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poem
November 2007 
finishing a prototype...
Posted on Jun 4th, 2006
by 
foolfaerie420
foolfaerie420
Recently I completed a year long project constructing a cob oven in my front yard. While learnind the process I have been sharing the process on my sustainability oriented blog on livejournal. All of the labour for this project was provided for me by my teenage daughter Lulu. She hauled stones and buckets of sand. The rest was entirely up to me, and part of the wonder of this process is the idea that alone a person can essentially create shelter and hearth with local materials and know-how.
A background in ceramics, and materials art in general was a tremendous help in determining where I could make changes to the basic method developed by the greater cob community. Over the internet I learned not to bother with a chimney...wastes too much fuel. The simple ancient oven works best. My innovations were that I worked the materials wetter than normally reccomended (rather than shoving cobs together), and I used rice-hulls in my thermal layer instead of chopped straw. Again simply avoiding difficult labor.
Currently I am researching and investigating the "rocket stove", which can be built with found materials and uses even less fuel. With both of these projects the idea is to promote and develop methods which use very little scrap wood.
Recent archaological discoveries suggest that the great copper smelters at Marion on Cypress were actually fired with olive oil rather than wood. Olive oil is sixteen times more efficient than charcoal for smelting copper, and an excavated workshop from over four thousand years ago was built around an olive press. Great work has been done to create efficient vegetable-oil cookstoves in India and Africa, where women's Self Help Groups establish Jatropha and Pongomania oil-seed-tree projects which gather and nurture these trees whic produce high-quality bio-fuel from their non-edible seeds.
It would be great to determine how the oil was used to fire-off the ancient smelting ovens, and extrapolate that to cob ovens. Imagine growing fuel for your oven and heater and motorbike.
Bio-fuels combined with Hydrogen gas technology are really the way to go.
A background in ceramics, and materials art in general was a tremendous help in determining where I could make changes to the basic method developed by the greater cob community. Over the internet I learned not to bother with a chimney...wastes too much fuel. The simple ancient oven works best. My innovations were that I worked the materials wetter than normally reccomended (rather than shoving cobs together), and I used rice-hulls in my thermal layer instead of chopped straw. Again simply avoiding difficult labor.
Currently I am researching and investigating the "rocket stove", which can be built with found materials and uses even less fuel. With both of these projects the idea is to promote and develop methods which use very little scrap wood.
Recent archaological discoveries suggest that the great copper smelters at Marion on Cypress were actually fired with olive oil rather than wood. Olive oil is sixteen times more efficient than charcoal for smelting copper, and an excavated workshop from over four thousand years ago was built around an olive press. Great work has been done to create efficient vegetable-oil cookstoves in India and Africa, where women's Self Help Groups establish Jatropha and Pongomania oil-seed-tree projects which gather and nurture these trees whic produce high-quality bio-fuel from their non-edible seeds.
It would be great to determine how the oil was used to fire-off the ancient smelting ovens, and extrapolate that to cob ovens. Imagine growing fuel for your oven and heater and motorbike.
Bio-fuels combined with Hydrogen gas technology are really the way to go.
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