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It is January in Lancaster County. Outside, the wind is cutting across the hayfield and the thermometer says fifteen degrees. The English neighbor down the road is sitting in his kitchen looking at his heating bill — three hundred and forty dollars for the month, and there is still half a winter to go. He has no real say in it.
Now come into my house. It is the same kind of cold outside. The same January. But the air inside is warm and steady, the floor is warm under your feet, and there is no fan blowing, no furnace running, no wire from the power company anywhere in the building. There is a small fire burning in a heavy stone heater in the corner — a fire so small it would not look like enough to keep a cat warm — and yet the whole house is comfortable, and will stay that way until tomorrow morning, when I will light another small fire just like it.
That is not a trick. That is how my people have kept warm for two hundred years on this county, without gas and without a single watt of grid power. In this video I walk you through the four real methods we use — the masonry heater (the hea
https://eliasyoder.com
It is January in Lancaster County. Outside, the wind is cutting across the hayfield and the thermometer says fifteen degrees. The English neighbor down the road is sitting in his kitchen looking at his heating bill — three hundred and forty dollars for the month, and there is still half a winter to go. He has no real say in it.
Now come into my house. It is the same kind of cold outside. The same January. But the air inside is warm and steady, the floor is warm under your feet, and there is no fan blowing, no furnace running, no wire from the power company anywhere in the building. There is a small fire burning in a heavy stone heater in the corner — a fire so small it would not look like enough to keep a cat warm — and yet the whole house is comfortable, and will stay that way until tomorrow morning, when I will light another small fire just like it.
That is not a trick. That is how my people have kept warm for two hundred years on this county, without gas and without a single watt of grid power. In this video I walk you through the four real methods we use — the masonry heater (the hea
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00It is January in Lancaster County. Outside, the wind is cutting across the hayfield and the
00:06thermometer says 15 degrees. The English neighbor down the road is sitting in his kitchen looking
00:12at his heating bill. $340 for the month and there is still half a winter to go. He has a
00:20furnace
00:20running in the basement, fans pushing warm air through ducts, and a thermostat on the wall that
00:26asks for more whenever the house cools. The bill comes every month no matter what. He has no real
00:34say in it. Now come into my house. It is the same kind of cold outside, the same kind of
00:41January,
00:42but the air inside is warm and steady, the floor is warm under your feet, and the bench along the
00:49wall of the sitting room is gently warm to the touch. There is no fan blowing. There is no furnace
00:56running. There is no wire from the power company anywhere in the building. There is a small fire
01:02burning in a heavy stone heater in the corner of the room. A fire so small it would not look
01:09like
01:09enough to keep a cat warm. And yet the whole house is comfortable and will stay comfortable until
01:15tomorrow morning when I will light another small fire just like it. That is not a trick. That is the
01:23way my people have kept warm for 200 years on this county, and the way good farmers in cold countries
01:30kept warm for a thousand years before that. No gas, no electricity, no bill that comes every month.
01:39And the secret is not one big invention. It is four old methods that work together, each one cleverer than
01:47the last. And each one, anyone listening to me right now can learn and put in their own home.
01:54My name is Elias Yoder. I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
02:01Today I am going to walk you through how we heat a real living room, the room where the family
02:07gathers,
02:08where the children read in the evening, where Esther and I sit in the cold months, without a single
02:14watt of power and without a propane line running in from the road. Before I go further, for the folks
02:22who want all of this, every method I have shown on this channel and the ones I have not gotten
02:27to yet,
02:28all in one place, I have put it together in a book at my website, EliasYoder.com. I will not
02:36push it
02:37again in the video. If you want it, it is there. Now let me show you the methods. And let
02:43me be honest with
02:44you right at the start, the way I always am. Some of what I am about to show you involves
02:50burning wood
02:51or coal indoors, and that means smoke and gases, and those have to be handled right or they can kill
02:58you.
02:59I will tell you straight at every safety point, the right way to vent a flue, the absolute requirement
03:06for a carbon monoxide alarm in any house with combustion heat, the difference between a job you
03:12can do yourself and a job you should hire done. The methods are real. The safety is non-negotiable.
03:20Walk before you run and respect the fire and you will be fine. Stay with me.
03:26The first method, and the heavyweight champion of them all, is the masonry heater. This is the one the
03:33European folks called the cockleofen, or the Russian stove, and what the old country farmers in the cold
03:40parts of the world built into the very middle of their houses long before there was such a thing
03:46as a furnace. A masonry heater is a heavy thing, a great mass of brick, stone, or fire clay built
03:54like
03:54a small square tower in the middle of a room, with a small firebox in the bottom and a long
04:00winding path
04:01inside through which the smoke must travel before it ever reaches the chimney. Here is how it works,
04:08and the marvel of it is in the math. Inside the firebox, you burn a hot, fast fire. Not a
04:16slow
04:16smolder like in a regular wood stove, but a roaring, intense fire that gets the air screaming hot. Hot
04:23enough that nearly every bit of the wood is burned to vapor and very little smoke comes out the other
04:29end. That hot air does not run straight up the chimney like in a fireplace, where most of the heat
04:35goes outside and warms the sky. It is forced to wind back and forth through long passages inside the
04:42stone, giving up its heat to the stone as it goes. By the time the smoke finally reaches the chimney,
04:48it is barely warm to the touch. Almost all of the heat from the fire has stayed in the stone,
04:55and the
04:56stone is the genius of it. Stone holds heat. Soak a great mass of stone with the heat of one
05:03hot fire,
05:04and it does not release that heat all at once. It slowly radiates it back into the room for the
05:10next
05:10twelve, eighteen, twenty-four hours. Long after the fire has died, the stone is still gently warm,
05:18still giving heat to the room. You light one or two small hot fires in a day, maybe one in
05:24the morning,
05:25one in the evening, and the heater warms the house all the way around the clock.
05:30The wood efficiency is what stops folks cold the first time they hear it. A masonry heater uses
05:37a fraction of the wood a regular wood stove uses to heat the same space. Some good ones run on
05:43as
05:43little as a third or a quarter of the wood. One armload of dry hardwood in the morning is sometimes
05:50all it takes for the day. There is no constant feeding the fire, no waking up at midnight to throw
05:56in another log. One small hot fire, well built, and the stone does the rest. The honest word on
06:04the masonry heater? It is the most expensive of the methods I am going to show you today to put
06:10in.
06:10A proper one is built by a skilled mason, brick by brick, and runs many thousands of dollars to install,
06:17sometimes fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand dollars depending on the size and the country. It is a
06:24once in a lifetime investment. But once it is in, it is in for a hundred years with no moving
06:31parts to
06:32break, no compressor, no electronics, nothing to wear out. Some of the old ones in Europe are three and four
06:40hundred years old and still warming their houses every winter. That is the trade. Pay once, heat for
06:48generations. The second method, the modern homesteader's cousin to the masonry heater, is the
06:55rocket mass heater. This one came up among the off-grid and homestead folks in the last few decades,
07:01and it is brilliant. The idea is the same as the masonry heater. Burn a hot, fast fire, capture the
07:09heat in a
07:10great mass of material, let the mass slowly radiate the heat for hours. But where a masonry heater is a
07:17tall stone tower built by a mason, a rocket mass heater is something a careful person can build with
07:24their own hands out of bricks, sand, clay, and a clay and straw mixture they call cob. The shape is
07:32different
07:32too. Instead of a tower, a rocket mass heater is usually built as a long bench, a low, wide seat
07:40along the wall of the room. The fire burns in a small chamber at one end. The hot air is
07:46forced down
07:46through an insulated channel, then through a long pipe buried in the cob bench and finally up a chimney.
07:53The bench soaks up the heat from the pipe and stays gently warm, warm enough to sit on, sleep on,
08:00dry your
08:01wet boots on, for many hours after the fire has gone out. The wood efficiency is even better than the
08:08masonry
08:09heater, by some accounts. The good books on the rocket mass heater say it uses 70 to 90 percent
08:15less wood than a regular wood stove to heat the same space. A bundle of sticks the size of your
08:22arm,
08:22branches, scraps, prunings from the orchard, wood too small for a regular stove, can run one of these
08:29for hours. They are the great answer for a person who has small wood, not big logs, and wants to
08:36make
08:36every bit of it count. Now, here is the honest scope. A rocket mass heater is best for a modest,
08:44well-insulated space, a small house, a cabin, a workshop, a single large room. The internet talks
08:52of heating 2,000 square feet with one. I would not promise that. Heating 800 or a thousand square
09:00feet of a well-insulated home is realistic. Heating a great big drafty barn house less so. Build it for
09:09the right space and it will serve you wonderfully. And the safety. A rocket mass heater is a serious
09:16combustion appliance. The chimney has to be sized right, the flue has to be insulated and code approved,
09:22and there must be a carbon monoxide alarm in the room where the heater is, and a smoke alarm too.
09:29Many fellows have built these with their own hands, and many have done it well. But this is not a
09:36project
09:36to make up as you go. Get the Good Builder's Guide. There is a real one by the Wisners, the
09:43people who
09:43have taught most of the modern builders. Follow proper plans, or have someone build it for you.
09:51Smoke that backs up because of a bad chimney can kill a household in their sleep. The technology
09:58is honest. The safety is non-negotiable. Before we go on to the next method, let me pause for a
10:05moment.
10:06Watching these videos will give you ideas, but inside our Amish home savings system and community,
10:13we help you turn those ideas into real household habits. You get courses, challenges, checklists,
10:22savings ledgers, and direct access to ask Esther and me questions about your own home. The link is in
10:30the description. Now, let me show you the third method, which is the one that doubles every other
10:36method I have just shown you. The third method is the building itself. This is the one folks miss.
10:44Long before any stove of any kind gets lit, a well-built house holds the heat that is in it.
10:51And
10:51a poorly built house leaks heat as fast as a bucket with a hole in it leaks water. You can
10:58put the finest
10:59masonry heater in the world inside a leaky drafty box and burn yourself out of wood. Or you can put
11:07a
11:08humble wood stove in a properly built house and live in comfort all winter on a small amount of fuel.
11:15The house comes first. My people learned this over generations of building. Here is what good farmhouse
11:24building does, and you can use every single piece of this knowledge today, whether you are building new
11:30or just fixing up what you have. Face the long side of the house to the south. In our country,
11:37in the northern half of the world, the sun in winter comes from the southern sky and sits low all
11:44day.
11:45A house with a long row of south-facing windows catches that low winter sun and turns every clear day
11:53into free heat. A south room with good windows can be 10 or 15 degrees warmer than the same room
12:01facing
12:02north in the same house on the same afternoon. That is the sun working for you, paying nothing.
12:10Keep your ceilings low. Heat rises. A high ceiling means your heat collects up where no one is, wasted.
12:19The old farmhouses had ceilings of seven or eight feet, not the great tall vaulted ceilings that are
12:26fashioned today. Low ceilings keep the warm air down where the people are. The bedrooms upstairs,
12:34tucked under the eaves, get all the warm air that finds its way up the stairs. The cleverest free heat
12:41there is. Put your heater in the middle. Heat radiates out in a circle. A heater in the middle
12:49of a house warms all the rooms around it. A heater shoved against an outside wall heats half a house
12:56and the outdoors. Many Amish houses are built around a center chimney for exactly this reason.
13:04Every room is close to the source of heat. Use heavy materials inside. Stone floors, brick walls, tile
13:14work, plaster on lath, not just thin drywall. These heavy materials, once warmed by the heater or the sun,
13:23hold the heat and release it slowly through the night. The whole house becomes a giant version of the
13:30masonry heater, a thermal battery, gently giving back what was given to it during the day. A piece
13:38of soapstone the size of a brick, sitting near a wood stove all day, will be radiating gentle heat
13:44back into the room for six to eight hours after the fire has died down. Now imagine a whole wall
13:52of brick,
13:53brick, or a stone hearth, or a slate floor doing the same thing. That is what an old farmhouse feels
14:00like
14:01even when the stove has burned down to embers. Warm because the building itself is warm.
14:08Build with good insulation. This is the modern part the old houses sometimes got wrong and we have improved.
14:17Today an Amish builder uses good thick insulation in the walls and the attic, sheep's wool or cellulose,
14:24or whatever is honest and works, and seals the cracks where the cold wind sneaks in. A well-sealed,
14:32well-insulated house with passive solar windows and thermal mass and a center heater can almost heat
14:39itself. The fire is just the finish on the comfort, not the whole of it.
14:45These principles do not cost extra to apply once you know them. They cost a fortune to ignore.
14:52The fourth method is the coal stove. This one is real Pennsylvania Amish knowledge,
14:58especially in the coal country of central and western Pennsylvania, and I want to be honest
15:04about it because it has real upsides and real downsides. A coal stove is exactly what it sounds like,
15:12a heavy cast iron stove built to burn anthracite coal, the hard black kind they mine here in Pennsylvania.
15:20Coal burns long and slow and steady, far longer than wood. A single load of coal in a good stove
15:29can
15:29burn 12 to 24 hours, holding the house at a steady warmth all night without anybody getting up to feed
15:37it.
15:38The old folks always said, you did not have to fight with a coal stove the way you did with
15:43a wood stove.
15:44You loaded it, you set the damper, and it did its work.
15:49The cost works in coal country. Anthracite runs around $150 to $250 a ton in the heating belt of Pennsylvania,
15:59and a moderate-sized house will burn through perhaps three or four tons in a winter. That is $600 to
16:06$1,000
16:07for a whole winter of heat. The average English family is paying that much in two months on their
16:14electric or gas bill. The math is real. Now the honest safety word, and this matters. Coal burning
16:23produces more carbon monoxide than wood does, and the flue must be built right or it will kill you.
16:30I will say it plain. A coal stove must be vented through a properly built masonry chimney that runs
16:39up through the roof, not through the wall, not horizontally, with the proper draft. The stove must
16:47be set on a non-combustible floor pad. There must be carbon monoxide alarms in the rooms above and around
16:54the stove. The ash pan must be emptied into a metal bucket, never a wooden or plastic one, and the
17:02ash
17:02kept outside and away from the building for a week before disposal, because ash that looks cold can still
17:10be hot in the middle and burn down a barn. Every winter the chimney gets cleaned and the stove pipe
17:17gets inspected. Every winter. Done right, a coal stove is one of the most reliable heat sources
17:26a family can own. Fifty years of steady service from a good one is normal. Done wrong, it is the
17:34most
17:34dangerous thing in the house. The Amish families who use coal know it cold and respect it. If you are
17:43starting fresh with a coal stove, learn from someone who has run one for years before you light your first
17:50fire alone. Now I want to take a moment because this is the part that matters. Look at what we
17:57have just
17:58walked through. Four real methods. A masonry heater, a rocket mass heater, a properly built house, a coal stove.
18:08And not one of them needs a wire from the power company or a tank from the propane truck. The
18:15masonry
18:16heater and the rocket mass heater run on small arm loads of wood. The house design itself catches free sun
18:24and holds free heat. The coal stove burns slow on a fuel that costs a fraction of what English heating
18:33costs. Put two or three of these methods together. A properly built house with a good masonry heater
18:40inside it, say, and you can heat a family home through a hard Pennsylvania winter for a small fraction
18:48of what the average house spends and with no monthly bill at all. And here is the quiet truth about
18:56why
18:56most folks have never heard of any of this. There is no money in selling a man a masonry heater
19:03that
19:04lasts a hundred years with no service contract. There is no money in teaching a family how to build a
19:11house that almost heats itself. There is no money in a $4,000 coal stove that will run for 50
19:19years. The big money
19:21is in the monthly bill, the gas line, the electric bill, the propane delivery, the service plan. The whole
19:29modern heating business is built on the recurring charge and the methods I have just shown you cut that recurring
19:36charge close to zero. So nobody runs a commercial for the masonry heater and nobody knocks on your door to
19:44teach you
19:45about south-facing windows and a whole nation comes to believe that staying warm in winter must cost $300 a
19:53month.
19:54It does not have to. It never has. My people have lived warm and lived free of that bill for
20:01200 years, on the same county,
20:04in the same climate, with the same winters. The knowledge has been here the whole time. Most folks
20:11have just never been told to look for it. So here is what I want you to do. Start where
20:17you stand.
20:18You probably will not put in a masonry heater this week. They are a long project. But the principles of
20:26these four methods can begin to work for you right now. Find the cold air leaks in your house and
20:33seal them.
20:34Look at where your heat lives. Is it in the middle of the house or shoved against an outside wall?
20:40Watch the winter sun for a few days. See where it comes in. See where it could come in if
20:47you trimmed
20:48a tree or added a window. If you burn wood already, look at how much you are burning and look
20:55honestly at
20:56whether a more efficient stove would pay for itself in two or three winters. If you live in coal country
21:03and have not considered coal, do the math on it. It surprises people every time. And if you are
21:10someone who wants to go all the way to build the kind of house and heater that the old folks
21:16built,
21:17the kind that runs warm for a hundred years with no bill, start studying now. Get the books. Visit a
21:25home with a masonry heater in it. Read the Rocket Mass Heater Builder's Guide. These are real skills
21:32with a real learning curve. But they are skills any patient person can learn. And they are the
21:38difference between a lifetime of monthly bills and a lifetime of free warmth. Tell me in the comments
21:45below. What kind of heat does your house run on now? And what is your monthly bill in the dead
21:51of
21:51winter? And if you have ever sat by a masonry stove or a tile oven in an old house, tell
21:58us what it felt
21:58like, because the folks who have never felt it should know the difference. I read every single one.
22:05Next time, since we have been speaking of staying warm with less, I am going to show you the old
22:11way
22:11my people keep the heat we have made. The simple cold weather habits, the heavy curtains, the right kind
22:18of blanket, the way we set the bedrooms and the kitchens, so a small fire heats a whole household
22:24instead of just one room. It is the natural next step after today. Until then, find your cold drafts,
22:32follow the sun, and remember that the warmest house in the village is almost always the one nobody is
22:39paying a bill on.
22:40And if you look at the sun.
22:40All that's in the sun.
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