Tonight I moved my paint can rocket heater into the garage. I wanted to give it a try in a non-windy space. It set up surprisingly quick once I found the right height spacer to set it on, some weights. It did take two tries to light it, but I tried to light it with very little paper without pre-heating it to get it to draft first.
I spent some time fiddling with wrapping it with bits of metal I had laying around trying to get it to shed some heat into the room. It did manage to warm up the garage 20 degrees, so not to bad!
I think it worked well enough to justify getting some proper stove pipe instead of the heat ducting and experiment some more. I would like to figure out how to get it to dump more heat into the room. I’ve an idea about wrapping the exhaust in a bit of ducting and maybe forcing air around the duct, maybe with an internal warm-air chimney. I would also like to bring in a fresh air intake from outside, which should significantly help with the heating properties of the device.
I think I need an IR thermometer to really do a good job tweaking this heater. Oh well. Time to raid the kitchen for the meat thermometer I guess.
