I do not know about the rest of guys and gals but I do not have firewood that is too dry. I stack all my wood even the kiln dried stuff I scrounged out side. If it is out side it will have some moisture in it. It has been my experience that the dryer the wood I have the less smoke it produces. If you are concerned with the fire being to hot then what we do is turn down the air supply but according to the article the less air will create more smoke. I did not read any thing about secondary burn in the article although there is a mention of EPA stoves. I myself do not buy it.
I couldn't even read that article....kind of like listening to a certain female politician trying to speak.
I believe there's some truth in it. I heat with gasification and storage. Gasification boilers gain a lot of the efficiency by burning their own smoke (1,350 degrees plus). I don't want to call it luck or good planning but with my wood drying system, I can get the wood well below the 15% moisture level. The Jetstream boiler is a forced combustion pressurized fire box that allows only a certain amount of wood by gravity into the combustion area. If the wood is under 15%, the amount of wood that enters the combustion area has to be reduced or you get the smell of burning creosote downwind which is not pleasant for the neighbours! A diagram of the insides of a Jetstream. The Jetstream burn Chamber The Jetstream Chimney burning at maximum efficiency.
Hey campinspecter thanks for a well thought detailed counter perspective. I guess every rule has an exception. now my question how does turning down the amount of wood used in your system a negative? You’re using less wood with a lower MC?
It's really a gain in efficiency in the range of 5% to 15%. I'm not burning wood to dry out that remaining moisture trapped in the wood.
The way I read that article is that firewood can be too dry because EPA stoves are "tuned" to run best on 15-20% MC wood...any less than that the wood off gasses too fast and overwhelms the stoves ability to burn it properly. According to Daryl, the designer/builder of the Kuuma Vaporfire wood furnace line, gasification takes a certain amount of moisture to work properly. He was telling me that my wood may be too dry when I was complaining about short burn times a couple years back.. I looked it up and it seems that there may be a certain amount of truth to it...although from what I found, it seems like the research was focused more on large commercial wood chip fired boilers...so not sure if that applies directly to firewood/wood stoves or not. But just as the article said, "too dry" firewood is rarely a problem most people ever have...
As usual, there is an exception to every rule. Still, do we want to live by the exceptions? Perhaps it is better to just single out the rare exceptions and deal with them rather than try to flatly state that wood can be too dry? What Allan has is what I recall discussing with someone who designs things like this many years ago. My hat is off to that company who has these stoves.
I believe wood can be too dry, I don’t believe it will ever be a problem for most people. The best wood stored normally is going to do is reach the EMC(equilibrium moisture content) Backwoods Savage might remember a fellow from Texas who had a Woodstock stove and he was having trouble with the wood offgassing too fast and causing big back-puffs. He was burning some really old wood, maybe fence posts?? It was believed his wood was “too dry” if I remember right.
Your memory is pretty good. However, what we found out is that it was not the wood which caused his problem. He simply thought he was running the stove right, even though he had been corrected, but was not running it right. It turned out that when he though he was engaging the cat, he was actually doing it backwards. So he started the fire with the cat engaged and then opened the bypass. Holy smokes. It is a wonder he did not burn his house down!
