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Old 09-26-08, 08:55 AM   #1
bennelson
Home-Wrecker
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: SE Wisconsin
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Default Woodstove for winter

Just a reminder,

If you heat with wood in the winter, now is a great time to tidy up your wood pile and clean your chimney.

You do clean your chimney, right?

Well, if you haven't, better to do it now, then when there's snow on the roof and it's dark all the time!



Here's one of my wood piles.
This is all scrap I get for free from a local cabinet shop. What's great is that it is all SUPER-DRY and almost exclusively hardwoods.

Note that it's covered with a tarp to keep the rain and snow out.

Wood can be a great carbon-neutral heat source which can keep your winter energy bills down, but you gotta be willing to put in the work.

Ideally, wood should be burned at a very high temperature for maximum efficiency, in a stove that can handle the heat and absorb it to slowly release that heat later. That's typically called a masonry stove, Finnish stove, Russian stove, etc.

Second to that is a high efficiency cast iron stove. They are sealed up pretty tight and burn very well.

After that would be a glass-front fireplace. Great for ambiance, ok for heat.

I wouldn't recommend anyone try to heat their home with a standard fireplace. They look great, but require a huge amount of air, all of which has to come in from the outside (cold air!) and then most of the heat goes right up the chimney anyways!

If you have a standard fireplace, seal it up, put glass on the front, or convert it to a high-efficiency natural gas fireplace.

(There are also outdoor wood-fired furnaces. These have other advantages and disadvantages, but almost have more in common with a boiler or modern furnace than they do with a woodstove or fireplace.)

My winter additional heater (main home heat source is a modern natural gas forced air furnace) is a Vermont Castings Intrepid II glass-front cast-iron stove. It's pretty small (requires special wood size) but puts out a lot of heat, and has the feel of a fireplace because of the view of the fire.


In general, it's a bad idea to try to "mod" a commercially made cast iron stove. However, its surroundings and attachments can be modified to improve its use.

More on this in future posts.

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Last edited by bennelson; 09-26-08 at 09:09 AM..
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