Cheap/Alternative/Offgrid Heating - Keeping warm for cheap during the apocalypse

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analrapist said:
He got the best results from no more than 50% blends with diesel. There is buildup and caking, but he also goes through the process of cleaning that out, and keeping the system going. He's burnt a lot of random waste oils. This winter, he's been playing with other heaters too.
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That sounds like a lot of fucking around. My goal is to pretty much be able to set the heater and never have to think about it again other than to top up the fuel or replace parts that inevitably fail. The idea is to make it as close to a drop in replacement to my propane furnace as possible. The small amount of savings gained by fucking around with alternative fuels or ridiculous waste heat capturing projects just don't really seem worth the time or effort for the small gains. The extra time spent filtering, blending and cleaning pretty much eats up the cost benefits. Personally, I hate fucking around with diesel. It stinks. You get it on your clothes or hands and you smell diesel for the rest of the day. I dunno, maybe things like that are worthwhile in places where diesel is outrageously expensive. If it ever got to be more than the price of propane I'd probably start considering things like that but currently it doesn't really seem worth it.
 
Grub said:
That channel looks pretty cool. I'm wary of burning vegetable oil and waste oil and shit like that in the heater though. The heaters aren't the best quality and diesel's finicky enough to ignite as it is. Carbon buildup seems to be the number one problem with these heaters. Doing things that could potentially create extra buildup seems like a bad idea. As far as I've read, once you've blocked up the atomizer screen, you basically need a new burn chamber or heater. It's not a serviceable part.
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The Burrners on the cheap Chinese heaters are very easy to service ..The other types are very easy to work on as well,they just need more parts. Nitrel gloves are a must have .
 
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Indelable said:
The Burrners on the cheap Chinese heaters are very easy to service ..The other types are very easy to work on as well,they just need more parts. Nitrel gloves are a must have .
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I dunno. I've seen a lot of conflicting information so it's hard to sus out what's actually true or not. I understand it's easy to get into the combustion chamber and clean out but the problems I've heard of are with the atomizer screen, which is not easily accessible or replaceable and once the atomizer screen is clogged that's it. Again though, I don't know.how much of anything I read about these heaters is actually true. A lot of bullshit gets repeated.
 
Not a lot of hard to access parts.You should have a small hook tool to get out the small screen in this type.The screen is accessable without having to open the combustion chamber too.
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God's strongest milkman said:
whats more is if you live where theres pine trees like I do you keep on look for dead pine trees where the wood has an alcohol smell to it, thats called "lighter pine" and is extremely flamable and great for starting fires
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Don’t use pine anywhere it’s not open air, some resin will vaporize before burning and congeal in your pipes or ventilation

Not fun to clean after 2 generations. Trust me.
 
Flannelette sheets are so much nicer to slip into than the usual sort on cold nights. And eiderdown! It's been single digits celsius here for the past couple of nights and under my new eiderdown I was literally sweating.

Any ideas on how to keep my icy feet warm though? I'm up to three layers of socks out here!
 
testing results
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You De-Tune one of these things and you can gas rats with the excaust.
 
anyone know if those dorky black water pipes with wood frames work well?

these things specifically



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I heard if your goal is to heat water, that these janky setups are much more efficient than using solar. haven't tried it because frankly they look ridiculous.
 
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I saw a commercial for a portable electric heater that looked pretty neat, but the commercial ended and I couldn't find it again. I didn't think those existed. Seemed like a portable fan type of thing except would spread heat instead of cool wind obviously.

I have seen similar stuff, but it all needed to an outlet or something, but this one was wireless. I bet it was expensive, though I guess it's worth it if you need it.
 
Sperg_rancher said:
anyone know if those dorky black water pipes with wood frames work well?

these things specifically



View attachment 6739635 I heard if your goal is to heat water, that these janky setups are much more efficient than using solar. haven't tried it because frankly they look ridiculous.
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I mean. It should work well enough to give you that coil's worth of warm water. I dunno how hot it'll actually end up getting and how long it'll take is dependent on the amount of sunshine.
SSj_Ness (Yiffed) said:
I saw a commercial for a portable electric heater that looked pretty neat, but the commercial ended and I couldn't find it again. I didn't think those existed. Seemed like a portable fan type of thing except would spread heat instead of cool wind obviously.

I have seen similar stuff, but it all needed to an outlet or something, but this one was wireless. I bet it was expensive, though I guess it's worth it if you need it.
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Well Milwaukee sells a battery powered 70,000 btu propane heater
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A battery powered electric space heater seems like it wouldn't work very well or for very long. Plugin electric space heaters are typically 1500W. Smaller ones are around 800W. Anything smaller than that's going to be fairly useless for any kind of significant heating. Something running at 800-1500W continuously is going to need a hefty battery. If you wanna go electric heat 12v batteries with an inverter is probably a better way to go.
 
Mother earth News always has some neat stuff on the subject. I can't find the exact article I'm looking for, it was something to do with using two windows and then you leave a gap at the top and then the greenhouse effect will heat the air up and then the warm air will will come over the top of the second window to heat up your room. The use case for the thing I'm thinking of was more for like a shed just to keep it above freezing, but if the power was out it would be better than nothing.
I did find this article, sounds interesting

My dream home would include a hypocaust, AKA a basement furnace that heats the floor.

And especially for something like trailers I would imagine simply upgrading your insulation and caulking all the joints would give you the most bang for your buck
 

I am just going to leave this one here for you.

Cons takes up more space than average heaters , uses wood

Pros well you need to light it up once or twice a day and after the load is burnt the mass surrounding it absorbs and slowly releases heat . There have been testimonials about using between 50% to 70% less wood than traditional stoves and there are varieties of plans where you can make it like a sofa or bed to chill in .
 
Info. I would just like to add : And these type of heaters are also known to produce little to no ash.
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Indelable said:
Info. I would just like to add : And these type of heaters are also known to produce little to no ash.
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That's fairly dependent on the air/fuel mixture. If they're tuned properly they should be fairly clean burning. A lot of people like to mess around with altitude settings and fan speeds though.
 
Grub said:
I mean. It should work well enough to give you that coil's worth of warm water. I dunno how hot it'll actually end up getting and how long it'll take is dependent on the amount of sunshine.

Well Milwaukee sells a battery powered 70,000 btu propane heater
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A battery powered electric space heater seems like it wouldn't work very well or for very long. Plugin electric space heaters are typically 1500W. Smaller ones are around 800W. Anything smaller than that's going to be fairly useless for any kind of significant heating. Something running at 800-1500W continuously is going to need a hefty battery. If you wanna go electric heat 12v batteries with an inverter is probably a better way to go.
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Huh, guess I probably misunderstood the commercial then. That's pretty neat too though.
 
SSj_Ness (Yiffed) said:
Huh, guess I probably misunderstood the commercial then. That's pretty neat too though.
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It could have been a little tiny personal sized one or something. Maybe a couple hundred watts. Or something like the little heating strips in those heated jackets with a fan attached. Either way, you're not likely to heat any kind of decent sized space with something battery powered like that. Electric resistive heating works on essentially a 1:1 ratio of energy input to heat output. Meaning, you need to put the same amount of energy in as electricity as you get back in heat. So, for 1500w of heat output, you need 1500w of electricity.

As a rule of thumb it's about 10w per sq ft so

1500W of heating can heat about 150 sqft of adequately depending on insulation and outdoor temperatures.

At 800W, which is typical for lower settings or smaller space heaters, you're down to about 80 sqft.

At 12v you would need a 125 ah battery to run a 1500w heater for an hour. At 18v (most tool batteries) you need an 83 ah battery to run a 1500w heater for an hour.
 
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