Log burner

[Trainee neophyte]

resinous wood can be burned safely, but it requires intentionally hopping up the stack temp once a day or so - opening everything up, letting it run hot for some period of time and then shutting things back down.

Can is sort of like a lot of things - you can do it. I doubt most people are committed enough to do it practically, though. We only burned hardwoods and still found ourselves with the fire department at home (despite an annual cleaning) when we changed from an efficient low stack temp stove to something decorative (switched over to oil in the 1990s). The amount of "stuff" left after cleanings was still enough to create an uncontrolled chimney fire and upon accumulation part of the way down, swell the chimney shut.

I don't think anyone uses stoves like that these days (fortunately). Their magic back then (perceived) was that they could slow the movement of air through the stove significantly (lowering the stack temp and burning a load of wood much longer and leaving more heat in the house), but the tail end of the burn didn't have oxygen to complete - even hardwoods became a huge problem with it. All of our wood was always seasoned at least a full year, covered on top of the stack, sides open and out in the open. Just a bad stove design because it didn't allow what's mentioned above - something to burn the volatiles out of the stack.

I have a monster wood burner but it was made by a Greek metalworker with absolutely no concept of fire design. It's cast iron, quite ornate, and appallingly inefficient. To make it vaguely worthwhile, I put a damper in the chimney, but this does exactly what you say - it slows down the chimney air velocity, traps oxidised gases in the fire, makes the burn inefficient, and allows lots and lots of tar to build up in the chimney. Even worse, the chimney is a stainless steel pipe with two 90° bends as it goes through the wall (no builder understands how to put a chimney through a roof, it would seem), which allows the tar to condense out and block the whole thing up. I have lined it with fire bricks, and tried unsuccessfully to reduce the huge airflow that roars through all the gaps, but without the damper, it would glow cherry red and burn all the wood in nanoseconds.

The good part of having a damper is it does keep all the heat in the house, rather than it going up the chimney. The bad part is all of the above. Eventually the wood burner will wear out and we will get a proper, efficient stove, but for now it heats the entire house on not too much wood, and I only have to clean the chimney every now and then. 15 years and no chimney fires yet.

 

[D_W]

Our finding was much like yours. The stove for us was half inserted into a fireplace, but stuffed with fiberglass above the top of it to keep the heat in the house (which probably just further lowered the stack temp).

My dad was very stingy (still turns the water off while showering despite having more money than he could ever assign to a purpose) and would never have run the stove hot for an hour each day or every several to toast the stuff in the chimney. I used to enjoy the fact that the stove was inefficient in combusting the top end of the fire as it made hours of a strong satisfying smoke trail, only clearing off for the second half of the burn.

But it was otherwise as you say - though it wasn't that efficient at burning the top end of the gases, it did run a load of 24" logs in a 3000 square foot older house for 8 solid hours (no waking at night to reload) and had plenty left in the ashes to get the next load going. Aside from the stack problems, they were a huge improvement vs. the generation before.

Where I live in the burbs now, gas heat is king (and has been for a long time). I like the ease, but miss the hot spot that you'd get coming in to a stove.