be sure to clean your stove pipe often to remove creosote. I saw someone recommend twice a year. If you are burning pretty much all hard wood that is completely dry this might be fine but we have a lot of softwood here and our tarp got a hole in so some of our wood ended up damp. So Josh has already cleaned our stovepipe at least 4-5 times this winter.

Our thought is better to clean it too much rather than not enough and end up with a fire hazard We had already figured this from long before we got the wood stove as a couple of neighbors have had chimney fires. They are scary and dangerous. Better to avoid them.

A wood stove/barrel wood stove is great for giving off a heat that will warm you to your bones. It is different than any other heat that I’ve been exposed to. I love it! I love the fact that we have heat no matter what happens in the world and we can put a cast iron griddle over the top so that it straddles the cement blocks and we can cook with it too.

Just use common sense and caution when using wood heat and you can safely and cheaply be warm too.