Coals are a pain when you don't have time to throw a piece of pine in to burn them down. It's too cold out for the coals to adequately heat the house at night with babies sleeping.
Get yourself in a pattern where you're "coaled-off" and ready for a full reload right at bedtime. When you have a heavy bed of coals, I find that raking them loose and piling them up near the air source and opening up the draft can help stoke them, which leads to lots of radiant heat as well as a faster burn-off time...do that an hour or two before you put the final load for the evening in and see if that helps, but be careful as to not burn them completely down and have trouble with a re-light. I once went an entire winter burning nothing but honey and black locust, some here may remember that. There was definitely a learning curve involved with that........once I got it dialed-in, it was smooth sailing. You'll find black cherry likes to coal up too, and it takes a similar pattern to burn it as well.
I feel your pain. My wife does a great job for the most part, but sometimes she doesn't see the importance of log placement when reloading, especially in the ZC fireplace. I tell her for a quicker relight and hotter burn to create a "valley" in the coals and ash and lay the logs across that valley, the air will get under the logs and it will light off quickly. She kinda just put a the logs right in the stove (without making the valley) and tells me "something is wrong with the fire, it won't burn right"... Ugh.....lol
This made me laugh because just a few weeks back, I brought a bundle of my homemade heart pine firestarters in, as well as a bundle of kindling. I put them in old pans on the hearth. I come home from work one afternoon and ALL of the stuff (both the firestarters and the kindling) were GONE! She used it all to get the fire going.....I told her the pitch pine was for STARTING fires, not for kindling... She just looked at me with this puzzled face and said "what's the difference?"
I feel your pain there. I have a bunch of old(er) growth ponderosa pine that is essentially farwood that I use for specific purposes. It magically gets burned lol
Thans for the tip Scotty! I' in my first year burning full time, and I've been struggling to get the harder woods to light off since switching to them in the past few weeks.
I'll try and get my wife to help me do a video of the process I use. Maybe she can memorize it that way as a bonus....lol
Just splits from the heartwood of the pine beams I got from a barn I tore down. The barn was built around 1868. The beams were trees that were well over 160-180 years old when they were harvested, very dense forest trees. It's literally like fossilized pitch. I split them into a bunch of slivers with a hatchet, and cut them into 5" pieces. I have a whole case of them stored in the barn. I bring handfuls in when needed, and keep them in an antique sheet iron pan on the hearth. This time of year I rarely need them, the fires never go out. all it takes is one little piece and some kindling to get a fire going..... One quick hit with a match and they burn furiously. Like gasoline!
A whole woodstove full of pitchpine just might "clean" your chimney in a way most of us dont want to do.
