This time of year there is an exquisitely erratic timer providing a pop-up message in my head several times each day, starting in the morning and continuing until just before I go to bed. The message is simple: Time to check the wood stove.
Think of wood heat as a highly interactive and relentlessly demanding way of keeping that unhappy state known as freezing your ass off at bay. To operate a stove properly you have to learn certain skill sets, and accept and shoulder a list of recurring labors. By properly I mean that your house is comfortable 24/7. Not too hot, not too cold, not full of smoke or on fire.
People who run a stove, as opposed to an outdoor wood furnace, generally have their stove in their main living area, and that area has to stay fairly warm to have enough heat to distribute to the rest of the house. That room, and the area by the stove, will be the warmest, and the place to not only bask, but where you go to warm and dry gloves, hats, coats, shoes and boots, dry laundry, and do some cooking.
I grew up with wood heat, and since the early Seventies wood heat from different stoves has provided at least 95% of my cold-season heat. In our largish, funky home-built house in Northern New York state we’re heating about 1450 square feet all the time, keeping the room that serves as pantry, root cellar, firewood storage, and other storage in the low forties, adding another 400 when my wife’s upstairs workrooms are opened up during the day, bringing them up from the fifties to seventy. Sometime in November I start one final fire that will burn 24/7, not going out until sometime in March.
Before I get to fussing with the stove itself, a few words about firewood. We usually burn around 16 face cord a year. A face cord is a stack 8 feet long, 12 to 24 inches deep, and 4 feet high—about 40 cubic feet. That measure assumes wood of regular length. What I buy and cut is mostly 16” long, but can vary between 9” and 24”; longer lengths can be a problem for regular box stoves, but I can burn stuff up to 32” long. The majority of what we burn is cut-dead ash and elm, augmented with smaller amounts of maple, cherry, oak, and hickory.
Sixteen face cord makes a pile taking up roughly 640 cubic feet—one that would fill a room 8 feet wide, 10 feet long, and stacked to an 8 foot ceiling. That wood has to be cut, hauled, split, stacked, and stored in such a way that it’s kept dry, and is easily accessible. We have stacks outside under roof overhangs and tarped over to protect them from rain and snow. From there the wood is brought into our garage by electric hand cart, and stacked in the two wood racks in there, taken together 12’ long and just under 6’ high. The wood is wheeled into the living room once a day on a modified hand cart.
That sounds like a shit-ton of work, and it is. When one rack gets low we haul wood in to refill it, and start pulling wood from the other rack. This way the wood has a few days inside to further dry before use. Dry wood is the ticket, wet wood means a laggard, smoky fire.
Now, the hot heart of the matter: the stove. A wood stove is a fairly primitive device; it’s a steel/iron/cast iron container with either one or two drafts to let air in, and a damper to control how fast the smoke—and the heat--is let out. Most stoves are either square-sided boxes, roughly spherical fireboxes as in a pot-bellied stove, or long or upright cylinders, as in a barrel or cannon stove.
Ours is (as shown above) an ugly old plate steel barrel stove, the cylindrical firebox almost 3’ long and 16” across. The upper part of the firebox has an internal baffle, bringing the smoke from the rear back toward the front, where the door is, up through a welded steel pipe that carries it to the upper barrel. That’s a half barrel, round on the bottom and flat on top. At the far end is where the stovepipe hooks on. Both the top and bottom chambers radiate heat. More heat comes off the six feet of plain stovepipe that mates with the triple-wall pipe that goes on up through the ceiling and roof. The damper is in that plain stovepipe, a couple feet up from the stove.
How hot does the stove get when it’s running? That depends on several factors, and this where you get into the art of wood stove operation, and it is an art if you want steady, reliable heat.
Air is fed to the fire by the draft or drafts, giving it the oxygen it needs to burn. The more air, the hotter the fire burns. The more wood fuel inside, the bigger the fire. The other end of the stove is hooked to a six inch pipe to carry the smoke away, which is a good thing, otherwise you’d end up stumbling and coughing through a room—even a house—full of smoke. The tricky bit is that when smoke leaves the stove, so does heat—heat you worked damn hard to conjure. That’s where the damper comes in.
That’s a round cast iron disc inside the stovepipe that can be turned from the outside, opening and obstructing the path outside. Dampers generally have a couple one-inch holes in them to allow at least some smoke to escape even when closed. A properly dampered fire lets out just enough smoke to keep the stove from smoking while keeping a majority of the heat in. Now some stoves do have an internal damper, like the flue in a fireplace, but the advantage of using one in the stovepipe is that you’re wringing a bit more heat from the stovepipe. While you want to get as much heat out of the lower iron mongery as you can, you do need some heat going up that pipe to provide draft, the movement of hot air into the cold outside air sucking the air behind it upward.
In the spring and fall, when it’s in the high thirties, I can stuff a couple logs in the stove, close the draft and damper nearly shut, and have a slow fire that burns hours, heat coming from the stove, but so slowly that I can lay my hands on the barrel. I’ve had a single fire last 24 hours, with enough coals left to bring the fire up or keep it going for another long haul.
Last night it got down to 8° F. I loaded the stove around midnight, throttled it down for the night, went to bed. This morning it was nice and warm, and I had the remains of three logs and a gallon of hot coals left. Tonight it’s supposed to go down to between 15 and 20 below. I’ll mix in some heavier wood—oak, cherry, hard maple--but do the same thing: stuff it full, throttle it down, go to bed, and wake up to a warm house. I don’t believe I’ve ever run the stove at even half what it can do, not even at 40 below. And I don’t get up in the middle of the goddamn night to put more wood in the stove.
Warming yourself by the stove after coming in from the cold from shoveling, snowblowing, or other winter recreation is pure sybaritic pleasure. Another pleasure/convenience is cooking with it. Many things can be simmered and cooked on the top of the stove. Chickens, roasts, winter squash, and other things can be slow-roasted or braised on the rack between the barrels. I wrap potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets and the like in foil and bake them inside the barrel—sweet potatoes come out soft as custard, with a mild smoky note. We don’t own a clothes dryer; if we can’t dry laundry outside we use the two clothes lines above and behind the stove. Not exactly House Beautiful, just plain practicality.
So this time of year I am adding wood every hour or two, checking and adjusting the draft and damper, adjusting the fans that move the heat to the rest of the house. When it’s really cold I have to dig out ashes every couple days (the deeper the ash bed, the slower the fire), operation on days over 30 call for less tending and more frequent chimney cleaning because of creosote build-up.
By spring I will be really tired of the continuous wood moving and stove tending and cleaning, but having a warm house, no matter how cold it is outside is a primitive luxury. If the power goes out, as it does sometimes, the only difference is I have to deploy a couple battery-powered fans to help move the heat around.
I’ve left out a lot of stuff about the vigilance fire safety demands, managing all this work when you’re in your seventies and weigh under 120 pounds (the reason I went from wheelbarrow to electric cart), how fans move the heat, the constant battle with dust and crumbs of bark, chimney cleaning and more, but I’ve probably rambled on too long as it is. Still, seeing colder weather coming put me in mind of all this, and I thought maybe some folks might find it interesting. Sure hope so.
Now if you’ll please excuse me, I’ve got to go check the stove.
