A Stove in the Forest

Image Gallery Margaret standing next to the inside portion of the stove, which was made of soft brick and fire brick. Next, a hard brick case was built around this entire box.

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Woodstoves

Heating the Russian way.

Sometime before the dawn of history, it was discovered that bricks had the distinct ability to (temporarily store heat and give it off at a fairly uniform rate. Hence, when your great-grandmother went for a sleigh ride, she first heated a brick and took it along with her as a portable heater. As time went by, people built various kinds of stoves, furnaces, etc., out of brick and made use of this principle to even out the heat output of wood.

In Eastern Europe and parts of Scandinavia, the winters were severe and the problem became acute as the available wood supply became so depleted that at times they had to use straw, brush, or animal dung to keep warm. Taking the heat-storing ability of brick beyond the simple fireplace, they began to build masonry stoves that were enclosed (so that the air supply could be outdoor air rather than the already-heated indoor variety), and they designed the flue so that the hot gasses produced by the fire ran through a long maze of brick. This caused most of the heat to soak into the brick rather than to go up the chimney. As the heat soaks into the bricks, the gasses cool and contract, creating a vacuum which sucks air up from the intake and causes these stoves to have a tremendous draft, thus making them highly efficient burning systems which could be fueled very successfully with most anything burnable.

At a home show in Seattle, I saw one of these Russian (or Finnish) stoves. It looked like a good answer to my problem. One of the options shown with it was a condenser pipe that provided hot water output from the stove. This could be piped around the house to distribute the stove's heat. Excellent! Just one problem though: the price. Bricklayers no longer work cheap, and bricklayers with a specialty are even less cheap. (A brick company salesman told me he was run off from a construction site by the brick mason who was building a Russian stove but didn't want anyone to see how.) The minimum price I was quoted was $6,500 for the smallest one they made—no frills, no hot water, and not including travel expenses.

Although I am not a brick layer, I have built a few things out of brick. In my college years, I mixed and carried hod for brick layers, so I know the basics. It really takes four ingredients to get started: hard work, a good eye, lots and lots of patience. . . and a library. After some searching, I came upon a book in the public library which gave detailed plans and instructions for building Russian stoves. Even the author of this book intimated that if you were an amateur, you had to be a little bit loony to attempt building your own stove. He was wrong as it turned out, but I appreciated the advice anyway.

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