Photo report by Norbert Senf

2001MHA Annual Meeting

May 7 - 13, 2001

at Wildacres Retreat, Little Switzerland, North Carolina

First stop on the way to Wildacres was an MHA heater building workshop at Jay Hensley's new house in Kentucky. The workshop instructor was Jerry Frisch. The project was a custom compact heater with a side bake oven.

After the workshop we headed to North Carolina in a convoy of 6 vehicles. We spent the night in Asheville and headed out the next morning on the spectacular Blue Ridge Parkway.

En route, we paid a visit to a nearby client of Jerry's to inspect a Biofire and a Firecrest, and to watch Jerry do the break-in fires with the clients.

The Firecrest fireplace, manufactured by Lopez Quarries (and Masonry Stove Builders in Canada). The stonework is by a local mason.

Jerry Frisch's wolfshead air supply. With glass doors on the Firecrest, the combustion air blows from the wolf's mouth, and it becomes the Frisch-Rosin fireplace. It is very clean burning and emissions certified in Washington State. This air supply was developed at Lopez Labs, MHA's test facility.

John Rousseau helps Jerry install the control for the chimney top damper.

The break in fire in the Firecrest.

Each Biofire is custom designed and calculated for a specific house by the Austrian factory. Instead of paper plans, it comes with a scaled 3-d wooden assembly model. This photo shows two courses of firebrick modules in place.

The course by course assembly model laid out in order of installation.

The break-in fire in the Biofire. Cleanout plug into the first channel is visible.

We started our business meeting in the Wildacres library the next morning. It was an auspicious year, as we were able to conduct all of our general business in one day, leaving the rest of the week for hands-on workshops and training. This format resulted in the best turn out to date.

One of the items of business was MHA's new sets of heater plans that will be for sale to the public. Jerry leads the discussion on plans for a Swedish heater.

Very early the next morning, we took two trucks to Tom Trout's house to pick up materials for the workshops.

Tom always has new and interesting heater related tid-bits lying about. This is Sleepy Hollow's drop down chimney top damper. It has received good reviews from several people in the know, compared to other types of top dampers.