paulwheaton

I think there are people that don't care about carbon footprint stuff. And I think that rather than hitting them with sticks, it is better to appeal to their wallet or to the luxury in their lives. If a person lives in montana and switches from electric heat to a rocket mass heater, they will be warmer and save about $1500 per year. $1500 per year is a pretty strong motivator.

Excellent questions!

A 4000 square foot home will probably have three rocket mass heaters. Keep your existing heaters and set the thermostats quite low.

Hundreds of thousands of consumers have build their own rocket mass heaters.

It absolutely will! Yes! And if we add a trillions trees to the current natural carbon cycle, and keep our tree count up, then that is (roughly) a billion tons!

In 2008 a guy was visiting my house and explaining what he saw in oregon. The fire burns sideways. You are warm even though the window is open and you can see snow outside.

It sounded wacky. And after an hour or two I felt I needed to see it myself. So I went and saw it first hand. "Why doesn't everybody do this?" "We don't know - we tell everybody we can." I put the first videos up on youtube showing it.

I have now built lots of these. The exhaust is pretty much just steam. Look at the roof and you can see this little trickle of steam for all but the very beginning of the burn. The exhaust in my house is 140 degrees. I watch the sideways burn every fire - I'm used to it now.

I can build a good rocket mass heater for $200 in a weekend. And it will cut my annual heat expenses 99%. A heat pump is gonna cost a few thousand bucks (or more depending on the type) and will cut your annual heat bill by 30% to 65%. Does this help?