Archive for March, 2010

When Sampsa first contacted me about building a masonry heater in a hands-on workshop, he already had drawings for a custom-made soapstone fireplace with an adjacent oven designed by Tulikivi in Finland. Working off these drawings and measures from Sampsa of available brick and firebrick near his home in New Zealand, I started to do scale drawings of a similar layout to the soapstone complex, ...

In America, the first wood heating devices in the historic era were large open fireplaces. To this were added wood fired ovens, some on the back wall of the fireplace and some to the side of the fireplace. In the middle to late eighteen hundreds cast iron cookstoves were invented. The classic six-lid cookstove could have one or both lids plus the divider over the firebox removed and stepped cast iron pots and griddles could be placed tightly but directly ...

One of the great masonry heater designers and researchers of the mid twentieth century was a Finnish researcher named Asp. When I (Albie) began my journeys to Finland in the late seventies, my Helsinki, Finland friend, Heikki Hyytiainen, made mention of Asp’s work and we were able to find one of his books in Finnish which I now have. Among other things, Asp did a lot of work with the introduction of what masonry heater and stove designers have often called ...

Sampsa Kiuru decided to install a Finnish masonry heater in his national eco design award winning home in New Zealand. Four features set Sampsa’s heater apart from other heaters that we commonly build, although all of our masonry heaters by Maine Wood Heat tend to be special and custom made.

First, he chose for his heater a large beautiful cast ...