Yes it does, but it's only an issue on really cold days. I figure that I've still got 3/4 tank of oil left from last fall's fill and it's just silly to not use it for an hour or so once in a while.
If you like a machete you will love a corn knife. It has the same long sharp edge but has a square blunt tip instead of the curved tip of a machete. For raking inside your stove it will be easier to use.
You can get away with that in Kentucky, but not in the now officially Frozen North.
Did it this morning when it was -6, I'll do it again tomorrow when it's supposed to be -12. When it's this cold, I'd rather run the the furnace for an hour than pile wood on a heap of coals. If I didn't have a furnace, I'd use space heaters while the coals burned down. I gave up trying to convince myself that I can heat exclusively with a stove, but I can come awfully close.
Yeah, having central heat or a lot of electric space heaters takes care of the problem, but I'd frankly rather not spend that kind of money just to deal with charcoal. I don't get big pieces of charcoal, but lots of small ones mixed in with the ash. I take a couple shovels full of the mixture out in the morning and stash them in an airtight metal ash/coal bin on my hearth that completely stifles the live ones in an hour or so. When it's full, I take it outside and throw it around on my steep and often slippery drive. Good thing about snow cover is it makes it a lot easier to dispose of ashes that may still have a few live coals in them. lol.
Could you explain this to me? Because I don't get it. People with open fireplaces would all die overnight if this was such a big problem, wouldn't they? (I don't mean the poster's idea of a coal heater, but just the general paranoia about CO here.)
It is a lot of work, and by this time of year, I'm beginning to get really tired of it, especially trying to keep the heat up in these gawdawful temperatures. Neither my boiler nor my stove can cope when it's double-digit below zero, as it has been all too often at night these last few weeks, so I have to run both -- cursing and swearing -- to keep the indoor temp from dropping and dropping and dropping.We used those coals in my driveway also. It's on a grade so they did more good there than setting in the stove when our heating needs were more than they could give. I never have had to take coals out of our current stove but there was always 8 or 10 days a year that stoves we had in the past just wouldn't keep up so I culled the coals. To each there own but it's a lot of work heating with wood. If on the rare occasion (a handful of times in the last 6 years) my furnace kicks on I feel defeated.
If they get too much, you can also dump them in an airtight bucket, seal it up to suffocate them then use them in the summer for BBQ'ing.
At least that's my plan
