Starting a Stove Fire

[Egon]

Fat pine spills and fat pine kindling work well for starting a fire.

 

[Snobdds]

When I snowmobile into the cabin in the winter, the place is as cold as the outside temp, so I need a fire fast. I have a pail of ceder wood shavings and a little bottle of kerosene. I fill a little metal can with wood shavings and pour some kerosene on it. Then I spread it in the stove, put some pieces of fat wood on and light it up. No matter how cold it is, and it gets well below freezing, the draft starts up and the fire is roaring in 5 minutes.

 

[deezler]

3-4 sheets of newspaper and a few small sticks of kindling or cut-up lumber scraps, gets my cold woodstove going easily every time. Definitely need to assemble the logs with the right amount of air space to make the "blast furnace" setup someone else mentioned. Also known as the "log-cabin", with any old leftover coals pushed to the inside since they light up quick.

An easy source of kindling is just to look on the ground after a day of running the log splitter, there's great flakes and strips all over. I also typically take all my scrap 2x4 and other non-treated lumber bits over to my miter saw and cut them into ~1x3" chunks, those work great since they are already kiln dried.

 

[gstrom99]

I have an Extech MO50 about $44 on eBay. It has 2 pins and digital display and seems well built. Parent company is FLIR, well known. You can spend about as much as you want on a moisture meter but I do not see doing that. $44 gets you above the junk but below wasting your money. The outside of a piece of wood will be dryer than the inside but is still a good indicator. If the outside is over 18% (my cutoff) the inside generally is too wet to burn without creating creosote. Ideally you would do a fresh spilt of a large piece and test the center and it should be under 20%.

Our exterior air moisture stays above 80% all winter which lets Doug Fir (our most common wood) stabilize at around 14 to 18% moisture after 2 years under cover. Split at the start of the 2 years, not at the end. Wood dries much better split.

Moisture Meters | Extech Instruments

I've never been able to figure out how our firewood is supposed to dry out to the 15 - 20% moisture content target, when the humidity levels stay 40 - 80%.
Someone want to explain the physics to me?

 

[4570Man]

I've never been able to figure out how our firewood is supposed to dry out to the 15 - 20% moisture content target, when the humidity levels stay 40 - 80%.
Someone want to explain the physics to me?

If you hung up wet laundry would it dry or would it stay 80 percent wet?

 

[ericm979]

I've never been able to figure out how our firewood is supposed to dry out to the 15 - 20% moisture content target, when the humidity levels stay 40 - 80%.
Someone want to explain the physics to me?

The two humidity measurements are not comparable. The wood one is straightforward- 20% humidity means 20% of the weight is water. The normal value used for air humidity is "relative humidity". 80% relative humidity does not mean the air is 80% water by weight. We'd probably have a hard time breathing that. Instead, 100% relative humidity means the air is saturated with as much water vapor as it will hold. That value depends on the temperature and air pressure. But it's less than the absolute humidity scale used for wood.

Here's a table showing the wood equilibrium humidity at different air humidities: Wood Equilibrium Moisture Content Table And Calculator

 

[gstrom99]

Thanks. That's the response I needed...

 

[kco]

I don't have a wood stove but we do use a wood furnace to heat our home.

My favourite starter is birch bark. I have several large contractor garbage bags of it that I store on top of the wood piles, which are all under roofs. I just go through one garbage bag per year. If you cut birch with the sap in it and don't buck it up it will start to rot within a few months. After felling I always run the chain saw the length of the log to open the bark. The bark pretty well peels itself, at least half way around the tree. So when bucking up the logs you just have to peel it the rest of the way by hand. It is easy to rip those pieces into strips by hand. I put them in bags and they dry over a few years. I transfer the bark to the furnace room in a 5 gallon bucket which will last 2 weeks for starting fires.

As others have mentioned, I lay two small firewood sticks parallel and put the birch strip fire starter in between. Then a few sticks of kindling straddling the two parallel sticks and light the birch bark with a propane torch. The birch bark is easy to light and burns hot and fast very similar to diesel oil.

My favourite kindling is dry cedar about the thickness of my little finger. It catches fire easily and burns quickly and hot. It's also very easy to split.

 

[Diggin It]

Though I've used different methods based on what I have near the stove at the moment, I find one of best to be twigs and sticks I have to pick up from around the yard. Dried Red Oak twigs work wonders.

 

[JerryK]

Up here in Michigan, we were log'd back in the 1800's. Around 1871 the big mess they left caught fire and burned across the state. The white pine stumps left from the logging and the big fire can still be found here and there in the state. They are full of pitch and when split, make excellent kindling. Just like they are soaked in diesel.