Wood Stoves

[caleb]

Falling temps have me thinking about getting a wood stove.

I stopped by my local fireplace store last night, and saw a bunch of neat models.

The basic decision seems to be whether we go with a conventional wood stove (likely a Hearthstone), or one of the smaller upright stoves (likely a Morso or Jotul). The smaller stoves look great and have super low clearances to the back wall, but I'm a bit leery of committing to logs that are 12" or less. On the other hand, it's a small house and I live in the city: this ain't Little House on the Prairie.

Has anyone here been down this road recently? If so, what did you decide?

[ides1056]

Jotul, Morso, and then everything else. I heat five houses with wood. All of it 16" in length. Split down to 4-6", very dry. Backup heat is propane and oil. There's a fair bit of work in it, but this is the byproduct of landscaping I do on our land, clearing around fields, and maintaining woodlands. There are some really beautiful German stoves I have seen, but can't recall the names of. Some good American stoves, too, that you can throw a big hunk into. Wood is labor intensive and fairly messy. But if you have it and don't mind the work...

[72gmc]

Can you have wood delivered (or pick it up) in the size you need? Or would you always have to cut it down?

[caleb]

Can you have wood delivered (or pick it up) in the size you need? Or would you always have to cut it down?

Custom cut and delivered is do-able, although I'm not sure how it'd go getting seasoned wood short enough at this point in the fall for this winter.

In the long run, I intend to cut it myself.

[guido]

I had a nice Jotul stove that kept me toasty for a couple of winters 35 years ago. The current ones are even more efficient and emit less soot as well. Lovely ambience with a lot of work to make it a regular thing and not just an occasional event. But you can live the commitment, it is a delight. Enjoy!

[htwoopup]

I love my Hearthstone stove made out of soapstone. I have it at a beach house on an island where getting real firewood is a pita. Thus we have to burn old deck 2 by 4’s. We stack them on top of each other but they still burn out in the middle of the night. The stone stays warm and the house (albeit a small house) stays warm from when the wood burns out and we wake up to restart a fire. The flip side is that it takes a while to warm up the stone for the same reason. This is my second Hearthstone. The first one lasted 15 years until we had the ocean and bay messing around during a hurricane. The second one was put in when we cleaned up the house from the storm. It is still going strong with an occasional dollop of furnace cement on a joint here or there and it was put in 22 years ago.

[j44ke]

We're getting a Morso 5660 insert put into our new house. The architects have used them in several of their previous projects, and they are confident it will provide the supplementary heat required while the radiant floor heat is coming up. An earlier house of theirs has a Morso pedestal stove that can heat the entire house. Part of that is the house design, but those stoves are also pretty amazing.

As far as shortening logs to 12" or less, a friend uses an old chop saw. Pretty quick and since you are cutting hardwood, blade stays clean enough it doesn't bind.

[j44ke]

Any way to run it directly through a wall outside rather than through the entire house?

[caleb]

Any way to run it directly through a wall outside rather than through the entire house?

The short answer is "yes," and people do it.

The long answer is that a bunch of exposed pipe outside isn't ideal and is likely to cause draft problems, especially in a really cold climate like Minnesota.

To get a good draft, you want a high pressure differential (i.e. temp differential) as close to the end of the flue as possible. Here's a better explanation than I can give, with all the math: Chimney Draft A bunch of cold stovepipe near the stove is likely to kick smoke back into the room as the pipe is warming up. It'll run fine once it's warm, but getting it warm can be a pain. People do it, though. There's a stove on my block vented out of the living room wall with 25 feet of bare pipe outside.

One common workaround is to build an insulated shroud for the pipe on the exterior to keep the pipe warm. That's a pretty significant construction project though, especially if you want it finished to blend reasonably well with the rest of the house.

Keeping the pipe inside for two stories has it's own issues, most notably that it occupies physical space, and has to be boxed in on the second floor to meet code.

I think I've figured out a way to route the pipe through my second story now, which will allow me to keep the pipe inside almost to the peak of the roofline. That'll only leave four or five feet of exposed pipe to clear the peak of the roof by the required three feet. Fingers crossed.

The house we're putting this in is on the windward side of the highest hill in the city, so I don't want to do anything to provoke the draft gods.

[xjoex]

Any way to run it directly through a wall outside rather than through the entire house?

My first gas Jotul vented out the wall . It worked fine, admittedly it looked weird and bugged me until we sold the house.

[ides1056]

the "stack effect" is your friend

pellet stoves are something to consider as well

[caleb]

We ended up delaying this project so that we could get a stove that meets 2020 EPA standards. Despite all the handwringing, the newer stuff is pretty much always better. And for an activity that's optional, reducing emissions as much as possible seems like a good idea, especially in an urban area.

The higher end Scandinavian stove companies have been making the case that their stoves are carbon neutral or negative for years, i.e. a log burned in their stove emits less carbon than that same log left to decay in the woods. Assuming that's true (it sort of boggles my mind), and that the stove offsets the emissions from my natural gas furnace, a wood burning stove seems like an okay or even good environmental choice.

But I was recently struck by Bill McKibben's article in the New Yorker arguing against using biomass to produce electricity based mostly on the idea that while biomass can be carbon neutral over the long haul, the long view isn't a luxury we currently have:

For all intents and purposes, in the short term, wood is just another fossil fuel, and in climate terms the short term is mostly what matters. As an M.I.T. study put it last year, while the regrowth of forests, if it happens, can eventually repay the carbon debt created by the burning of wood pellets, that payback time ranges from forty-four years to a hundred and four in forests in the eastern U.S., and, in the meantime, the carbon you’ve emitted can produce “potentially irreversible impacts that may arise before the long-run benefits are realized.”

My read of his argument is that is only applies to cutting down living trees for fuel, and not to using dead and down timber, or leftovers from a tree service that are going to be cut regardless.

But maybe I'm thinking about it wrong. Any thoughts?

[guido]

Is there enough scrap and surplus downed wood to go around? To make a stove investment worth while?

An air source heat pump makes a whole lot more sense...

[j44ke]

The inside of the stove has a bunch of plates and holes and vents. As the box heats, unheated air gets drawn in at the bottom and heated air exits at the top, somehow without smoke.

The air intake slide control (bottom front) is key of course. When I remembered to shut down the air a bit, I got a better burn rate. Wide open, the wood disappears. Way too hot. The better setting makes more glowing coals. Plenty of heat and the wood lasts longer.

Need more practice. Trying not to burn the house down.

[j44ke]

Wow maple burns nicely doesn't it? I just took all the lower limbs off a maple that's been down for a year and a half and cut them up. The thickest piece is 2-3", but most of it is 1-1.5" in diameter. Made a bag of ash log chips, dumped a pile in the stove, got it cranking and now the maple is cleaning out my stove for me. Wonder if the biggest difference is that the limbs were all sticking up in the air, drying all the way around in a nice sunny spot. Each piece makes a nice "clink" sound when you knock them on the floor. Definitely going back for the rest.

Learning stuff is cool.

[ides1056]

That clink sound, like a bat hitting a home run, sounds like firewood ready to burn.

[j44ke]

Today my friend Jeff and I spent several hours dragging out the last piece of the giant black cherry that fell over in a storm a month ago. First we got it down a small rise in the forest and then up a small rise and then into a clearing where we could load it into Jeff's truck. We used a ratcheting winch (come-along), a strap, some chain, and some rope, plus a couple peaveys and a rock bar (very heavy bar for moving rock). And rollers made out of small trees that got crushed when the cherry fell. Then we used Jeff's gantry, that he made three trees ago and is still going strong, to raise and swing and roll the trunk into the van. 21" diameter at the base but more than that at the top where it split into two trunks. I think in addition to this one, we got nine 8' logs out of this tree. Nice workout.









Not technically about wood stoves, but this tree produced all the cherry wood sitting next to our garage that Jeff and I split a while ago out from the limbs. However, Jeff is a cabinetmaker, so he's going to mill the big trunk to make a dining room table - eventually when it all dries out in a few years.

[Tom]

Jeff is out of his mind right now. A cherry log that big? Never happens. It drives me insane to see a big tree in my neighborhood go down and the "tree surgeons" have no thought of saving saw logs.

[j44ke]

Jeff is out of his mind right now. A cherry log that big? Never happens. It drives me insane to see a big tree in my neighborhood go down and the "tree surgeons" have no thought of saving saw logs.

You said it. Broke my heart to see that tree on the ground. It was huge. But now, most of that tree has been milled into planks for furniture and is drying in Jeff’s workshop (garage,) some is aging as firewood next to our garage and the base of the tree and root ball will be used by a colleague of Jeff’s who turns wooden bowls. Admittedly a fallen tree has a role in replenishing the soil nutrients, but it is also a nice way to honor a great old tree by crafting a creative product.

[j44ke]

Jorn - This cannot be a real photo of a living space. Where is all the stuff randomly covering surfaces (tables, chairs, floor)? This looks like the cover of a scandinavian home and garden magazine cover. Post a photo of this same room perspective during mud season.

Well we don’t have much extra stuff here. And we have many more closets and cupboards than we can fill, even in the kitchen. How we planned it. Plus a super nice Miele vacuum, a fancy robot vacuum and two 4x6 industrial entry carpets from Grainger, one outside and one inside the front door. Oh and no shoes allowed in the house. That cuts down on a lot of stuff. Plus no kids and no dogs. I am often the dirtiest thing in the house and usually that’s just because I am bleeding from something stupid I did outside.