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fasenuff
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# Posted: 14 Dec 2010 01:05pm
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While I may have grown up around my grand parents who heated with wood it was a looong time ago and I was young so I did not pay much attention to what they did other than they put more wood in from time to time. There fore I have been re-learning how to keep warm using the small wood stove I have. Assuming the wood stove has been put in correctly there is still much too know when using it. Little things that while they may seem obvious to some may just slip by others unknown. Tips for quicker starting or faster heat. Ways to get it to burn longer and still heat the cabin.
A lot of people do not realize that the damper can be turned two directions and that one direction will still let it burn high but help capture more of the heat and the other way will slow down the burn making it last longer.
I keep two piles of wood indoors. One pile I use for normal use and the other pile is softer wood gleaned from trees that were standing yet dead. This second pile will burn fast and create a lot of heat quick and I will use when I climb out of bed in the morning to warm the cabin quick. Makes a world of difference when it is single digits outside and I don't want to spend all day under the covers.
I also keep a lot of the bark from the standing dead trees because it also will start quick but will create a lot of coals and can be controled easier for cooking.
I keep a large heavy pan filled with water on the stove with a lid on it. This way I always have hot water available and it will put moisture back in the air which keeps down the static and helps to warm the place. A camp fire coffee pot sits at the front of the stove at night and has water for the morning coffee or instant breakfast.
Rather than fold my clothes at night and putting on a chair or shelf I hang them on a nail near the stove so they are warm to put on in the morning. My skinny legs and chest were glad when I started doing this instead of slipping into a cold set of clothing. I put my boots on the concrete near the stove so they too are warm but taking care that I do not get them so close the leather dries out.
Since I do not have my water system all set up I am using 6 gallon water jugs which I keep close enough they gather heat from the stove and help heat the cabin even after the fire starts to die down. This also makes it quicker to heat it for bathing and what not.
Like I said I am still learning a lot and would love to hear tips from some of you who may know better or easier tips that would make life in the cold wild better. I am sure many city folk who are moving to country cabin for the first time would love to read yor tips as well.
Just how do you stay warm heating with wood?
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larryh
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# Posted: 14 Dec 2010 04:22pm
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I have owned a lot of wood stoves. Currently I have an old Oakland circulator. Its probably from the 40's but when I got it a few years ago it had almost no use. I am guessing they got central heat and the auctioneer said they had it stored on the second floor. Lots of thrifty germans around here that kept everything. At any rate it was replaced two new EPA stoves I had tried since they were being so heavily pushed as the way to do. I hated them. Tiny wood boxes, slow to heat, and the stoves were insulated on nearly every side to make the fire hotter but kept the house cool. I have owned a number of automatic damper stoves as well. They are creosote producers big time, at least the old ashleys and similar 60's era stoves were. My current stove is a manual slide damper control with no ash pan. Many new stoves and european stoves have no ash pan which in some ways is a good thing as the coals tend to last longer in them making starting the stove easier. I buy my wood from a local fellow and it comes split for the stove. I do split some farther for my wood cook stove as well. I don' t know that there is much of a trick to it, but dry wood is a must. A nice supply of kindling is a must, and like you I have found that just picking up the split off bark makes for a quicker fire if I toss a hand full in the stove before the larger wood. I run the stove reasonably hot to keep the flue clean and then turn it down to a medium setting, especially now when its in the teens for highs and zero for lows. I used to get out of bed in the middle of the night and refire the stove, but that became tiring for sure at may age. So now i just put in a fairly good load of larger pieces, set the damper for a safe air intake that would not let it burn too high and go to bed. This morning my farm house was about 65 in the living room and 55 in the kitchen, but I started the range to make coffee and then the stove in the living room and it was up to 70 by the time the coffee was ready.
Nothing can improve a poor stove and figuring out which is a good one can be a chore and take a few tries. No stove is going to run much more than a few hours with the wood actually burning well. You might have a tiny set of flames after 4 or 5 hours if its really set fairly low but not much heat. Main thing is to keep it going and have a stove that fits the size you are heating. Nothing worse than having a stove that can't keep up with the cold.
Oakland circulator, late 40's.
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fasenuff
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# Posted: 14 Dec 2010 06:34pm
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That looks like one my grandparents had. What I have now is one of the $150 specials you can get at many places. It does ok for me but I will keep looking for a better stove.
Since I tend to turn mine way down at night I also will burn a good hot fire from time to time to help clean out the pipe. A good tapping occasionally will help keep build up out of the pipe as well.
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larryh
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# Posted: 14 Dec 2010 11:09pm
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Be cautious with your stove, those opening price point imports have been know to be a bit of a problem to some people. I think one lady I read had hers to crack while running. Not to mention nearly impossible to control. But it sounds as if your having good luck with slowing yours down. I wouldn't cut the air to the point it only smolders, its really a waste of wood because your not getting the benefit of the heat and it producing dangerous creosote.
If your not familiar with it Hearth Net is a good site for reviews of stoves and discussions around heating.
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fasenuff
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# Posted: 15 Dec 2010 09:51am
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I keep it burning with a visible flame. Your right if it is only smoldering it gives off no noticeable heat. This stove seems to be fairly easy to control but I did seal the seams and that made a major difference on control. I do keep an eye out for build up in the pipe also.
At around 3:30 this morning I got up and stired the coals and fed wood into it. A friend had bought me a real nice shovel and poker set with long heavy handles. Very nice but just the two pieces. No stand. I had planned to make a stand later and did as always when looking for a good place to hang something....put a nail in the wall. Now I was not a complete moron and did put a sheet metal strip on the wall for safety and ease of cleaning. I have been fighting the flue and have the usual head congestion and runny nose so my smeller is not working. At about 4:15 I awoke thinking it was just the flue keeping me from sleeping but had a bad headache and my throat was burning. As I lay there my eyes started to burn also. It was not until I sat up and put on my glasses that I realized the cabin was full of smoke. After getting the door open and clearing some of the smoke I discovered that apparently an errant ember must have clung to the poker and dropped to the CDX floor below. The resulting smolder was the cause of the smoke. Ok, nearly a gallon of water poured on the small 4" blackened area and I was still getting smoke from it. Worried I quickly grabbed my cordless jigsaw and cut a 6" hole around the area. On inspection of the CDX I found that the smolering burn had gone clear through but at an angle. The hole ended up about 6"x8" to remove the entire affected area.
Lesson learned? Metal behind and below the wood stove tools. I happened to have a tin box that holds welding rods and used tin snips to cut out the front and part of the sides and my tools now rest in those. It could have been a lot worse. Why did it happen? Lack of follow through on my part in finishing a job that was more critical than I gave credit. Was it a stupid mistake? Yes! And it was all mine. All it took was me not doing something correctly and timely and one very small ember to nearly burn down what I have worked so hard for and possibly cost me my life.
I took so much time and effort to make sure the stove was safe and would not present a safety hazard and it was not the stove but something used with it. I clean the area around the stove every morning and every evening before carrying wood to help keep it safe. I keep the area clear of any items that might trip or cause me to fall against the stove. I do take precautions and am very mindful of the dangers but let one small area go because other things were more important in my mind. If some one had said you need to fix that I probably would have said "yep, and I will get to it later". I have concrete under the stove and extending out far enough to catch anything as I clean it out but not where the tools hung.
Now, feeling shame from my own stupidity I could have not posted this here and keep my mistake to myself. I could have looked for a dozen reasons why it happened other than me. I could have said it was the cheap CDX. Or maybe the way the poker was made made it easy for embers to cling. But it was me that placed the tools away from the concrete and me who failed to put something under them. It was not the manufacturer who made the tools or the store who sold them. I love to learn from others mistakes because they save me so much time and money. It is only fair I in turn save someone else what this could have cost me. I screwed up. I failed to do what I knew I should have done. Cost to me is the time and labor to patch a small hole in the floor. Savings to some one who reads this and learns? Priceless!
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larryh
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# Posted: 15 Dec 2010 11:37am
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I don't have a shield under my poker either, in fact the hook is on the wood box for the shovel an poker. Its good tip, one which I wouldn't have really considered. My poker is an older round one and I have never had anything but dust on the end of it so far. I did create a ash removal pan with handle something like one that was at one time offered for sale. I attempted to buy one from the guy in Canada but he never sent me one. So this year I bought some small pieces of sheet metal at the farm supply and using just simple 1x 3 lumber in a vise I bent the pieces to shapes that worked for me. I am posting a photo of the finished product, I am pretty proud of it and its stopped 90% of the dust from removing ash, the only ash now comes from loading the wood or rearranging the coals. You were really lucky with that you finally woke up.. Do you not have a smoke alarm? Mine goes off without much prompting from a fry pan or stove.
Covered ash scoop. Handle I cut from an old lawn edger I never used.
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Showing how it slides open, then you close it to remove the ashes.
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fasenuff
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# Posted: 15 Dec 2010 12:48pm
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Well as to the smoke alarm. I have one that I had disabled due to my over cooking and it always going off. Another mistake on my part.
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bobrok
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# Posted: 15 Dec 2010 05:03pm
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fasenuff,
Many would not have done this for fear of embarassment or even ridicule.
I have a profound regard for you for stepping up and telling your story. Needless to say I think we're all glad you survived the ordeal.
Thank you for sharing.
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plainbrowntabby
Member
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# Posted: 18 Dec 2010 09:48pm
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Yes yes! Telling your mistakes in hope of helping others is a very very good thing to do. Thank you for being 'large" :)
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PlicketyCat
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# Posted: 19 Dec 2010 07:15am
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We have a bunch of fire-kill dry dead standing spruce on our property that we use to build up a hot fire fast. A bundle of those sticks will catch a cold stove even if there's some ice on our logs.
We only have 3 types of trees for firewood here: spruce, aspen and birch. What we've found is that spruce burns the hottest and fastest, so it's good for starting the fire or boosting it up for cooking. Aspen is the wettest, no matter how long you let it season, and it doesn't seem to have much BTU output... but it does burn for awhile, so it's good for a cooler day fire just to keep the stove going. Birch is definitely the long heat, so we use that to bank up before bedtime.
I peel all the birch bark off and keep it in a tinder box with the kindling. Works a million times better than newspaper. Every morning, I open the damper wide and burn a really hot fire with almost nothing but bark and kindling, just to keep the creosote down since the cool aspen during the day can gunk things up quickly.
In addition to the mineral insulation board under the hearth pad to keep the floor joists from getting heat damaged, I also put a layer of thin tin under the cement board just in case embers burned through the grout between the tile. And I still put a large fire-resistant hearth rug in front even though I have more than the minimum distance of tile in front of the stove opening... I've had some of the spruce sap pop and shoot embers a couple of feet out of the stove before, better safe than sorry!
As for firewood, I find that cutting our trees into 4' logs in the woods during the fall, then hauling those back to the tent and cutting them into stove lengths and splitting them while they're green really helps them season much faster and better than just letting them season as logs or rounds. Our wood species, at least, seems to split easier when it's still green or after it's over 2 years seasoned... trying to split it in between then and it's a losing battle. If we have really big rounds, we'll usually leave those to split once it's below -30 since they virtually explode when it's that cold... we just use up the limbs and smaller logs first.
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chris632
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# Posted: 5 Feb 2011 06:51pm
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i lived for a number of years in the bush with wood heat. i found that cutting my trees in 3 to 4 inch pieces like plates and then breaking them into smaller pieces made them burn like coal and last for a long time. this way i got a more even heat and saved a lot of wood over the winter. makes it a lot easier to use up the log buts to no hard splitting.
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larryh
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# Posted: 5 Feb 2011 06:55pm
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That is an interesting but labor intensive idea. I would be curious to see how it reacted. I have no access to decent coal here. Wood however being a softer structure would seem like it would maybe burn up faster in small sections that larger ones?
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fpw
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# Posted: 5 Feb 2011 07:10pm
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I use a four-dog wood stove made here in Minnesota. The stove is compact, portable, and lightweight. It is suitable for a cabin, wall tent, or yurt.
http://peelinglogs.blogspot.com/2009/11/installing-wood-stove.html
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PlicketyCat
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# Posted: 7 Feb 2011 04:06pm
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I love my four-dog stove!! It's done admirably well through our two Alaska winters in the wall tent. When we move into the cabin, I have no doubt that I'll clean up the "tent stove", give it a new coat of paint and use it in one of the outbuildings.
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