Our new 2021 catalog is hot off the press! It includes a variety of firebox door sizes, ash doors, cleanouts, oven doors, cooktops, sliding and pivoting bypass dampers, grates, core kit components and plans. All to make masonry heater construction more familiar and accessible.
A beautiful masonry heater, built by Noel Adams, with heated benches and finished with natural plaster. Firespeaking provided design, training, a core kit and hardware for this project.
These are some common variations for basic masonry heater design. These heaters are symmetrical and show how you can choose to include an oven and benches around the main volume. Additional options include the see-through firebox which includes a door on both sides and choosing to have the oven face the opposite direction as the firebox.
What a pleasure to help a family get to know their masonry heater by making pizzas with them! We want more people to know that masonry heaters are not only the best way to heat your home with wood but also offer many options for cooking food throughout the cold months of the year!
A Rocket Mass Heater with a custom fabricated cooktop replacing the metal barrel and a long heated bench constructed for the 2016 Masonry Heater Association annual meeting.
This article goes over the basic options for placing a masonry heater in a floor plan you are designing and includes some sample layouts.
Building an oven on a farm is a great way to generate business and create community! “Pizza Farms” are becoming popular venues where people can go to have excellent wood-fired pizzas topped with fresh farm-to-table ingredients and enjoy the country environment.
Firespeaking, LLC is happy to announce that we will now be selling the Fireway line of masonry heater and oven hardware. These products include a variety of sizes of firebox doors, oven doors, ash doors, cleanout doors, bypass dampers, grates and cooktops. They feature high quality cast iron, refractory glass, high-temperature paint and gasketed connections.
BIG NEWS! Firespeaking will now be offering well-made, affordable cast iron hardware for masonry heaters, rocket mass heaters, ovens, cookstoves and other wood-fired cooking and heating appliances. More information and pricing will be published in the coming weeks.
This illustration demonstrates the role of masonry heaters in providing heating and cooking capacity for homes in a long-term sustainable flow of energy and resources.
Masonry heaters are essentially a solar energy solution. Well-seasoned firewood acts as “batteries” for the solar energy captured by trees in forests through photosynthesis. When the wood is then burned cleanly and efficiently in a well-designed firebox, the energy stored in the bonds of complex organic molecules that make up wood are completely released as heat energy. Masonry heaters do a great job of capturing that heat inside their mass, rather than letting the majority escape up the chimney, and radiate it out over an extended period of time.
In ideal combustion, the only two byproducts leaving the chimney are carbon dioxide and water vapor because all of the energy tied up in more complex organic molecular bonds is released. When combustion is not complete, only partially volatilized and unburned organic compounds result which are commonly known as smoke, soot and creosote. Pollution resulting from incomplete combustion represents energy potential underutilized, either by poor stove design or most often by users burning wood that has not been completely seasoned.
Ash is the portion of the fuel which is unburnable, consisting of nutrients and micro-nutrients which can be returned to the soil. These nutrients include calcium, potassium, phosphorous and trace metals.
In order to properly consider wood as a sustainable fuel source for communities, it is important to use extremely efficient appliances such as masonry heaters to provide residential heat and to take seriously the concepts of sustainable forestry practices at a community scale.
Artwork by Jonathan Mears, a friend and collaborator of Firespeaking.
