Shoulder season burning

BG, yup what you said, small or shall I say low BTU wood fire morn and eve with another small load down real low overnight. I leave LOTS of ash in the stove which always keeps some coals buried somewhere for easier restart and a bit of long term warmth. I think the soapstone too helps keep coals for a crazy long time which helps a lot.

Having a good supply of wood left for the first time this year , I'll keep it going 24/7 with very low setting during the day. I feel its much easier than restarting from a cold start for the evening hours. No need to keep hunting for more kindling too.

Right now we have a QF4300st...it was warm today 50* so every now and then I threw on some dry punky wood I was saving for the campfire. If I have to open up a few up stair windows that's what I do, my wife hates it cold and there's no shortage of wood here.

The problem burning times for me is apr/may--- sep/oct when you have those real cold mornings but it can warm up to 70 by 1100. Usually I have a dedicated stockpile of poplar and or willow split up in small pieces. It's heats of fast taking the chill out of the house and doesn't leave any coals...fires totally out by the time mother nature kicks in with our friend the sun.

Just say'en I always burn hot...I just don't add big pieces.

By the time you are burning clean, you are burning mean.

Click to expand...

Yeah BB, and that's the biggest challenge of the shoulder seasons, figuring out how to burn clean with as little heat production as possible. Hot is the key to clean burning.

Yep,I still keep my front-mounted thermomitor at 350 or higher, just means the rec-room gets up to 84 to obtain 66 upstairs. Gotta open a window or move the big screen upstairs %-P

BeGreen said:

BrotherBart said:

The 30-NC only knows one way to burn, 500 and up, so I light it off and let it get up to temp and run down. After six hours the 455 pound pup is still at 100+ stove body temp.

It is gonna be the same with any large firebox stove unless you have a fondness for smoke and creosote. By the time you are burning clean, you are burning mean.

Click to expand...

Yep, that was my perspective as well. I'll be interested to see if the Summit owners concur.

Click to expand...

I concur. What I do is burn it like a mini masonry heater. Lots of little splits and the air wide open...in less than 5 mins there is no visible smoke from the stack by about 30 mins the stove is about 500 or so and reached it's peak, slowly tapers off for the rest of the day start from cold again after dinner.

It can be done, takes a little more effort and lots of kindling but better than smoldering a log at a time with the windows open.

I burn pallets-harwood 50-50 mixture at night and pallets a couple of times during the day. Soapstone allows me to take that break.

80 degrees and low humidity in the living room. Low 70s in most of the rest of the house.

First year with the soapstone stove. What we did last fall was to build a small fire in the morning and again at night using soft maple. For overnight we use mostly white ash. Works pretty good.

Spring and fall burning is a challenge. I burn 24/7 but I do modify my routine somewhat. Since I have a cat stove I must burn it hot enough to light it off. But I don't load as much wood, I mix in some slightly greener wood, turn primary air as low as it will go, and wait later in the burn cycle to refuel, and when all else fails I start opening windows.

Here winter is the shoulder season; the rest of the time we don't need heating. I've just been lighting the fire about 5pm every day. I chop the wood up small 3" x 3" get the stove hot and burn one load. This seems to be enough to keep the house in the 70's until the next day.

Yup, I do small & hot in the AM & PM.
It was in the 50's in the AM here today so I didn't need to do anything house was still comfy.

HEY BeGreen
Your awesome! thanks for making me a new thread.I do find it very interesting how everyone handles the shoulder season.It seems to me allmost everyone does it one of two ways ,probably depending on one the weather and two your stove size.(maybe the type of wood also)
Thanks to all who have given there way of doing this.I have found this web-site very insightfull!
goose

jpl1nh said:

BG, yup what you said, small or shall I say low BTU wood fire morn and eve with another small load down real low overnight. I leave LOTS of ash in the stove which always keeps some coals buried somewhere for easier restart and a bit of long term warmth. I think the soapstone too helps keep coals for a crazy long time which helps a lot.

Click to expand...

I've been thinking about this and paying more attention to what I actually do and it's what I guess I'd call a cat-soapstone hybrid of my answer above. While yes I burn a quick fairly hot load morn and eve, being that it's a cat stove, as soon as its cat-light off hot, I'm shutting down the air a bit to maximize light off and take advantage of the cat. Given that it's a soapstone stove, I need enough wood to get the soapstone warmed up a bit and enough air to get the stone warm as soon as possible, but as I start to acheive that, because of the cat, I can then shut it way down at that point. Generally at the point I'm shutting it way down, I'm passed the main gassification part of the burn and headed towards the coal stage. What happens from there is this really long, slow coast down to just a nice bed of ash covered coals 9-10 hours later and a steadily decreasing heat release as the day and the house warm up. There will come a point when it will just be too warm for that to work. Think it's about another month here in coastal NH.

I prefer low and slow, but then, I'm a lazy cuss that can't be bothered to re-light if I don't have to. Does it smoke more than it should? Not really. As long as the wood is good and dry it doesn't seem to be a major problem.

I run it on Low as it can go and it will maintain a stove top temp of 250-300F. It takes 3hrs to come down and settle at that after a reload. It will be good till the next day and CAT will still be in the active zone. April and Sept for sure are done with this procedure. Begining of May and late Aug pretty common. Average frost free days for the year are 82 Yes creosote in the stove, not in the chimney,still light grey ash. Gawd help me if I was to have a stove fire. :gulp: I could not do this with my old stove.

BrotherBart said:

Willhound said:

I prefer low and slow, but then, I'm a lazy cuss that can't be bothered to re-light if I don't have to. Does it smoke more than it should? Not really. As long as the wood is good and dry it doesn't seem to be a major problem.

Click to expand...

But Willhound you don't have shoulder seasons. You have winter, Thursday, and then winter again.

Click to expand...

Yep...and it was LAST Thursday to boot.

Actually, it's 10 months of winter, and two months of slightly poorer ice fishing.....

Our shoulder seasons are April and November. We run according to the weather report. If a stretch of a few days it's burner weather then we'll run it continuous and open a window midday to cool down the house, otherwise we do a warm up about 5 am and another about 5 pm and let it burn out overnight so we don't get too hot sleeping, just for when we are getting ready for the day and hanging out at night.

Warmer days and nights are what the pellet stove or the heat pump are for.

Our current setup (it was that way when we bought the house) is a wood furnace vented into a masory chimney. A hard setup to get going (I may put a liner in the chimney if we continue to use it) but with a grate in the furnace, it doesn't hold coals for restarts and the draft is horrible with the way it's vented.

OTOH, the pellet stove can handle the house on 50 degree days.

We have a PE Summit on order, I will take my time getting it installed right for next season. Next season we will have to experiment.

Ken

Interesting techniques. What we've been doing is getting it going when we get home (5PM), bringing it up to a normal 450-500 temp (2 hrs on the soapstone) and then setting in a full load for overnight burn, draft all the way down for secondary burn. This gets the house up to 72 or so.

We let it go overnight and in the AM we have a bunch of coals. We rake them all forward and open the draft wide and let the coals burn down during the day. Then we do it over again.

The only thing this has on the downside is that we have to use the SuperCedars with the med splits to get it going fast. It would ignite off the remaining coals, but it'd take too long so we use 1/2 a SuperCedar broken in four to get it all going again.