Wood Stoves: what's new in the world of wood heat.

Shoulder seasons are tricky. Once you turn on the big masonry heater, you can't turn it off. Our house has good south exposure, so even in winter if it is going to be a bright sunny day I either skip the fire (and am a bit chilly in the a.m.), burn a short fire (which stillsometimes leaves me chilly in the a.m.), or burn normally and open windows as necessary. I tend toward the last option, as I like thefresh air anyway.

I don't have a problem lighting the fire(s). I burn softwood, since it is most available here, and the Tulkivi lights really well due to its design. Only takes a couple minutes, some newspaper, a handful of kindling, and one match.

The Pellet stove is on a thermostat and is set to go on at about 5 am in the winter to take the edge off, then we get up and light the Defiant. Once fire is going, what we do depends on the OAT [outside air temperature].

The advantage of the pellet stove is that when it's tolerably mild it's easy to flip on for a bit of supplemental heat - it's got three output settings/fuel burn rates, and you can run it for an hour and when it cycles off, it's cold.

The downside to the pellet stove is that being electromechanical, it's almost mandatory to service it - we pay a pro to do this annually to make sure it's working properly - it's worth the insurance - and this year, the repairs fixed some problems we did not even know we had, including a bad igniter and control board.

I like being able to use both systems as they tend to compliment each other and both are renewable fuels - we get the pellets made from local beetle kill pine and our wood is also beetle kill for the most part, with some salvage oak and fruit wood.

The downside to a pellet stove is that it's loud - at least ours is. There are two blowers in the design, and I have found that even at the lowest fueling rate, the stove self-cleans best on high blower - the buildup in the firebox is minimized.

Got home about 8 last night and decided that since it had finally turned cold (been dropping down below freezing at night) I would try to build a fire and see if it would keep the house warm enough against freezing temps outside. It was 56 degrees inside when I started, 40 something outside. So I did not turn on the furnace.

Took about an hour to get the stove putting out some heat using compressed sawdust logs with a fire I could walk away from. Before midnight I put on the third compressed log and went to bed. Got up about 4 AM and added a half log - the temp was 63 at the thermostat but warmer in the room were the stove was at.

This morning I got up and the fire had mostly burned down so I put another half log on. The temp was 60 at the thermostat.

I need to find a better way to transfer heat from the stove around the house. The ceiling fan moves the air down from the ceiling, but not between rooms very well. Each bedroom has a transfer vent above the door, but no fan. The master bedroom is next to the room the stove is in so it will be warmer, but I am sleeping in a guest bedroom until I get my big captains bed put back together (still unpacking stuff).

I think when it is cold outside like it is now I would need to have a larger fire than three compressed logs and use a box fan to move the air out of the stove room. I also need to do something about the large windows in the stove room is in - I am looking into getting window quilt type insulated roman shades for those windows, I know they probably lose a lot of heat.

Cool concept, but not an easy owner-retrofit.

Do you have your fans pushing the hot air down, or pulling it up? They should be set so they are pulling the warm air up. This "helps" the natural air movement rather than fight it, creating better circulation in the room.

Regardless though, I also have problems moving the warm air around my house, I have a very closed off house with separate rooms. I have to have my stove going for a good 24hrs before the rest of the house will get noticeably warmer. My next house will have a much more open floor plan.

My mom had a house with a stove & Magic Heat in the living room, and her bedroom at the end of a long hall on the windward end of the house. It got really cold in the BR, and roasting hot in the LR, so I took a desk fan and placed it at about the middle of the hall to one side pointing toward the living room. It worked: the cool air being pushed toward the LR brought the hot air down the hall.

Not a real sexy solution, I'll admit, but cheap & simple.

It feels like the air is being pushed down (I can feel it from here) and I would think that is what you would want. I have seen these various air circulation "tubes" that bring hot air down from the ceiling.

I don't think the problem is hot/cold air exchange, the ceiling fan seems to handle that - it is moving the air from the large stove room to the front room. There is a large 10+ foot wide hallway between the two rooms and that area is open and it has the ceiling fan in it, but I noticed that naturally the stove room is significantly warmer than the front room.

The front room is the room I decided to make my living room with the TV/etc. and the larger stove room with the picture windows I am not sure what that is going to evolve into yet, but it is where the stove is and it is next to the master bedroom.

I am sure that a box fan or something can transfer the air between the two rooms, I just haven't unpacked everything yet.

For any Woodstock soapstone fans, they are working on a soapstone masonry heater that is an easy refit, assuming you can support the incredible weight of it. Come to think of it, it should probably be out by now?
http://woodstocksoapstoneco.blogspot.com/2011/01/masonry-heater.html

You bet-- as long as you have the footer already in place, or are setting it on a slab. I imagine there are a host of other considerations to deal with also that aren't coming readily to mind.

Notice I wrote "easy", not "possible".

"Easy"= Set the stove to required clearances. Plumb up & cut required vent holes. Set support box and interior & exterior vent piping-- brace if necessary. Light fire.

"Possible"= a brick-laying project in my living room with its 2x8 @16"OC floor framing.

With my particular house it would nowhere near as easy as simply building a brick wall. YMMV.

Frost line is somewhere around 24" here (when we actually have a winter), 200 miles north of Denver.

I cannot imagine frost is to blame for their basement slab movement-- I would wager that it has more to do with clay.

As for wood heat, I'll stick with my little Bosca for now.

Lottery winnings and a custom home? Bring on the masonry stove and the personal pizza chef.

Question for you folks from California, any experience burning eucalyptus or avocado wood? Good to burn either straight, or mixing with hardwoods. Only personal experience is from burning the pine and oak we had growing up.

We are hopefully moving into a home with a wood heater here soon, and those seem to be the common woods on CL.

Wood burning may be regulated by the air quality board depending on where in S CA you live.

Ukes burn hot and fast, sappy, poppy stuff, IIRC.

Your right it's not frost heave.

It's Expansive Soil.
It should be rephrased, expensive soil it's more accurate.

The house is above 3k feet, which I believe removes any restrictions. Looks like I will be avoiding the Uke, thanks.

We are all well into the wood heating season at this point, enjoying the warmth that wood heat brings. With that, I thought that I would share some thoughts on buring the "bio-bricks" now that I have had some time with them for anyone who may be interested.

Pro's: easy to handle, very little pre-burn mess, low smoke, very low ash, low pollutants (if you care), good heat, they are dry, no bugs in them wither so they can be stacked in your cellar, etc without concern. They take up less space than a cord of word.

Con's: a bit more expensive than cord word, depending on your type of stove they are a bit of a pain in the ass. My stove is a front loader with the draft in the door. These bricks expand when they burn and often fall against the door and the draft pushing smoke/fumes out of the stove. A top loading stove would be better for these in order to get a full load in the stove.

That's it for now and it is January so there is more burning to come.

I've been burning them too.
So far, I've burned about a ton of them.
I agree with you. Cleaner burning, no bugs and they stack so well.

Around here, a cord is $250-275 dumped in the yard.

The bio-bricks are $325/ton.

I'll use them again.

This is my first year with a pellet stove as well.
I'll use four or five tons of pellets this year.
I won't know until a get an oil delivery, but I've used probably 400 less gallons of oil so far, and I'll use no kerosene. Last year I used 250 gallons of kero.

The pellet stove will be paid for this year in oil savings alone.

I should have done this a decade ago.

Nice Springer...

The "latest thing" for my friends who heat with pellet stoves is an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).

Some just buy a new one and get on with it - pellet stoves seem to have pretty modest requirements so you don't need a very big one., But one of the guys on NASIOC who works at home a lot :bought a large older UPS from a data center for a few hundred bucks, then replaced the batteries for another few hundred bucks. So he can run modest daytime loads for 4-8 hours before he even gets out the generator. He likes this setup because the switch over is automatic and will also run his sump pump (much higher load than a pellet stove). He has a portable generator (Honda 2000i) and only has to use it when there's an extended outage. His dream is to add solar panels to charge up the UPS, don't know how feasible that is.

OT but I learned in passing that the city of Fairbanks, AK has a UPS that can run the city for up to 15 minutes, giving them time to switch over to a backup power system.

I have a pellet stove in our house, the no electricity = no heat kindof buggs me, but thankfully I live in an area where I don't have to run it all the time and if I really needed it I have an inverter on my truck and a generator that either one will more than run it in a pinch. My truck has 6 batteries total (4 golf cart and 2 regular) to run an inverter that is capable of running my table saw among just about everything in the house.

I didn't have a dry place to store wood this year and I wanted to try the sawdust logs anyway. During XMas break I decided to heat only with the logs. I get them for $2.50 per 3 at the local grocery store (actually the cheapest place around shy of going direct to the manufacturer which is local). It was fairly cold during that time - freezing or less during the nights - and I would burn 6 to 9 logs per 24 hour period, keeping the fire going more or less around the clock (I would start it from coals in the morning).

I burned about twice as much as I thought I would. They are a hassle for me to get started at first, but once going they work okay, most of the time I can get them going from coals okay.

In comparing them to firewood, you really have to compare them by BTU, in which case they don't compare well for cost.

Once the weather dries out (late spring), I intend to put some concrete pads on two sides of the shop (front and side) and have a lean to put over the side to store wood and other stuff under, then get some cords of hardwood to burn next year. But I will still rely mostly on the electric furnace I have for weekdays - it is just not worth it to build a fire in the morning before I leave for work, and I only need heat when I get home until I go to bed and turn the heat completely off - unless it is really cold out.