Rain rain go away...

Raining steady today,  it's not cold but i feel like i should have a wood stove going.  Wood, ahh the smell of a wood fire makes me think of fall in Maine.  It is almost like the smell of the fire melds with the smell of the dirt and composting leaves of the forest floor.  But it's getting harder and harder to justify the amout of smoke that billows forth from untold numbers of homes each year.  I want to be able to provide my own heat in my future farm house but I worry that the volume of wood needed to heat it would decimate the wooded areas of our property.  So for the last few days I have been looking at rocket mass heaters as an alternate heat source.  These use a smallish, super hot fire to heat a solid mass of cob, stone masonry, rock anything that will hold heat. The fire burns so hot that most of the gasses produced by the fire are burned up releasing 1/1000 of the usual smoke a wood stove produces.  The amount of heat stored in the heat bank warms the home over a longer period of time, more of the heat produced is saved and utilized.  The amount of wood used is  1/10 of what conventional wood stoves use.  The only issue is that I'm not sure this method of heating is approved yet.  So good luck getting homeowners insurance with this heat source.  Funny how far behind our government is in the creation of regulations that will propel us into a self sustaining future and removing regulation that holds us back.  Seems like the political scene and the creation of legislation is much like my daughter and her Ipod, separate the two and we might find that more gets done.

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