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Show 6 ' CRISPY TIMES - JANUARY 1994 _ Saving Money While Heating with Wood With the beginning of winter, here are a few thoughts on how to get more heat from the wood you’ve cut or bought for your wood burning stove. The most important piece of information it Lakes to determine how efficiently we are managing our wood burning stoves is easy to acquire. All we need to do is walk outside and look up to see how much smoke is coming out of our chimneys. Once the fire has been burning for awhile, there should be no black, oily, or white smoke visible. If you can see any more than just a wisp of steam that soon disappears, you are pumping unburned wood up your chimney. Not only is that the same as pumping your hard earned money up your chimney, but this same smoke is also making creosote deposits on the inside of the chimney. First, a few words about fire. Roughly speaking, there are two stages to the wood burning process. In the poison carbon monoxide (which is the poison that kills people when they leave their cars running in the garage with the doors shut). Modern “air tight” stoves drastically accentuate the inefficient burning of wood. With these new stoves the amount of air can be easily restricted to yield poor burning in both of the bunting stages. This was much harder to accomplish in the older “leaky” wood burning stoves. Another problem is that many The Work of Christmas When the carols and merriment are stilled, When the ornaments are packed and stored, When the season’s magic is gone, teristics needed. 4) Think about your fire. 5) Use your wood burning stove in conjunction with a furnace, so that you can get the best of both: the romance of burning wood and the convenience of low—cost propane. Types of woods: PITCHY WOOD_S like ponderosa and pifion; CLEAN, FAST-BURNING WOODS like aspen and juniper; STINKY WOODS like cottonwood and tamarisk; and BEST WOOD OF ALL, oak. Small amounts of pitchy woods are great for starting your fire and putting a lot of quick heat into your house. The stinky woods aren’t quite so bad if they’re in a hot fire with lots of air. Aspen is a great wood for getting the longer-burning woods like oak started, or for shorter fires. For long- When the feasting is over, When the company and friends have returned home, The work of Christmas begins: initial phase, the cold wood is heated to the point where a part of the wood (called the volatiles) is boiled out of it and burned with the fresh air coming into the stove. The pitchy woods have a lot of this. Later in To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To succor the refugee, To rebuild the nation, To bring peace among sisters and brothers, To make music in the heart. —Donovan Roberts the combustion process, when all the people want their wood burning stoves to work as effortlessly as a propane furnace. This is simply not possible, and is why many Castle Valley residents are tired of the romance of burning wood and are installing propane furnaces. There is a temptation to load up an air-tight stove with lots of wood and then turn down the damper of clean burning (with enough air and so the stove smolders all day long. All oxygen) is little more than carbon this smoldering is unburned wood being pumped up the chimney. The secret of efficient wood burning involves more effort managing our stoves. 1) Cut firewood into smaller there isn’t enough air in either of these stages, we get some pretty nasty by— products. Clean buming wood has almost no odor. Not enough air in the first stage yields by-products that smell like “wood smoke.” Not enough air in the second stage yields the odorless of heat value and very little creosote depositing. Every couple of years, the Division of State Lands and Forestry has a green oak sale up on the back side of the La Sals near Taylor Flat. This is by far the best deal going on firewood. The green oak cuts easily with a chainsaw and then splits very easily once it has dried. No other wood volatiles have boiled away, a very different type of combustion takes place. At this stage you find glowing lumps of coals and embers burning. These are basically lumps of carbon which can combine with air to yield more heat. In both of these stages, the result dioxide and water vapor. However, if terrn heating, oak is by far the best to burn, with lots , pieces making a smaller but hotter and cleaner burning fire. 2) Add smaller pieces of wood more frequently. 3) Mix types of wood to give the fire charac- burns as cleanly as oak. Good, long-lasting coals are produced. Very little creosote is deposited on stove pipes and chimneys. While I am still burning wood myself, I am also beginning to look around for a deal on a large propane tank. I’ve already scrounged a furnace from the county dump, and I look forward to having an alternative to wood burning. The people who have already converted to propane make a pretty convincing argument that propane is really cheaper, if you do your calculations accurately and count the costs of your time and the wear and tear on your vehicle, chain saw, and back. —Jack Campbell (reprinted from Merry Times, December 1992) |
