RMH uses EIGHT TIMES less wood to heat a house than a wood stove

I posted this video about ten minutes ago.

After building 700 rocket mass heaters, this is Ernie and Erica's
latest. They are in the okanagan highlands where snow has been on the
ground, non stop, for months. Two days earlier the temperature
dropped to 19 below. They show how little wood is needed to stay warm
up there. And they show some new innovations with their designs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4usXIAoy9us
 
I think I would like to build one under my house, when I close it in (we are 8 feet up). I'm wondering if I can go straight out the back end of the house....continue going several feet behind and then go up for the chimney, so I don't have to bust a hole through the floor, ceiling and roof. I saw some plans, but I think I will re-look.
With no more firewood than is needed, if I can light a fire on experially cold nights, I would not wake up to a freezing cold house because of the potbelly going out upstairs.
 
I would like to see detailed instructions on constructing such a stove. The videos are nice but don't explain measurements, distances between pipes and convection chamber, exhaust placement in relation to the firebox and how one cleans out the system from a vertical pipe cleanout. Any info on where one might find these instructions without paying through the nose for a book that you will use once?
 
Don't have the time now, but am planning on looking into this later on as maybe something I could build in my green house. I have trouble keeping it warm enough at night. A kerosene heater works, but smells and costs a lot. I have a propane heater, but it doesn't seem to heat the whole thing. And, hubby doesn't want me to put a small wood stove in-he's afraid of it catching his tool shed on fire since the green house is next to it.
 
Are there issues getting fire insurance on the house with a RMH built in it?

(I can't actually watch videos, we're rural so there's no high speed internet available here so I haven't seen the videos)

Using less wood would be fantastic, at $240/cord (for 5 cord a year) it's expensive and we're tearing down an old part of our house to build a new addition... I'd love to put in one of these instead of the woodstove but we have to have insurance to get the loan for the addition.
 
Until they become more common, I suspect that an insurance company would say "no" to anything that they don't already understand.
 
I just ordered a book on RMH's on amazon for light reading for my next work week.......(and another on underground homes hehehe). If I can understand it, I'll give it a try....even as an experiment with trash, just to get an idea.
 
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