Burning bricks instead of firewood is the most useless life hack for your home! We explain why
On the Internet they say that the stove can be heated by a real "miracle". The role of this "miracle" is a brick soaked in kerosene or diesel fuel. All this is a complete "heresy" and with the help of simple calculations we will prove to you that it is simply impossible to heat the room in this way.
A bit of math
Some bloggers trying to grab the attention of a gullible audience claim that two red bricks can absorb a bucket of kerosene and burn for three to six hours after that. Allegedly, this method was used in Soviet times, when there was a lot of fuel, and there was nowhere to put it. According to their assurances, in this way, you can easily heat the stove, which will easily heat the house like that.
Let's start with an indicator of how much liquid an ordinary building brick can absorb. Its weight is 3.6 kg, and water absorption is 14% by weight. If we resort to a rough calculation, then the brick can absorb no more than 500 grams of water. Suppose that a brick soaked for a day has absorbed 500 grams of kerosene - it will no longer enter it for quite objective reasons.
The question arises: how much heat will these 500 grams release during combustion? 500 grams of kerosene is 0.625 liters. We look at the table, which shows the specific heat of combustion of kerosene (underlined in red). According to the table, 1 liter of kerosene is capable of releasing 10400 kcal of conditional heat. From this it follows that 625 ml, which are able to be absorbed into the brick, will release 6448 kcal during combustion. For now, let's dwell on this and move on to firewood.
Now another question: how many kilograms of firewood do you need to heat the stove? The answer is from 8 to 12 kilograms of dry wood. For calculations, let's take the minimum value - 8 kilograms. Now let's look at the following table, which indicates how much heat 1 kilogram of firewood emits during combustion. The value is 3400 kcal.
But since we will burn 8 kilograms of firewood in one fire, this value needs to be increased eight times (3400 * 8 = 27200 kcal). Well, then everything is simple. According to our data, for normal heating of the furnace, 27,200 kcal are required, and a brick soaked in kerosene will give only 6448 kcal. And this is 4 times less than the required heat.
Conclusion: you cannot heat the stove with a burning brick (or even two); all this is fiction and a waste of time for those who want to try it.
How long does a brick burn?
Adequate bloggers have experienced burning bricks. In a preheated oven, it burns for no more than 40 minutes; in the cold it can hold out for an hour and a half. Practice, like calculations, has shown that experiments with bricks and kerosene are useless and they will not be able to heat the oven under any circumstances!