Wood burning

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A question for all you seasoned woodburners out there (no pun intended!) Does the wood go faster if you only put a few sticks in at a time? A friend of ours has an outside wood burner and he packs it once a day (It's huge, mind you) and doesn't have to touch it again until evening. He packs it really full, has a thermostat in the house and duct work to all the rooms.

It seems with ours that the wood is going so fast (it's an old burner) but I wondered if it was packed constantly if it would burn slower (less air inside?) Thanks for opinions...

Nancy in WV

-- Nancy in WV (CelticFrau@aol.com), February 26, 2001

Answers

His fire probably lasts longer because his stove's probably more airtight. If your woodburner's is a real old one (like ours), there's not much you can do about that.

Fire needs three things to burn ~ heat (coals), oxygen (air) and fuel (wood). If you have a good bed of coals built up for the heat and pile on plenty of wood for the fuel, all it needs is air now. In older stoves like mine, it gets plenty of air so will burn relatively quickly and I really can't regulate it much. Newer more efficient wood burners have a way to regulate the air coming in ~ they can be set to "choke" the fire, letting only a small amount of air in, so the fire burns slower. I don't think that less air inside your stove would have that much effect as it's not really how much air is inside the stove at a given time so much as it's how much air can get in as the fire needs it.

The size of your wood does affect how the fire burns. When you burn one large log, there is only so much of the surface area exposed to the coals/fire where it can catch and burn. But if you were to split that same log into a bunch of smaller logs or sticks, that same amount of wood would burn faster due to more surface area being exposed where it can catch and burn faster, creating more heat faster and thus making more wood burn faster, etc., etc. When we want a hot fire fast, we put a bunch of smaller sticks of wood on top of the coals, not really packing it tight, but stacking a lot of them in there. When we go to bed at night and want a slow fire, we pack the stove as tight as we can with large logs. We pack it not so much so the fire will burn slower, but so we don't have to get up at 2am and feed it again!

-- Wingnut (wingnut@moment.net), February 26, 2001.


if your getting enough heat out of it,, you can close the damper part way to slow it down,,, At night I put a piece of green wood on,, and close the damper to make it last till morning.

-- Stan (sopal@net-port.com), February 26, 2001.

You have to look at it this way an out door stove is alot bigger than an indoor stove.It doesn't matter how much you put in yours(It's what kind of wood are you using).of coures the more you put in yours the less air you have and yours will burn slower also!

-- Norm (scanner13069@hotmail.com), November 02, 2001.

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