Colder here. What's your temp? What ya burnin?

8 OAT at 6:30 am, going up to 24 (In-Accuweather now says it's 6). IAT was down to 64 when I got up, so I loaded some Spruce. Surprised my wife didn't crank up the thermostat in the middle of the night.
I'll fill the stove with Ash for the day by about 8:30.

 

About 8 outside now and on the rise heading for 22.

Now about the snow.

Total over the whole storm (I use the term lightly) was only about 9". Not so bad at all!

Temps with the wind were almost at -10, then the wind died!

 

21
Had to throw another blanket on the bed last nite. Bedroom trends cooler than the rest of the house running the shoulder stove.
Mix of good hardwoods in the stove.

 

We were estimated to get from 1" to about 6" of snow, but ended up with maybe 1".
Still cold, but not in the house.

 

Threw some maple in this morning. Temps in the 30's with wind chills in the 20's. Just enough wood to throw a little heat and keep it going. Looks like the temps will drop throughout the day today with the wind picking up, lows in the high teens over night. Will make sure to load the stove with oak and black birch for tonights over night burn. Keep warm!

 

Mid 20's to mid 30's and clear.
Tossed a skinny load of ash and mullberry in the owb last nite.

 

21F Heavy frost last night. Burning 200yr old oak.
Absolutely no moisture content. Does not even register
on the meter. Have to really watch the air, it will take
off in nothing flat. The heat it creates is amazing.
Really getting spoiled w/this wood.

 

It is 9am and I have 10 degrees on the thermostat on the back porch in the shade. There is a slight wind and that wind is darn cold. I have Ash and Maple burning this morning. The Wood Gun did great last night with large splits of Cherry and Ash put in at 9:15PM. Still had some red hot coals at 8:15AM.

 

20 this morning sunny with some snow on and off. Maple uglies and some 5year old wood from a neighbor that I’m not sure what it is. Hey it burns and throws heat

 

It's snowing---it's snowing!

 

Oh it’s 70 inside

 

39 now but dropping..first fire this year

Sent from my LG-H901 using Tapatalk

 

Finally filled the stove, mostly, and ran it all night. The burn looked like this:



You can see the combustor settle down around 12:45 AM (shown in the graph as 00:45 or so along the bottom line). Then a pretty steady firebox burn until just before 6:00 AM when I opened the draft about 1/2 to burn down the coals. The volatilizes in the wood were done burning off around 2:30 AM, this is when the combustor temp. drops to the firebox temp. because there is no more fuel (smoke) for the combustor to burn. That is the end of the wood burning phase and all the rest is charcoal. Finally a pretty steady output with a very even dropoff in all temps. as the charcoal is consumed.

The stove was about 3/4 full with no coal bed whatsoever so this is basically a cold- start fire. If there had been a coal bed, the beginning of the burn would have been much more even.

Now here comes the part with a lot of debate: how long was that burn? Certainly the stove was still 'hot' at the end but it was not putting out enough heat to keep up with the house and so I consider the end of this burn to be about 2:00 or maybe 3:00 PM, which would make it around a 16 hour burn but I think we can all see that this is very much a judgement call, which shows just how useless a manufacturer's listing a "burn time" really is. If I had left the stove alone, and called the 'burn time' the time that the stove was warmer than the room it was in, I guess it could have been a 48 hour or more burn but that would be useless as far as the stove producing useful heat.

At a wild guess, the wood was 1/2 silver maple with the rest oak. Overnight temps. dropped to below freezing and this was enough of a fire to keep the house warm. It will be colder tonight and I will run another graph starting with a full coal bed, all oak and a packed firebox.

Brian

 

Sitting at -9 C or -15 C if you count the wind. That's 15 F and 5 F. Nice weather for the stove to start breathing well.

 

Very windy here and the temp. is dropping pretty rapidly. Burning silver maple while I am here and can reload the stove as often as needed.

Temp. in the house dropping slightly so I just kicked the stove to run a little harder; flue damper closed all the way but opened the draft from 2 notches open to 6 notches (the first big notch, or 1/4 draft). Secondaries kicked in, the firebox temp. went way up and the combustor temp. dropped off by quite a bit too. In other words, I just took the stove out of pure cat. mode and put it in hybrid mode. Collecting all the data so will share with you folks later on.

Brian

 

WTF, BDF?? How did you get a readout? Some computer attachment? That's phenomenal!! I'd like to know how many times my gas log fire comes on when I'm away from home (I use it as backup when I'm at the salt mine all day and the woodburner burns down)...great technology!

 

No, it is a stand- alone readout / recorder. Genuine [cheap Chinese knock-off] of a real instrument. It looks like this:



They are all over Ebay for around $125. Runs on 4 AA batteries or a 'wall wart' (one of those cubes you plug into the wall and provides a low DC voltage to the unit). In addition to the readout, it has both low and high limit alarms for all four channels. It uses K-type thermocouples to sense the temperature and records the data on an SD card (I think it is SD, anyway a common flash card for cameras, video recorders, etc., cheap and available anywhere). The data is stored as ascii and I drag it into Excel to produce the graphs.

I use it in both real- time to see what is going on at the very moment as well as to record data so I can see what the stove did overnight or by day when I am not here. I have learned a LOT about how to run various woodstoves with this device. Once you learn how to read the data, you can see exactly when the volatiles (the gasses) are done burning off of the wood and it enters its charcoal burning stage, how both draft and damper setting affect how the stove acts and a host of other things.

The unit has four channels and I use them for 1) Combustor temp. This is the temperature immediately above the catalytic combustor. 2) flue temp. This measures the temperature of the gasses exiting the smokepipe at the chimney thimble. Very useful for NOT starting a chimney fire as well as getting a good understanding on how much heat is being 'thrown overboard' and going up the chimney. 3) the actual firebox temperature. This thermocouple sticks into the firebox and measures the temp at the top of the firebox just before entering the combustor; this is useful to watch the combustor 'light off' because only when the firebox temp. drops and the combustor temps. rise is the cat. actually lit and working. And the last one, 4) is the stove top at the hottest point. This is more or less how much heat the stove is putting into the house, and combined with the flue gas temperature is an excellent indicator of how efficiently the stove is running.

I have also changed out the flue gas reading for a room temp. reading so I can see if the house is being maintained, or has gained and then lost temperature overnight. Most times, the house is not steady in temperature but gains temp. until the gasses are all burned off and then slowly cools while the stove's output drops off. But it is impossible to tell that without the recorded data because when you wake up and it is 69 in the house, you have no idea if it was 69 all night, 75 at some point, or was actually lower and rose to 69.

I have more than one of these units and used one extensively two years ago when I installed a new boiler and hot water tank; it proved invaluable in stopping the boiler from short- cycling, getting the most heat out of the least oil, and allowing the boiler to go 'cold' for as long as possible between firings just to maintain hot water.

Brian