Newsgroups: misc.rural
Followup-To: poster
From: bernie@bpc.uucp
Subject: Problems heating with wood

Well, amidst general calm here on the farm I'm discovering that if I don't
get a LOT better at managing the fireplace it is going to be a long,
cold winter.  I've run into a handfull of problems, for which I'd
appreciate advice, suggestions, wisdom, etc.

Recall that what I have are fireplace inserts.  The downstairs one has
a thermostatically controlled fan that circulates air through the
plenum.  Mostly, when it is making 'hot' it all works fine and
generates a reasonable amount of heat.  If I can get up the energy to
get the upstairs fireplace going, too, [it has a simlar insert], that
should actually make a fair amount of heat.

I've instantly observed two things about heating with wood:
  1) it is a dirty business.  It messes up the house, and keeps me pretty
  messy, too.  [the mess is not from the heat, but from the effects of
  carry loads of wood about, messing with the ashes, futzing with the
  logs on teh fire, etc].
  2) it requires a fair amount of attention: if I ignore it for two
  hours the thermostat will turn off [pending my nudging the logs and
  generally stirring things up some]; if I ignore it for six hours, the
  fire will virtually go out.  It is not a real big hassle, but for
  example the other night I watched the Celtics game and totally forgot
  about and ignored the fireplace [the TV is in a room at the other end
  of the house, and that room has baseboard electric].  When the game
  was over, I came out to a VERY cold living room/diningroom/kitchen
  area.  Clearly I needed to pop out at half time [at least] to keep
  the thing going and happy.
  
Within that context, I have a bunch of questions about this whole process:

1) I'm having a lot of trouble keeping the fire going and happy [as I
mentioned above].  One of the problems is that I don't quite know how to
manage the firebox.  It is really depressingly small: only about 16" wide,
by about a foot deep by a foot hight.  I have a bunch of seasoned wood
[delivered last week] that seems to do a fine job.  My problem is that
when a 'current' crop of logs burns down enough to give me enough room
to cram another log on top, that is actually far enough along that there
isn't enough heat, quite, to get the new log blazing away [smoldering
yes, blazing, no], and so the fire dies down until I do a fair bit of
poking at it to get the new log to catch.  Then I'm set for an hour or
two, until this whole thing cycles again... what's worse, is that it is
just-barely doable if I 'catch' the fire when I can just fit a new
log in.  If I actually forget about the fire and let it burn down some,
then there's virtually no hope and I need kindling shoved in over the
coals or something like that to get it going again.

My feeling is that it shouldn't be this fragile, time intensive, and
difficult, and so I'm wondering if I'm just doing something wrong or
[as usual] overlooking the obvious or something.  [e.g., a simple response
might be "your logs are too 2#$%@$# big you idiot.  Split them so that
you can get them in sooner", but I dunno...


2) How do you split logs?  I wandered over to the local hardware store and
picked up a maul [6#] and some sort of wedge, but I'm not exactly sure quite
what to do about it.  I had a log that was annoyingly too large: it took
up almost the WHOLE firebox, and so it was clear that it wasn't going to
fly, so I decided to try splitting it into pieces.  Now, I _think_ that
"all" you have to do ["all", hah!] is stand the log on end, position the
wedge over its center, and pound the thing in.  But real-world logs [at
least _my_ logs] don't have flat bottoms and parallel ends, and so if
they will 'stand' on end at all [most chunks wont] the top surface is,
as a rule, not going to be particularly close to horizontal.

In general, how do you split the things, and specifically, how do you
hold up a log so you CAN split it.  I don't even know, quite, which end
of the maul to use for what [I've been using the flat side to whack the
wedge...  I have no clue what to do with the blade side].  It seems to
me that a lot of my fire problems would be a LOT lessened if I could
just split down the wood I got so that instead of have 6"-8" round logs
I had nice quartered wedges, and so getting proficient at splitting
looks like a useful/necessary skill.  I don't even know 


3) Where do you get 'kindling' from?   There are lots of places where
I can get a truckload of wood [in fact, I did just that], but I don't
see anyplace that has kindling.  Returning again to the above problems,
the one thing that helps the fire a LOT is having some small stuff that
catches quickly [and burns fairly fast], which I can shove in the
bottom over the coals to give the whole fire a quick boost.  What I've
been using is the leftover wood from the framing in the factory: lots
of bits and pieces of 2x4s [usually two or three inches long], but
I'm starting to run out and I don't know exactly what to do about it.
[on the other hand, the 2x4s burned *great*: so one alternative is just
to go and buy a 16' 2x4 and chop it up...:-)]

If/when I get good/better at splitting, will I be able to split up
the logs into small pieces?  If not, where _do_ you find the small
stuff to coax/start the fire with?


4) What is the right strategy for setting up the fire for overnight [or
if I'm going to be gone all day or the like]?   I usually try to get a
_real_ good fire going, and that's fine: the house is all toasty-warm
and it is great if you want to get up in the middle of the night... but
that also guarantees that the logs will be long burnt-out by morning,
and so not only will the house be cold [anyway!] when I get up, but
the fire will be sufficiently completely-out that it'll be a nuisance
[and take a while] to get started again.  It occurs to me that a different,
and perhaps better, strategy would be to close down the air-vents and
try to get the fire going as _slowly_ as possible.  This will get exactly
_zero_ heat into the house, because pretty quick the thermostat will
shut the fan off.  BUT... it might allow the fire to 'coast' all night,
so that maybe, even, all it'll take in the morning to get the sucker
going again is to open the vent, throw on an extra log or two and stand
back.  It doesn't seem quite possible to keep the house warm all night
AND still have useful-fire left in the morning...

Thanks!!
  /Bernie\
Newsgroups: misc.rural