Finally pulled the trigger...

Oh yeah. At 450°, she's lit.
Steam (white "smoke" that only travels 20-30') is normal when it's really cold and fire is really hot.
A thin blue-ish, long streak that travels 100' or more before it dissipates is smoke.

 

Yes

 

Cat stoves are new to me… It’s nice to know so many have my back! Thanks fellers

 

I posted this earlier over in the "red maple" thread. It also applies here.
(And I probably said it here before...but)


I am rethinking all my burning practices and theory. Mostly due to using a cat stove.


I've been reaching for the softwoods more and more for these cold snaps.
Like just this morning, its was in the single digits, and the house was starting to cool down already, (after a 2am reload of oak). There was a ton of oak coals left in the stove and it was holding over 300° so i threw on 4 pieces of red maple and set the air at 50%. The house warmed up 5° in 2 hours.
This cat stove will ring every BTU out of the wood and will leave you with (oak) coals 12-18 hours later, but when it's cold out, I'm finding the softwoods work out much better. I'll probably need another 4 sticks mid afternoon and I'll be digging past the oak to find the red maple, ash, and poplar.
I might even hit up the pine/aspen camping wood pile or run over to the neighbor's and grab some pine from his pile.
The cat stove works great on softwoods.
Non-cat stoves, maybe not as much.

 

I've experienced the same thing...time to re-load (house cooling) but firebox full of coals (this is not in a WS product though) load some low BTU wood and roll!

 

Music to my ears! I’m not a big red oak fan anyway… I don’t usually get called to remove nice trees like Hard Maple, White Oak, Hickory, etc. I have an abundance of spruce, pine, soft maple, cherry, ash, elm, etc… The primo wood that I do end up with is very little and I use it sparingly.

On a side note: I got word my Supah Split should ship any day now sans extra wide production table. Opted to not wait a few months on a supply chain issue and went with the regular table instead. So I expect to be processing wood with it as soon as I’m able. Expect another thread soonish.

 

Bringing in elm and ash tomorrow, been mixing it with the oak and working well for the most part, dont have access to silver maple any more.
Gonna splt some oak much smaller to try but pretty easy to send the stove into launch mode with those splits.

 

Second reply:
A branch had fallen in the yard off a tree that had been hung up in the tree for a few months and looked pretty well dead before that. Cut it up into lengths and stuffed the stove.
Had the same bright white smoke pouring out of the chimney for about 20 min then it was all gone.
Is your wood on the borderline of being fully dry do you think? Overall I don’t believe you have anything to worry about it.- and if you do, then I’m right there with you.

 

In the end, all wood has about the same energy content..... if one measures the wood by weight instead of volume. So a ton of pine and a ton of balsa and a ton of oak all have about the same energy levels but the volume varies hugely, assuming the moisture content is low. Given that, hardwood, especially very dense hardwood, will provide more heat per unit volume and so a wood stove full of oak has far more energy than a wood stove full of balsa simply because of the weight difference.

The other variable of course is how efficiently that wood is burned. If particulates are going up the flue, the burn is less efficient than a clean, basically 'invisible' burn at least going by the Mark 1 eyeball. A very dirty burn is of course less efficient yet. And moisture content makes a very large difference.

At first blush, if you are getting more heat overall from soft (and therefore relatively light) wood I would say the hard wood is not burning efficiently. Nothing wrong with burning softwood of course, just that there is less energy available per unit volume (one stove full, one cord, etc.) A very few stove manufacturers give a metric about how much the firebox will hold in wood weight and assuming they are not hedging the numbers...... it is actually a good metric IMO. More weight will always mean more energy, all else being equal.

All of that said, I am in southern New England where hardwood is the basic firewood wood and we pass by trees such as pine as being poor stove woods. Pine is often used for outside fires though, such as campfires and general outdoor fires. On the other hand, softer species are quite common to the west / southwestern US as hardwoods are not common enough to make a ready supply for wood burning.

One can accelerate the coals burn by adding a little 'under grate' air to any top or front draft woodstove and go a long way to balance out the burn so the majority of the coals are consumed as the wood itself is. It takes more under- grate air proportionately as the outside temps. drop and the demand for heat from a stove is increased.

 

Yes it can be but again, air introduced lower in the stove or below the grate (if the stove has one) goes a long, long way to speed up the start of a fire in a woodstove. Of course if it is 55F outside, by the time large splits get going all the doors and windows will be open so smaller splits are a nice option

 

I do not remember which stove you are getting but honestly I think having any modern, relatively air tight stove truly running away is not very likely. Depending of course on the size of the splits, what wood is used, etc. A stove full of cut up 2 X 4's is going to get really hot, really fast. But any reasonable size splits, especially of hardwood, are generally not a problem

I have an Ideal Steel Woodstock and changed from a medium height masonry chimney to a fairly tall insulated SS chimney and the draft change was actually amazing. Suddenly a warm chimney really pulled on the stove, and at the deepest of winter, about 0F around here, the stove was not responding even with the draft fully closed (and that is not fully closed but that is the way the stove is built). So I put a key damper in the stove just for those few times when I wanted more solid control during extreme temps., and that has worked just fine. But again, this chimney has a very high draft and this was never even a consideration with the older chimney, even at nine below zero.

 

I am having a little trouble even thinking about it.....

 

It’s at around 18% so kind of in the middle. I think it was just a combination of being really cold and me not used to checking the chimney much.

 

Yes, absolutely but have you ever seen barcroftb and me together at the same time. Hmmmmm? HMMMMMMM?

 

Going to be runing an Absolute Steel.

What do you mean by reasonable size splits? By that thought process, are "unreasonable" size splits very small splits, or very large?

 

Pretty similar BTU's/lb...what I found surprising is that everything else being equal, softwoods will actually have just a bit more BTU's/lb. (but still take up more space for the same BTU potential)

 

I'm in the same boat with a secondary air tube stove on the ton of coals left by my heavy hitting large split overnight hardwoods. I typically use smaller splits of the hardwoods through the day when I'm around with the primary air opened up more to help burn down the coals. Then about 2 hours before bedtime, I rake all the coals to the front and toss in a couple pine cookies with the air wide open to get the coals burnt down to where I can get a nice overnight load in again at bedtime. This seems to work well for us, it's just that I have to run down to the stove about every 1-1/2 hours most of the day. On really cold days I can usually work in another "full load" burn mid-day and then get all the coals burnt down by bedtime.

Sounds like both the cats and the air tube stoves are similar with having to try to keep in the high heat zone when cold out. I guess it depends on the area of the house you are heating with the stove.

To keep our furnace from running during weather below freezing I need to keep the secondary tubes active with a STT at 600* or higher because once the large hardwood splits finish gassing and are in the coaling stage, I'm only getting 350* ish STTs which won't quite keep the house toasty at the colder outside temps. I'm thinking about a second stove at the other end of the basement to fire up during below freezing weather.

 

Sounds like you are a good candidate for a wood fired forced air furnace...

 

Yep, go big or go home