Masonry Heater in Meditation Space
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.
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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.
Continue Reading Locating a Masonry Heater in your Floor Plan
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.
Continue Reading New Masonry Heater and Oven Hardware Now Available
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.
We are excited to share with you the exciting design and beautiful execution of masonry heaters by a Canadian collective name L’Esprit du Lieu (Spirit of Place). A plastered finish on masonry heaters allows for both a timeless feeling of tradition as well as an elegant modern look.
Continue Reading The Inspiring Plastered Heaters of L’Esprit du Lieu
If you are an architect, designer or homeowner… try a Tulikivi Soapstone Heater in your next home design or remodel! Here are specs and .dwg files to incorporate into your floor plan.
This masonry heater features a “white” oven, ample wood-storage options, and a heated bench. The heater is faced with Idaho Bitter Root Ledge Stone, Sage Ledge Stone and the slab details are Pennsylvania Blue Stone. It serves as a visual focal point, as furniture, and as a resilient energy source for the home!
The world needs more masonry heaters and masonry heater builders! A shortage of viable plans as well as education opportunities means there are very few masonry heater builders in North America. This design work reflects an effort to simplify things in order to make the process easier for everybody involved.
For the masonry heater we are currently working on, we took a new approach to the design and construction of the core by casting the most complex parts. The goal of this is to simplify both the design and construction process so that we can streamline the process for our own projects as well as produce a viable strategy and parts for other masonry heater builders.
I was invited to examine a masonry heater that was built by another mason in a town one hour north of us. One of the wooden studs immediately behind the heater, in the wall adjoining their bedroom, had been heated to the point that it had at least reached a smoldering point inside the wall….
Designing a masonry heater into a home can be complex. Here is a design chronicle of incorporating a Tulikivi into a floor plan while navigating other important architectural elements such as a staircase, an important structural beam and circulation space on the second floor.
Continue Reading Design Development for a Tulikivi Masonry Heater
High-Speed Video of Barrel Oven being built!
Project was led by Eva Edleson at the Natural Building Extravaganza.
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.