Clean burning: Is it possible to avoid white smoke entirely?

Burning wood produces water. The hydrogen in the wood combines with oxygen in the air to produce water, which goes out the chimney along with some carbon dioxide and some excess air. Even with absolutely dry wood, you will have some water vapor, and if atmospheric conditions are right, the water will condense and become visible. Burning gasoline also produces water, and that is why in cold weather you see white smoke coming out of a car even though the car may be running perfectly.

As I understand wood combustion, the volatile parts of the wood burn up first, leaving behind carbon (charcoal). Carbon becomes carbon dioxide in the stove, and carbon dioxide is invisible.

So, my answer to the original question is no, you can not prevent a little white vapor coming out the chimney until the wood has burnt to charcoal.

 

Thats exactly what I see sometimes. Thanks for dropping in and commenting on that Dennis.

 

Backwoods Savage nailed it, as usual. I have an older stove and it will emit smoke for around 10 minutes when starting a fire and on the reloads. Rarely see any smoke once it gets going. Avoiding all smoke is impossible I think.

 

I see no smoke emanating from any of those chimneys and my name is not Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf.

 

Lots of high tech words there but i think we are thinking the same. I spend a lot of time outside the house and glance up occasionally. What my thoughts on this were: when i load the stove i shove all the coals to one side and then load the stove with fairly large pieces and try to space them away from the coals. I then load more wood on top the coals and load it as full as need be. My thought were that the bigger pieces are having whatever moisture is left baked out of them resulting in white steam/smoke coming out of the chimney. Once everything inside gets up to temps and starts coaling no more smoke. Or something like what you said.

 

Interesting. If I understand correctly, you increase the stove temp before reloading the stove. This enables a complete burn once you've reloaded the stove? I need to give this a try today. I am guessing this is not possible after an overnight burn where you only have a bed of coals?



Jason from RI

 

White smoke? Have no idea what you're talking about... ...

 

To be clear, I do get smoke on a reload, I just try to eliminate as much as possible. If I ramp up the stove temp before reloading, it helps to get everything going faster, getting me back to a smokeless burn sooner.

You'll get the most smoke right after you reload, before the flames appear. I like to using kindling even on a reload, and if I get the coal bed hot enough, the kindling will ignite before I even have a chance to toss the new splits on. This means no heavy white smoke, at all! Just the thin translucent variety that disappears 15' from the chimney.

Now, if the coal bed isn't hot enough to easily ignite the kindling, I'll use a bit of newspaper to kick things off. Doesn't even need to be under the splits or anything - just tucked in the side, next to them. Often one piece is enough to get the new splits to ignite, but I'll add more as necessary, until I get steady flames.

 

Lighten up, dude.

Behind all the mostly irrelevant smoke you toss up here, you totally miss my major point, that "steam" is not smoke and that it's easy to distinguish them. Who's contradicting whom?

Simple fact is that steam is not visible, but condensing water vapor is. Again, lighten up. Bonsoir.

 

Lets not get all full of hot air about smoke guys.

Everyone has a right to an opinion even me with my dumb and wrong ones!

 

You make it sound like that happens on a regular ongoing basis. 'Taint necessarily so.

Before you launch into semantics, we'd be looking at what's coming out of the chimneys. Once you get a clear sense of how the effluent matches to stove behavior, little additional observation is necessary.

Kinda like using a moisture meter, once you note how your perceptions relate to measurements, the MM gets used less.

 

Somebody needs to lighten up.

Actually no,,,, carry on CT. This has become an entertaining, and informative (Thanks Stuckinthemud), thread. I would hate to deprive you of the opportunity to participate and play in the mud with everybody else. Hopefully you have a laptop though, so you'll be able to both, sit outside and watch your chimney, and quote my posts. Carry on.

 

Kinda possible. I push all the coals hot, cold and medium into a pile on one side and then open the dampers for a bit to get that coal bed hot and then load.

 

You reminded me of the coal furnace days again. If I didn't do what you just described, before adding 4 shovel fulls of coal... it just wouldn't be hot enough to ignite the new stuff. Wood responds every time for me when I use your method.

 

Here's an example of smokey moments for me. I've been testing some new ideas these last few weeks, here's a couple graphs to illustrate what I said in my post...

So, visible smoke usually goes along with a CO ppm measurement around the 4000 ppm level. Not always, sometimes lower ppm will be visible smoke, but that's a decent baseline in my experience. In this test run, I did pretty well. Put the load in on top of just enough coals to ignite but not so much as to flare the fuel and run rich and blow smoke. There still was probably a puff or two of visible smoke right at that spike in the CO line right at the start. You can also see the efficiency drop off quickly as more CO is left unburnt. Overall though, it was a good run...



In this one, I thought I had it, but as you can see at about the 22 minute mark the fuel burns enough to "drop", or reorganize itself in the firebox, and I get a big blast of wood gas that overwhelms the secondaries and again, I go rich. You can see the o2 drop dramatically as the CO spikes, not enough air to consume all that wood gas. At that moment, there's visible smoke coming out of my chimney. It doesn't last long, the stove flushes the rich gas and settles back in, but I had smoke.




If I'm doing really well, it looks like this...

 

Interstate 81 in Va was a disaster today so I did a bunch of detours on route 11 and some other roads to avoid 81 and 11.. Could not believe the amount of smoke rolling out of chimneys right in the middle of these towns. I hate to see a little and some of these places were just rolling white/gray smoke like you wouldn't believe. I'm new to this, but I feel like I'm doing pretty well thanks to the information I've gathered here and my father in laws 3 to 4 year pile he gave us..

I just couldn't believe what I was seeing from those chimneys. I pay much closer attention to that now and they were smoking out entire towns..