How long do you spend on the morning reload?

Don't be to jealous boys but my stove is usually never ready for a reload at 5:30 in the morning so my wife usually handles it around 8-9am.
The perks of my wife working from home I guess

 

If you got it that way, roll with it. Not jealous at all

 

Hope you didnt take that wrong....... It was meant as more of a joke that my Wife finally has the stove operation down.

 

Its all good, I knew where you were coming from.

 

If everything goes right, I can load and close the air in all three stoves in 30 minutes.

It doesn't always work that way.

 

It's the opposite here. Wife leaves for work at 7:30 and unless the temps are frigid I don't need to reload for a while.
I'll probably reload tomorrow morning, since I'm in the middle of a kitchen remodel and I need to put some exhaust fans in the windows to blow out the drywall dust because I'm workin' from home. No jealousy here.

 

About 2-3 minutes. Open boiler door. Rake red hot coals around and flatten out. Load box up with appropriate amount of wood. Close door. Done.

 

So many factors to consider. The biggest factor I've seen is how the stove was loaded the night before. That will determine what we have left in the am to keep things going. A good load will leave a beautiful bed of coals that I simply put splits in and leave the door ajar for a couple of minutes with the air intake open all the way. Next I'll close the door after a good flame is established leaving the air intake open all the way. After another 5-10 minutes I'll close the air down to normal operating levels. Varies depending on temperature outside.

Now if a good bed of coals is not there in the am, then I have to go through a full startup. Even if there are some coals. Rather than mess around with the few coals in the box, I'd much rather get things moving. This probably adds another 10 minutes to getting it ready for the day.

Now most days I work from home. Which means I'll feed a few logs every 3 to 4 hours. With a good load at 4pm in the afternoon.

 

I guess I'm a slave to the ole smoke dragon.......I spend about an Hour and a Half

 

In a smoke dragon isnt the load almost half burned up in an hour and a half? Or are you burning "good green wood" so it lasts?

 

Last night when I got there to load the Buck 91 I had 220/580 on the meters so I loaded on the fly, no warm-up splits. I had the stove cruising and walked out the door 21 minutes later. Could have just as easily done it in the morning...

 

Having a weak draft I can load hot like that with the 30 without worrying about over fire. On really cold nights, I'll start a load and when the logs are all red and starting to collapse I'll throw 2 big splits on top. The fire starts ripping right away and I can shut the air down almost immediately. Those 2 logs don't have a chance to totally catch fire right away, if at all and the fire just feeds from their offgases. Makes for a long hot fire.

 

I do a few small hot loads to build up a bed of coals...then get a couple good sized rounds going, keepin the stove pipe temp around 450 and stove top around 500....when it's holdin steady I leave for work.....so far when I get home from work it's been 67-71 degrees upstairs.

 

I have to watch that on a cat stove, ceramic cat anyway...to be safe, need to char the wood a little to drive off any excess moisture. That load I did in 21 min, there was not a big coal bed, just some coals and little skeletons of a couple of splits.