[Cob] wood stove

[Quinn]

There has been so much talk about trying to make a stove do something it's not intended to do: heat a bench.  It doesn't sound like a safe, environmentally sound, efficient or useful idea.

If someone really needs a warm cob bench, how about radiant heating the way one would do with a floor?  Pex tubing imbedded in the bench (don't know how copper would work as far as being broken down by the acids in the clay) and having heated water run through the tubing/bench.

Someone mentioned a while back a guy who heated the water for his radiant-heated floor with the compost pile out in the yard, which I thought was brilliant.  Surely this would be negligibly polluting (the fabrication of the pex), infinitely more safe (only worry- poorly cemented joints, something you'd check before finishing of course) and much more likely to achieve the intended goal of a warm cob bench.  If that is the goal.  If the goal is *making* a stove (convection/ combustion/ etc) do something nature doesn't want to do, well then, that's another topic entirely.

Quinn