Loading a piece of wood at a time.

During warm days and cold nights (fall and spring weather) i usually make a fire about 10 at night. Fire burns all night keeping the house warm during the cold overnight hours. The latent heat from the stove and the warm house usually keeps the house warm all day,especially if its sunny outside. One stick at a time,sounds like a second job. This way im only burning 1 full load a day. It s easy on the wood pile.

With an EPA stove, adding one split at a time every 30-60 minutes doesn't work, at least for me. Just as things are heating up to get secondaries going, adding a piece cools it down. I find the only way to burn efficiently is to fill the stove, let it die down over 6-8 hours, then load it up again.

disamatic said:

Yes that would work great, unfortunately I get up for work at 150 in the morning, so I to bed a bit earlier, but start a fire around 3_4ish. By the time the ole lady fires up the oven and what not well you can imagine the house temp.

Click to expand...

Shoulder seasons are typically "restart" seasons for wood stove heat. I burn small hot fires and let them go out more often once or twice a day depending on need. But during the mid-range between shoulder a full on 24/7 burning I have put in one or two splits on top of a hot coal pile and burned with more primary air to keep it going. Just a feel thing and your needs will dictate what to do. In a perfect world one would have access to piles of shoulder wood like pine and aspen to burn and save the primo stuff for deeper winter burning. I currently do not live in a perfect world.

Inefficient . . . but no real harm as long as the fire is hot enough.

Personally, during shoulder season I just live with the fact that I am going to have to light a fire in the morning and a fire in the evening . . . it's no big deal, except for the fact that this fall our shoulder season has been very long which means I'm going through a lot more Super Cedars . . . of course I'm not complaining since a longer shoulder season means nicer temps and weather.

Build the fire before you go to bed, and let the little lady light it off and dial the stove down when temps drop in the evening. She'll probably enjoy running the stove, if she doesn't have to haul the wood.

I make no effort to keep the stove going all night. If it does, ok, but I don't stuff the stove full or anything. We prefer it coolish for sleeping, anyway. In the a.m., I light off fires in both our stoves. By the time breakfast is ready, the house is warming up.