I'm Eric Schroeder, and I became involved in Masonry Heaters when I was 23 or so years old after reading "The Masonry Stove Book" by David Lyle.  I spent the next few years travelling from heater job to heater job, assisting a few different builders and learning as much as possible.  

     I learned a lot from each one, and I'm grateful they were willing to work with me.  I still had technical questions (about things like channel sizes and lengths, and firebox sizing, heater sizing, and so on).  It seemed to me that smaller homes should have smaller heaters, but I didn't yet know how to make this happen well.  To this day I still remember working on a project in a 4,000 square foot house that was fed by the exact same firebox we had just used to complete a stove heating a sub-1000 square foot house.  I felt like there had to be a better way. 

     After a year or two I was invited to perform some work rebuilding a very special heater in Lincollnville Maine.  This heater had been the first Finnish Contraflow built in the US, and that it had been part of a workshop which had been attended by some of the biggest names in masonry heating.  This stunning and simple heater was as clean as the day it had been built 25 years earlier, and had been laid in clay mortar so that it had lots of flexibility and was very easy to service. 

     As I opened up this heater two things happened.   The first was that I saw a large upper chamber unlike anything I'd seen before.  Through staring at this and considering what would likely happen in a chamber like this from a flow perspective, I labelled it the "thermal stratification chamber."   I later learned to think of this as the "Double Bell" principle. 

     The second thing that happened was that I understood where a generation of heater builders had learned their design vernacular and why so many North American "contraflow" heaters look so alike.    

     Shortly thereafter I took a trip to Germany for the Austrian Stove Guild's annual show.  Germany and Austria have a centuries old tradition that has been tirelessly refined.  When Austria passed what was then the strictest emissions standards in the world this tradition of custom sized and designed heaters allowed for the development of a system that calculates chimney draw and resistance to flow throughout the whole system and balances those to oprimize combustion dynamics in the firebox (to the degree that stoves conforming to the parameters of the program are treated the same way as stoves tested in a lab.  It's an amazing program, by far the most advanced heater design system in the world.   

     A high point of the trip was a somewhat spontaeous visit to a stove mason I had met at a US heater meeting a couple years prior in northern Holland.  His company produces one of my favorite heaters, and was was such a joy to visit with him.  I have a sense memory of sitting at his conference table with him one evening and having a discussion about flow dynamics, thermal stratification, and secondary combustion air, German heaters and so on.   It served as an encouraging confirmation that my observations and theories to date were not crazy.

     Sometime later I started working with a stove mason who had travelled to Austria to learn and who used the Austrian Tile Stove Guild's calculation program.  I worked with him on several heaters, got a license to use the software myself, and after building a few heaters under supervision I started applying the software on my own. 

     My nature as an experimenter created a couple situations in which the stoves I built this way needed refinement (call for details, I'll tell you the stories).  It was in troubleshooting these heaters and the experimentation I was able to do in my own home with 5 heaters so far and more to come that I learned much of what I really know about heater performance.

    Along the way I picked up a sense that a heater's shape has a profound influence on how it feels to be in a space.  It started by observing traffic patterns in rooms and desining to keep hard corners out of the flow of people.  From there I learned that shape creates a feeling in a space, and can infuence our perception of that space it's self.  A masonry heater can make a space feel larger, and does an amazing job of defining different areas within a home (call and we can talk more about this).  

     It's been a very interesting journey so far, and I look forward to working with you to bring the traditional warmth of a masonry heater into your home so you can experience the security and comfort of a warm stone.

     

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Eric

207-766-6003​