Question: When should i reload ?

It did well over night. Plenty of coals by 6 in the morning. the house still at 70 and the stove top at 220. Pushed the ash to the back and raked the coals to the front and middle. Set a couple of cedar splits on top for good hot cleaning burn. Didn't work quite as planned, the splits burned hot for a while but then petered out and instead of burning down the coals they added theirs. We had north east wind this morning and that means down drafts. The house smelled a little of wood burning and it did outside also. Took a couple of pics of the chimney but it is hard to see. However, the lovely coal bed didn't get wasted i put my new old cast iron pan on it to burn the crud off and it worked very well.
Do you think it will be safe to burn some pine tonight. It's not quiet as dry as the other wood only around 16 to 18 but it has no bark. It's the only light weight wood i have right now.

 

Yup, as long as you don't cook yourself out of the house.

 

Still burning nice dry pine here, most likely for another week or so until I run out for this year.

 

Better be or I am in deeeeep troublePine is all I've burned for weeks. I just put another 2 weeks worth on my porch. Well seasoned pine is a pleasure to use in my setup. Enjoy

 

Pine will likely get toasty a little quicker than the hardwoods - I wouldn't count on the controls needing the same settings, and it'll burn out quicker, leaving just ash if you don't get up a little early.

If you need to burn down coals, pine is the ticket. After a thorough burn, pine leaves only ash behind. Saved me many times from having to shovel out good hot coals from the owb. Now with the IS, we've been burning exclusively pine so far. Very short coaling stage, so we relight often. No problem in the shoulder season.

 

With any modern EPA stove the species of the wood is far less important than the moisture content. Most of the pine I find around here is super knotty from a poorly trimmed residential area, and bit of a pita to split....But when I do get some it dries easy, and burns nice and hot with great rolling secondaries

 

with one round left in the magazine.......................never want to chance an empty chamber

 

Our pines were huge and beautiful but have been destroyed to saw dust by beetles we have very few left and the saplings don't seem to make it. Black Locust on the other hand grows like weed. We used to cut it down and just toss it on the clean up fires because of the thornes etc. Now i wished we hadn't.

 

Funny how that works eh?

It's great firewood.

 

You don't make creosote at the end of a burn. There's no volatiles left to make creosote with. You can let the fire coast right down to just enough embers to relight some kindling if you have lots of kindling and a few splits on top of them and get the stove back up to an efficient in-the-zone burn temp again.
You obviously won't want to do that when it is real cold out when you want to be making heat . You'll be putting splits on a bigger coal bed sooner and likely not using kindling at all.

 

Tell me about it. If i hadn't been so after cleaning it all up we now would have twice the firewood. Of course i did get the "told you so" from my better half.

 

Oh good that works out well. The cedar that i burn is so dry i don't think it creates any creosote. The oak is dry but it always smokes a little when it first starts burning.

 

Temps have been down into the low 20s overnight. 40s during the day. Not real cold but enough to get the draft going better.
They say to load the stove up. Here is what i found. I load the stove around 11:30 NS (wood too long for EW, need to cut some) with 3 fairly large splits of dry oak on a cedar coal bed wait until it gets burning then turn down. Stove temp around 450 - 500 or so.
If i use two larger pieces that works also. There isn't much room above for more. That leaves me with coals and a stove of around 200 - 250 in the morning after 8 - 9 hrs. House at 67 - 70. I tried to load smaller pieces and cross the top ones at an angle because they are a bit long and the effect is the same. The stove gets hotter initially but in the morning it's pretty similar only the coals are smaller. I seem to burn less wood with two larger pieces.
In the morning i load 2 splits of smaller cedar let them burn until the stove temp is at least at 350 and then add 1 gnarly big piece of cedar. That keeps it going at a nice temp for about 4 hrs around 450 at first and then slowly down to 300 or a little less until i put another big piece in.
Left side of the window is usually dirty by morning sometimes both sides. The cedar burn cleans most of it up during the morning.
No idea yet what that does to the chimney. Will clean it on the next warm day and see what falls out.
Would love it if this works out. Will never run out of cedar while we don't have much pine.
Let me know if this sounds ok to you.
Have been cooking on it and love that big flat surface.

 

I just load the stove N/S. It's a N/S stove.
IMO, criss-crossing splits is something you do in an outdoor fire pit for aesthetics and because many circular open fire pits have a circular air input.
I'll save the larger splits for overnight knowing that the trade-off for less surface area burning is a lower output but longer burn.

I think you'll find if you don't try to get 8 hour burns out of a 5 hour stove and you have well seasoned wood your chimney will stay fairly "clean" or "safe" if you will.

If I burn pine I don't quite fill the stove all the way. The stove top gets to max and to max for too long. I have to adjust the air way down compared to maple and oak. I also found I get a stream of smoke if I mix 50/50 oak and pine and adjust the air for the pine. Except for pine kindling to get a fire going again, I don't mix pine in. One or the other. I'll burn pine if I'm around to fill the stove every hour and a half or want to have short hot fires twice a day with no fire in between.