About a month ago I said I hoped to have something to show you all -- photos of a work in progress -- by Thanksgiving.
I don't.
Really early this month we started getting hard freezes at night. And anything with water that I left outdoors turned solid overnight. Mason jars with clay in water (samples from various sites) broke. My 5 gallon bucket of cob froze. Water in hoses freezes. So I must disconnect and drain hoses each day.
And while many days we got up to the low 50s by 3 in the afternoon, it would start cooling down soon after that and the sun would go over the bluff to the west of my land at about 4:15 p.m. Just wasn't warm long enough any day to melt the frozen blocks of stuff. (I brought my bucket of frozen cob indoors and thawed it so I could work with it.)
So, I knew several weeks back that I wasn't going to have my forms made and building roughly up by Thanksgiving. But only remembered a couple days ago that I'd talked here about aiming for that.
Have not completely given up for the winter. Am still hoping to get the framing up for one unique building and then wrap it in pallet stretchwrap and see if I can use it as a sort of greenhouse/workshop through the winter. May be possible to mix and pour and cure forms inside. If the thermal mass is adequate, might be able to hold enough heat overnight to keep things from hard-freezing. We'll see how it goes.
In the meantime, am still working on a rocket-thermal-mass-heater for my RV for heat this winter (instead of propane). That project is getting close. Don't have the space or reinforced flooring to allow me to run 30 feet of exhaust through a couple tons of thermal mass. So am adapting and modifying things and miniaturizing the design. Making a hybrid of a combo of a "pocket rocket" and a thermal mass heater. Hoping to be able to hold and steadily release substantial heat for at least 10 hours from each 1 hour burn with my reduced amount of mass. We'll see. *Probably will have at least 15-feet of exhaust running through thermal mass. Probably will have this finished and installed within 10 days. (So long as it keeps passing tests outdoors each stage of the build, and so long as I can get the heavy paint burned off the 30 gallon drum that is housing the insulated heat riser and burn tunnel. And which also *will* be holding a LOT of irregularly shaped rocks that I'll gather from the hillside above my build area.) So that's my current project. And it's urgent. We had one night in the low teens in the last couple weeks. And many many in the 20s. Moved the big propane tank out of here mid-summer so am without any real heat until I get this thing installed. Has taken much longer than I expected. But that's mainly because I'm experimenting with design ideas and in that process found that a couple of my early ideas weren't going to work well. What I have now is working well and seems promising so far. Wish me luck for the final days of the build.
Happy Thanksgiving everybody,
ken winston caine
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