Coals burn down

Get your pipe looking like a barbershop pole or even a may pole. Wife may say something different.....? Haha I dunno. I don’t have a wife yet so the negotiations like these aren’t in full swing.

 

Found this so why not bring it back up...






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I have a large air tube stove and the original first few posts on this thread work very well on the really cold days to get the coal bed back down AND keep the stove in high temp output. For overnight I bank some big splits in and pretty well fill the firebox, let it get up to temp with a nice secondary burn going on the tubes, then shut it down all the way. This will hold a high heat burn for 3 to 4 hours then ramp down on coals. I do it again when I get up in the morning and once it ramps down to coals again, I rake them forward and put a couple splits in to get it back up on the "pipe". I work from home most of the time so it allows me to tend the stove more often on really cold days to keep the furnace from kicking on. My stove is in the basement and I use the furnace blower to distribute the heat evenly all through the house. It's working pretty well after tweeking it over the years to get the best air flow through the house and getting the air ducts to pick up the heat from the basement. It's a large two story home and it heats it pretty well. I opted for the basement setup to keep the wood and ash mess in the basement next to the walk out basement door. I also bring in wood 15 days worth at a time in alternating wood racks so it is pretty much all "kiln dried" in the racks down there at 80 to 90* for at least 15 days. I get a bug now and then, but usually harmless beetles that only get in the green firewood prior to it being seasoned for 1-2 years before it comes into the basement. I've had this system going for a few years now and it is working well for us.

I did have to replace two of the air tubes this past summer due to not being careful enough when loading large splits. On occasion I would be a little too careless loading and wang a split into one of the tubes. After 4 seasons of doing this two of the tubes were getting bent to the rear and cracked open. That definitely screws up the efficiency of the secondary burn. I had shut it down last season on a warm day after the tube strike that broke them and bent them back and fortunately they didn't snap in two. This allowed me to get some new tubes on order and finish out the last couple weeks of the heating season.