Burnin' Wood ( and other fuels...)

[jchamberlin]

Luther Ray Hinds: You may have a point about the heat loss. I notice that I can run the stove with the door open and the stack thermometer at 400 deg F and the room temperature only goes up about 1 deg F; but if I close the door, and make no other changes, all of a sudden, the room temperature goes up 3-4 degrees!

Allen: Lewis is probably right about the Latex-painted kindling. I've gone through a box of pine wood trim painted with latex enamel, and I notice an acrid odor --mostly when I'm outside! So while your neighbor burning the wood may not suffer in his house, all of his neighbors, including you, probably are by breathing the fumes. I'm not sure I'll volunteer to burn painted wood again.

Wayne: I used to have a wonderful hand axe, but one of my boys lost it. Replaced it with a hatchet, one of my boys lost it. Problem with splitting kindling is the mess it makes. With the 60 deg days and the 30 deg nights I've been getting by with one fire a day, but I've gone through all my fire-starter pine-cones-in-paper-bag tricks, and I'm almost out of the painted kindling. It looks like I'll be buying another hand axe, if I can find one.

 

[kide]

Jeremiah -if you don't have a barometric damper in the stack above the furnace, you're allowing all the heat to be sucked up the chimney.. A plate damper in the pipe turned down so that the draft above the furnace is choked off will work, but a barometric is actually more effective especially when it's windy. My first furnace in the house I built 34 years ago wasn't air tight and I had a heck of a time getting any heat out of it. My best friend was a HVAC alpha dog and started laughing when I called him, as he'd just went through the same thing with another one of his friends. The secret to learning how to control a wood burner is to get and use a draft gauge, so you can adjust the draft over the fire to a minimum, to just that that it needs for oxygen and to move smoke up the chimney.. Any more than that and you're pushing heat up the chimney also...

 

[jchamberlin]

Gerry: Thanks for cluing me in to the barometric damper trick. I'll see if they have one at Lowe's the next time I'm in town.

 

[jchamberlin]

Have you ever watched how different woods burn?

Since I have a "window" on my firebox (see my post of January 24, 2013 - 11:12 pm), I can watch the wood burn in my stove. Despite the advice of the modern "experts" to control the amount of wood burned instead of the amount of air supplied (which controls the burn, see also Gerry Ide's contribution Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - 10:56 pm); my stove just won't heat the house unless I get a critical mass of wood burning. That critical mass is at least five good-sized logs, i.e., 2-4" round and 12-20" long.

Right now I'm looking at five logs burning brightly (see pic) with the room temperature at 74 and climbing (something my heat pump can't match on its best day).

The oak, pine, and maple wood crumble into glowing coals; the heat seems to radiate best from where they appear "white-hot." The pecan wood burns in a similar fashion, but when the door opens and the air swoops in, the pecan generates tiny, harmless sparks everywhere while it crackles softly. It is possible to burn these woods with very little odor, if one is able to keep the temperature within the bounds Kraig set of 300-400 deg F.

The pine, and other soft woods, on the other hand never "crumble into coals." They only smoke and shed "embers" (for lack of a better term). I find it difficult, if not impossible, to build a heat-generating "bed of coals" from pine wood. My wife complains about the constant "smell" even when the fire is burning as brightly as it can --which isn't very hot: I've never seen a "white-hot coal" produced by a pine fire, the best one can hope for is a bunch of glowing red "embers."

My son tells me that he works with a fellow who burns nothing but pine, he swears by it. Although the supply of pine is certainly plentiful around here, I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would burn pine voluntarily. It just can't compare to the hard-wood fire I'm enjoying right now.

Another thing: I can never get the burn temperature of a pine-wood fire much over 200 degrees F, which means the house is still cold; I've built hard-wood fires I couldn't get to burn under 400 deg F --my son and I have loaded so much wood, over a period of time, that the "coals took over" so that it didn't matter if we shut the door, the stove just kept generating heat and the temperature kept on climbing, all without the slightest flame!

Maybe with a Gerry-Ide-recommended damper in-line with the chimney flue I can "dial it in" to 300 degrees or so (hard wood), but right now I'm enjoying the heat, and thanks to Hurricane Irene [Edit: and my log splitter]I have plenty of fuel for the fire.

 

[rkelm]

I have a Hearth Flame (I think that is the name of it) it is an insert in the fireplace and I can control the air flow with "dumps" on the front, it doesn't take away the looks of the fireplace, just looks like doors on the fireplace and the great thing about it, it has duct work (separate from the flue) to the bedrooms. I can control a set of fans from the master bedroom with a thermostat just like you would with a central unit (it cuts off when the temp reaches the desired temp) to have them come on. The fan speed for the duct work is controlled by rehostats on the fans in the front of the fireplace. I had this built in when we built the house (this is the second one I have had) and it is great. The first house was 2500 sq. ft. and this heated the whole house. This current house is 3500 and it is a little cool in the farther 1000 but it is bearable (just the way the house is built - I can close off that section) if you have to. It just doesn't get cold enough for us to use it very often here and I have a Pulse furnace (propane) that is 97% efficient that we use most of the time. If you are thinking of building the Flame is the way to go to heat a whole house - it really gets almost hot in the bedrooms.
Rodney

 

[digger]

I figured I'd get a head start on next years wood.
14 cord of Tamarack and 12 cord of red oak.
Should get me started anyway, LOL

 

[kmcconaughey]

Charlie, very nice! Tamarack is tough stuff once it dries. If it's still green you might want to cut as much of it as you can ASAP. I've never tried burning it, I'm curious how well it burns. Not much of it around here but we have some BIG live trees on the 40 acres up north. Interesting trivia for you, Art Aytay's parent's property has the only natural occurring stand of Tamaracks in St. Croix County, WI. I have some that I planted on my home property but they don't count...

I see an <FONT COLOR="ff0000">I</FONT><FONT COLOR="000000">H</FONT> Scout...

 

[mgwin]

Dang, you guys are talking about burning wood and it's supposed to be in the mid to upper 70's here tomorrow!

Charlie,
That looks like an IH Scout behind that wood pile.

 

[digger]

Marty G.
We might see 70 around the 4th of July! LOL

 

[digger]

There's actually 2 Scouts out there, one is behind the woodpile covered up. The blue one is my snow pusher.

 

[mgwin]

Charlie,

 

[digger]

Hopefully it's OVER for a couple months.

I started the stove Oct. 3 2012 and put the last wood in this morning!

224 Days -- or -- 32 Weeks and 0 Days

That's pretty freakin sad!

 

[dtanner]

Some glad I only have to cut and split 4 cords to keep my house warm. I`am thinking geo thermal . It would be nice to have a room in my basement finished .

 

[jchamberlin]

Charlie, for your own sanity you may want to consider moving to a more temperate clime. Let's see 32/52 * 100 = 61.5% of the year is "hard winter" by Southern standards. In eastern North Carolina we can't run the furnace 24/7 or we have to leave all the windows open. We keep the wood stove burning around the clock maybe 10 days out of the year, 30 days at most in a very "hard" winter. We don't always have to "be prepared" down here, we can "lay back" a little; working too hard is stressful.

Just a thought.

 

[digger]

Ok, so I fibbed a little, which was unintentional.
But it still a little chilly at night, so YES, the fire is still alive and well in the stove, sigh!!!

Maybe after the weekend, LOL

Jeremiah C.

BELIEVE me, I'd like nothing more. But the wife's dad is still kickin, so we're stuck up here for a while yet, sorry to say.

 

[mgwin]

Jeremiah,

Now you know how Charlie is about finding deals! If you talk him into moving to NC we will never run across any more deals on a cub cadet!

 

[jbaker]

Just had my share of some group cutting and splitting. 4 loads of a 14 foot dunp trailer.
this was mostly oak and with a little pine mixed in.

now my son is stacking, so no final cord total yet

 

[jchamberlin]

Jeff: That's a lot of wood! You know what they say, those who heat with wood are warmed twice; once to get it cut up and put away and once more when it burns. It's still worth it to me, though. However, it has gotten tougher now that sons have moved away and I no longer have any "free labor."

 

[kmcconaughey]

Jeremiah, I believe it warms more than twice. Here's my count:

First time is when I cut it.
Second time is when I split it.
Third time is when I stack it.
Fourth time is when I haul it into my garage pile.
Fifth time is when I actually burn it.

Jeff, nice haul.

 

[digger]

I'm STILL throwin wood in! Grrrrrrrr
With the temps getting down in the upper 30's at night, I don't have a lot of choice, LOL
Of course 2 8" logs last almost 24 hours, so I can't complain to much.