The Rocket Stove Institute
New Concepts in Wood Burning StovesYou can use the new SR100 rocket stove with a thermal battery to meet ALL your heating and hot water needs for near zero fuel cost? We research, design and build working rocket stove systems.
Let’s build rocket stoves now
We are interested in working with and helping homesteaders and communities build their own SR100 Homestead–Village Rocket Stove with Thermal Battery Heating and Hot Water Utility Systems now, for near-zero fuel cost. Heat your house, greenhouse, shops, and have hot water for kitchen, bath and a hot tub, for near zero cost.
Our aim is to watch this technology spread and benefit people everywhere.
Rocket Stove Institute
We Teach the
Principles of Combustion
and
Build Rocket Stoves
WATCH THIS VIDEO FIRST…..and you will have a good overview of the Rocket Stove Institute, its goals and what we do. When people around the world start building these rocket stove thermal battery systems , we will maintain a world map with a dot where a stove is being built and enable communications within this community of rocket stove users.
There are many types and intensities of fires you can build in the combustion chamber depending on the brick layout you choose and other factors. This burn shows the intensity of heat that can be generated continually by just keeping the hopper filled. We’ve burned at high intensity over twelve hours in a row by just adding pellets. Note that there is no external fan. No electricity is required. The expanding gases in the tall chimney create the incredible draw of air into the fire. Turn the volume up and listen closely to the industrial grade sound produced by the SR100 Rocket Stove combustion. This stove produces between 100,000 to 150,000 Btu’s per hour.
The design principles incorporated in this rocket stove create the MIRACLE OF THE ROCKET STOVE: IT USES UP TO 90% LESS FUEL,…BECAUSE IT TAKES IN 90% MORE OXYGEN.
Dr. Winiarski had a great interest in wood gasifiers which are a type of engine that can be used to power a vehicle. In this video we see Jakob, the son of one of Dr. Winiarski’s collegues and collaborators. Jakob built his own gasifier from scratch which he then drove on road trips over the broad range of the continental United States and up to the Canadian border. This engine is entirely fueled by wood. No gasoline was used withe the exception of ignition.
This video is taken through an opening between the bricks in the back of the stove and shows the flame as it leaves the combustion chamber and flows down the burn tunnel and up into the chimney. This is how the stove normally burns and this is the level of heat that is sustained for hour after hour of burning. The hot chimney gasses are guided and focused onto the surface of the coil made of sixty feet of copper tubing. The water flowing through the coil is heated by the hot chimney gases and raises the temperature in the thermal battery. This is called “recharging the thermal battery”. On a recent burn on April 18, 2022, we put 44,437 Btu’s into 329 gallons of water raising the temperature of the water from 67 to 132 Degrees F in two hours. We then pumped water from the thermal battery through the radiator in the the 87 square foot icosahedron geodesic dome greenhouse and turned on the circulating fan and heated the entire dome to 80 degrees F .
This video shows that we are able to burn wood (biomass) with a blue flame. A blue flame is quite pure and burns hot. Our research leads us to develop in-stove methods of refining the chimney gases that will be able to run internal combustion engines and to run electrical generators.
This video is one of the early burns of the pellet hopper automatic feeding system. Larry’s voice in the background is saying that this stove burns pellets in the same heat range as coal. The pulsing is called the thermoacoustic effect and can be used to power a sterling engine to produce electrical flow or to create refridgeration. Ben and Jerry’s use a similar method to produce refridgeration for their ice cream.
We build prototype rocket stove systems which demonstrate the possibilities for personal energy independence and sustainable living.
Working with Dr. Larry Winiarski, the inventor of the rocket stove and author of the Ten Principles of Combustion, we have designed, built and implemented the rugged forge-like SR100 Rocket Stove-Thermal Battery Heating System for homesteads and villages, which provides continuous and abundant heat to keep people warm in their homes, heats greenhouses and work spaces, and provides hot water for kitchen, showers, bath and hot tub.
The SR100 Rocket Stove design is based on the “Ten Principles of Combustion”. This larger size rocket stove uses up to 90% less wood to produce the heat of an open fire and burns as hot as possible to achieve near-complete combustion and therefore the least pollution.
Complete combustion is when carbon, oxygen and hydrogen bonds are broken and only water and carbon dioxide come from the chimney. The breaking of the chemical bonds releases heat.
The tall insulated chimney allows additional combustion and creates a powerful draw of outside air directly into the center of the fire and sustains a very hot rate of burning. Remember the time you blew into a campfire and it felt like your eyebrows were going to catch on fire?
The heat of combustion is transfered into the water circulating through a copper coil inside the chimney. This heated water flows into an insulated water tank which stores the heat for further use. This tank is called a “Thermal Battery”, because it stores heat, where regular batteries store electricity. The Thermal Battery is kept at 130 – 140 degrees F.
This Thermal Battery is the core of the Radiant Heat system. For Space Heat, hot water is pumped from the thermal battery into tubes under the floor, or alternatively, hot water is pumped into a radiator with a fan pulling the heated air through it. The radiator and fan combination provides fast and efficient forced-air heating.
Running hot water for faucets and showers uses tap water which is at city pressure and is heated by running the water through a long coil within the actual hot water tank, which heats the water in the coil, and then to the sink or shower or hot water hose.
John Robert Zielinski
Rocket Stove Institute – Founder
All interested parties, people who want to help save the world, and lovers of the rocket stove are invited to contact us for more information, apprenticeships, employment, product sales, franchise-like opportunities to make and sell and install SR100 rocket stoves in your community, and to be part of our team.