What's the best wood for nice rolling secondaries? It's been my experience that some woods generate them better than others... Maple, cottonwood, Apple... Softer woods, seem to make more secondary flames than say locust or oak, which do burn well, but I feel like they make less showy secondaries. I loaded some thin silver maple splits tonight and they produced absolutely lovely secondaries.
I think all other things being equal, like stove temperature and the moisture content of the wood, that softer, faster burning woods like pine will be more apt to produce nice rolling secondaries than harder, slow burning hard woods.
LOL, gotta sit on a milk crate to see mine, the stove is kinda low to the floor, but I'm noticing eastern white pine can really form some big puffy rolling clouds of burning gas and the swamp maple tends to ignite mostly right at the tube but can look more like a gas stove flame. Oak seems to output less gas and burns off in little intermittent puffs and streams. Course, I don't sit in front of the stove watching it much as it is in the wrong room, so I might miss some of the shows at different burn phases. I don't have much of a built in cushion for sitting on a milk crate for very long. We might replace the little box stove with no window with a 17-VL this year as it is on sale at ACe and the burn tubes on that might be more visible.
Doug fir works nice. I noticed more in the first hour of burning more although its often more than that the load is more soft woods. But hardwoods, I get the logs being like big embers. Some more so than others. But those can have great secondaries too!
