Expert Advice for Wood Heating
Save time, energy and money with these practical tips for getting the most out of a woodstove.
October/November 2008
By John Gulland
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Why not heat your home with a woodstove? Wood is a renewable fuel, and it’s often cheap and local, too.
CORBIS/G. BOWATER
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Considering the amount of work involved in full-time wood heating, it just makes sense to burn efficient fires. The payoff is lower cost if you buy your wood and less work if you process your own. When you make smoky fires a thing of the past, you’ll never again worry about flammable creosote causing chimney fires, and you’ll need to sweep the chimney less often. The door glass of your stove or fireplace will stay clear longer, and there will be less chance of smoke roll-out when you open the loading door.
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Let’s see: lower cost, less worry, less maintenance and better indoor air quality. Do those advantages make it worth your time to try out some new wood heating skills? I thought so.
The secret to high efficiency wood heating is to pay attention to the smoke. When a piece of firewood is heated, it begins to smoke. The smoke is made up of sticky tar droplets and some combustible gases. If a piece of wood were heated and allowed to smoke until only charcoal remained, more than half of its energy content would be gone — up in smoke, you might say. It is important to burn the smoke because any that escapes from the firebox unburned is wasted fuel that will stick in the chimney as creosote or be released as air pollution. Wood smoke is not a normal byproduct of wood combustion, it is waste. Visible smoke at the top of a chimney is always a sign that energy is being wasted.
Tips for Lighting the Fire
Starting a wood fire can be a frustrating experience, and when a fire fails to catch it can even be embarrassing if anyone is watching. But, by using the right techniques and materials, you can have complete confidence that every fire you light will take off immediately and burn reliably.
First, consider a key rule that applies to all wood burning: The wood must be dry. No fire will light and burn reliably if the wood is damp. By dry, I mean that the wood’s moisture content must be less than 20 percent.
Is the wood dry enough to burn? Here are several ways you can tell:
- Look for checks or cracks that form at the ends of the pieces as wood dries.
- Consider the color. Wood darkens as it ages, from white or cream color to gray or yellow.
- Split a piece, and if the fresh surface feels warm and dry, it is dry enough. If it feels cool and damp it is too wet.
- Bang two pieces together: seasoned wood sounds hollow, wet wood sounds dull.
- Burn some: wet wood sizzles and bubbles at the ends and dry wood doesn’t.
The old way to light a wood fire is to bunch up some newspaper, place some finely split kindling on it, put some bigger pieces on that and light the paper. This “bottom-up” approach can work provided enough paper and fine kindling are used. However, this method has two serious drawbacks. First, as the paper burns the pile will collapse and the fire might smother itself. Second, you have to keep opening the stove door to add more wood until you have a respectable fire. I don’t recommend this method because it is too smoky, labor intensive and messy.
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