Woodstove user tips

[Carl_NH]

One thing I have come to like about my masonry-style heater is there is no fire tending to speak of. I light a fire in it once per day using about a 5 gal. bucket worth of wood. When that has burned down to coals, I put in another 5 gal. bucket's worth. Pull the coals together with the poker when it's about done. That's it until the next day 99% of the time. There is no messing with damper controls, it's supposed to burn hard.

Masonry/contra-flow heaters are best designed into new construction in most cases.

Hi Dave,

Can you send some pics of your masonry heater? I understand they are all about mass and chambers and once heated they radiate for the day.

What was the delta in cost of a typical center chimney vs the masonry heater?

Thanks

 

[dmccarty]

..

I have a chimney here in a small older cabin and I called a fellow in 1989 to come out and clean it. He said he cleans them by starting a chimney fire and burns them clean. He said I could do it myself and he told me how to do it. I did it like he said and it worked fine but I will never do that again!

I appreciate your suggestions!
Sherpa

My FIL burns out his chimney this way. :shocked: I saw him do it once and it was rather dramatic. He burns out the chimney at least once a week so the creosote does not build up much and the fire burns out quickly. I sure won't do it. :laughing::laughing::laughing:

Later,
Dan

 

[dave1949]

Here are some pictures of my three ton soapstone stove. From left to right, the front, the bake oven on the back side (I was working on the floor tile), and the chimney (flue exits at floor level, goes under the bench and up the chimney).

It is a Tulikivi brand, if you go to their web site, you can see a lot of models and info.
Fireplaces, bakeovens, sauna, natural stone, dishware | Tulikivi

This is the web site of Steve Busch, the guy who installed/built ours. Steve is a trustworthy, straight-up person.
Maine Masonry Stove Company

There are other masonry stoves, of course. If you have the space, very large and elaborate custom brick units with multiple bake ovens and such are possible that are integral to the floor plan. You can pretty much design your own exterior shape--within limits of course.

The cost is high. Our stove installed was $18,600, plus another ~$2K for the chimney. You could probably find less expensive types, or build your own. Building your own requires some experience/knowledge with heat expansion, high-temp mortars, flue design and so forth, I believe.

Masonry heaters are a good fit as area heaters in tight and well-insulated houses. They radiate a very gentle heat for hours and hours. You can touch ours anywhere except the glass door and there is no danger of burning your hand. You should be able to hold your hand on the stone and count to five before having to pull away. And that is at the hottest place on the stove at the end of a burn. That gives you an idea of the surface temp and heat produced. They are not a good heat source fit for houses that need lots of btu's.

 

[dmccarty]

We burned for about 6 years before we sold our last place and never had to clean the chimney. We did yearly inspections to make sure all was good and it never needed a cleaning. It was hard to tell the fireplace was our main source of heat. We always kept a hot fire, day and night. I would wake up in the morning and have to just throw a log on the coals and within a minute or two the fire was back.

This new house we are in, we just picked up a used insert. The insert was caked of creosote. I chiseled most of it away and have burned the rest of it off. We have a thermometer on the side of the fire box that has some ranges on it. It came with the stove. It says if the fire box is down in the 200F range you are generating creosote and if its over 500F your too hot. We generally keep it around 400 - 450F. And like mentioned already, we barely see smoke coming out of the chimney except when we open it to put more wood on or just starting it up.

Since the thread said "tips" here is one...when I have a fire, I wait until there are no flames before I refuel. When there are no flames, I fill it up. I never open it if there are any flames. In this way, no smoke ever gets into the house. I told a buddy about it, and now he does the same, and he is much happier with his setup. He tended to fuss with the fire. Now, he just fills it and waits for no flames, and then refills it. This his much better for him.

Here is the chimney cleaner I mentioned in the earlier post.

Amazon.com: Gardus Inc RCH205 Sooteater Rotary Chimney Cleaning System: Home Improvement

I looked for years for a fireplace thermometer for the stove and eventually found one at TSC. Best danged thing I bought for the stove. It has a white zone from 250-550 degrees F that supposedly means no creosote. Sometimes the fire will peak higher outside that zone depending on the quality of the wood. Once the fire is going, I don't load wood until the temp falls back to 250 which is right at the creosote zone. This gives us a four hour burn to maximize the BTU input into the house. At 250 degrees the wood will light right back up. The only time we see smoke is at start up and when throwing new wood into the stove.

When we designed the house, we had a six inch pipe run under the slab and to the stove to supply outside combustion air. Works great. You can feel the air flow when the firing is burning. We were supposed to connect the pipe to the stove but I could not find the correct pieces so the combustion air pipe dumps air behind the stove which works just fine. We do not ever feel cold air. When the stove is running the air gets pulled into the house from the pipe. If the air is not needed, air is not pulled into the house.

Later,
Dan

 

[Deere Dude]

One other thing I did do this year was to get an electric barbeque/fire starter to get the wood fully going when building a fire from coals. It is the Looftlighter shown here:

Looft Industries

It may work for charcoal but it does not start a wood fire from scratch very well. We use birch bark to do that. But it works great for restarting from coals as it blasts a lot of hot air. Prior to this year I used a hand bellows but they don't work as well. This thing gets the wood (from coals) in no time.
.

What I have used for a lot of years to get a fire going is to use construction 2x4s or whatever cutoffs that will get thrown away. I cut them 4-5 inches long with a chop say and then use a small axe to split them to maybe 4 or 5 pieces to a small chunk of 2x4. I just fill a barrel or a box with them.

Then I fill a 5 gallon bucket with some of these chips and pour diesel from old fuel tanks over them trying to get a coat of fuel oil on all of them. I try to keep the bucket half full so they soak good. When I get low on chips in the bucket, I have a another bucket with chips standing by, and I pour that fuel oil in that bucket of chips. So I always have chips soaking.

When I want a fire started I take a 1 gallon ice cream pail and go out to the garage and get maybe half a dozen pieces and bring them in the house to the fireplace. I crumple op 3-4 pieces of news paper and lay these pieces over the top with a couple small split pieces of wood 18" long and then a little larger pieces on to.

Then light the paper and you will have a nice fire in 2-3 minutes. It never fails and is quick. The chimney is not cleaned often because I like hot fires and hardly ever needs cleaning. I just knock the dust off it with a brush yearly.

 

[dmccarty]

I would LIKE to burn wood that has been split and seasoning for a year. Reality means the wood might be split for a few months. That might sound bad but often what happens is that I get the logs back to my CWPA, Cord Wood Processing Area , cut the wood into rounds, and then get busy with work. Wood drying is a function of length so this wood is drying out but it would be drying a bit faster if split. When I do split I tarp it to keep water off the wood. One day, my simply dream is to have a large wood shed. :laughing::laughing::laughing: At the start of this burn season I had a cord of split wood from last year that burned real well though a bit hotter than the I would have liked if the thermometer is to be believed. The dampers is at the most restricted position. Over XMAS, I split some wood that has been in the rounds since this time last year. It is burning real well. Not too hot and certainly not wet.

If we burn wet wood, we will get creosote covering our stove door. So far we have not had creosote build up though the glass is dirty and cleaning would not hurt. Maybe today.... :laughing::laughing::laughing:

For starting a fire, I collect the splinters of wood from splitting. That stuff works real well and larger pieces I use in the grill when we BBQ. Makes good smoking wood. I will also run around picking up branches from trees and break that into 4-6 inch long pieces which are stored in a big plastic container with a lid. We use these pieces to start the wood as well. Our county paper is a weekly and it supplies us with just enough paper to ball up to start the fire. :laughing::laughing::laughing: Sometimes I think that is about the only worthwhile use of the paper.

Later,
Dan

 

[Grumpy Old Man]

Well , one of my friends has a new wood burning furnace he has been using for 2 years and his home owners insurance policy has just been cancelled and they will not renew it until he removes the furnace totally ! no exceptions !

 

[kco]

Well , one of my friends has a new wood burning furnace he has been using for 2 years and his home owners insurance policy has just been cancelled and they will not renew it until he removes the furnace totally ! no exceptions !

Crazy! Must be in cahoots with the oil industry lobby. I imagine 90% of the people in my rural area heat with wood with perhaps 1/2 stoves and the other 1/2 furnaces or boilers.

Our insurance company inspected my house and installation when we moved in 9 years ago and reinspected to update the policy 1 year ago. There are no issues.

The insurance companies always inspect homes when new owners move in. The owners before us had to install continuous stainless steel liner in the masonary chimney instead of the old setup of having just the pipe go into the bottom of the masonary chimney. The same happened when new neighbours moved into the house down the road. The insurance company made them put a continuous liner in the masonary chimney.

In our previous house we moved to in 1986 we had an all masonary fire place with a separate flu and masonary fireplace in the basement. The basement fireplace had been bricked-in and a stove with metal pipe run into it. We had the chimneys cleaned and inspected when we moved in. The chimney sweep told us the basement setup was dangerous from a fire standpoint. So we never used it, and I told the new owner about it when they bought the house.

That house was in Alberta which unlike BC does not have near as many wood heated places. So the insurance company never did inspect that house.

I welcome reasonable rules and inspections, but outright bans are unfair.

 

[Scooby074]

Well , one of my friends has a new wood burning furnace he has been using for 2 years and his home owners insurance policy has just been cancelled and they will not renew it until he removes the furnace totally ! no exceptions !

Then he best find another insurance company.

A properly installed, and rated stove/furnace is a non-issue here. Your insurance rate may be slightly higher than electric but that's about it.

 

[jerrybob]

Get one of these for chimney cleaning.........

Chimneyking, using the chain flail to clean a chimney - YouTube