Winter's onset
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Submitted by lambert on Wed, 11/28/2012 - 11:31am
I held out on starting the wood stove as long as I could, since I'm a bit short on wood, but I fired it up a couple days ago. So now I'm hauling wood in from the pile several times a day. Good for me, actually; gets me away from the computer and the body problems it creates. Winter is here:
I can tell because of my broken fingernails and the bruised finger where I dropped one of the logs on it.
Maine is a tough, tough state...
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It's wood only for me.
Since I have no other source for heat, I have been hauling wood for a month. I build a fire in the wood burner when the winter rains start and I keep that same fire going for 4 or 5 months. Always keep embers hot and just keep feeding it. We once held the same fire for 5 and a half months.
It's all good since our wood burner is a Norwegian Yodel and they know they wood stoves.
The hardest part is keeping the wood pile dry since we live in very wet rainy North. Calif.
My father had Yodels but replace them...
... for some reason. Basically, I have a big metal box with the circular vents on the front to control the draft.
It's a great moment when the bed of coals is always there, but alas I am not always in the house and sometimes I let it run down....
I know people in Maine who like a fire in the summer for the cool part of the day, just a small one. So theoretically one could keep the stove going year round.
I know people in Maine who
I know people in Maine who like a fire in the summer for the cool part of the day
i spent part of one summer in maine. what i remember about that is the cool part of the day goes from approximately one minute after sundown to about one minute before the next sundown.
Does anyone here have any familiarity
with rocket heaters? I've read of some local people that have built them, and rave about them. What I really like is their super-efficiency.
I have heard good things about rocket stoves...
... from the permaculture community.
For home heating, the issue is apparently storing the heat in thermal mass of some sort. That rules it out for me, because of weight considerations on my first floor, but if I were building something from scratch on permacultural principles, I would probably make it the centerpiece of my house.
Missing something
The rocket heater sounds really good, but I am missing something... How is it that those vertical pieces of wood do not catch fire and burn straight up? How can just the bottom burn and not the whole stack of vertical wood pieces? Is it the draft chamber that allows this?
What am I missing?
My Yodel ( Jodel) has a burn chamber that recirculates the smoke and re-burns any ash within. I have much less ash to haul out than other conventional wood burners. It is the highest efficiency rating of any wood burners I researched.