Heating with Wood

Once you find a good wood furnace, you need a good, safe chimney, and all areas around the furnace need to be safe from heat. A hot wood furnace can actually catch the wooden studs inside a wall on fire through the plaster/drywall. Cement board is an easy, inexpensive way to protect the areas near your stove. You can glue or nail right to the wall. There are many different ways to make or install a chimney, some require a professional and others just need some good directions, common-sense helpers and a free weekend. Each house and each location in your house have certain requirements for safety.  It’s best to research this by asking friends and neighbors who burn wood how they have theirs set up.

After you have a good, safe setup, you need lots of practice to get to know how your wood furnace works. Of course, you can burn it too hot and the chimney pipe can actually turn red hot. One of the best things to prevent this overheating from occurring is installing a chimney pipe/ductwork thermometer. This has a magnet on the back and I stick it right to the chimney pipe about half-way up. It has a dial needle that shows the temperature of the pipe. You can easily see when the fire is getting too low or too hot – and thus prevent the red-hot pipe scare.

To control the heat you can adjust the dampers – which are like vents in the door that let in or restrict the amount of air to the fire. Too much air and you’ll get the fire too hot; too little and you’ll starve the fire. With fire you need fuel, heat and oxygen. Starve it of one and you’ll get nothing. Fuel, of course, is the wood. Heat is referring to enough hot coals in the furnace to ignite new wood you put in. If you open the stove and there is a pile of red-hot coals, the fire will continue to burn and catch the new wood you put in to replenish it.  Once you fill your furnace, you should have a good 8 to 10 hrs of burn time.

When you get home, fill it up again and top if off a few hours later before bed. So you only tend it three times in a 24-hour period. It takes practice though, because you have a lot of factors like the particular kind of wood used; hardwoods burn hotter and longer, the dryness of the wood, the setting of the dampers open the dampers more and you let in more air, which makes it burn hotter but faster – maybe so fast that when you come home later the wood is completely gone. Then you’ll have to start a new fire which will require more newspaper, kindling, etc., until you once again have a hot, stable fire.

After you get all these factors working for you, it’s an easy, enjoyable thing to do in the winter. We have had many people ask us, “Isn’t that thing a pain? You know, cutting, splitting, and hauling all that wood, cleaning ashes and maintaining the stove all the time?” To us, having this as our daily routine is not a burden, but merely another seasonal activity and habit like planting and maintaining the garden in the spring and summer. You definitely won’t take heat for granted when you are as responsible for it as you will be when you heat with wood.