Those that don't care for long overnight burns

I have to get up pretty early and head to work so before i head off i load the stove up real good and by the time the old lady and kids wake up it is good and toasty, not going to let my little kids get cold in the night, that was the whole idea behind getting a stove was to stop being cold and paying high electric bills.

I'm putting a largish log on before bedtime and finding red coals each morning, enough for a restart in needed. Daytime temps are not that low yet (50F/10C) so my wife usually starts a fire around 4pm. Nights are about 40F and the stove keeps the whole house nice and warm with refills of a couple/few logs at a time.

cighon said:

Not that i don't care for a long overnight burn, but i just focus on a warm house that is low cost relating to my heating method. i have not had 1 night that i get 6+ hours out of an overnight burn. Might be me; but isnt one of the highest priority items with my insert. Getting free wood is; getting it split and dried; keeping the fam warm. I throw a few splits on before i go to bed and if the blower is still on when i wakeup so much the better. As long as the gas furnace doesnt kick on until i bump it up when i first wake up-so much the better.

does anyone else not 'try hard' to get an overnight burn?

Click to expand...

We build up the heat during the day and throw some maple splits in at night so we have coals in the a.m., once it starts getting colder we will want more of a overnight burn,

Zap

cighon said:

Not that i don't care for a long overnight burn, but i just focus on a warm house that is low cost relating to my heating method. i have not had 1 night that i get 6+ hours out of an overnight burn. Might be me; but isnt one of the highest priority items with my insert. Getting free wood is; getting it split and dried; keeping the fam warm. I throw a few splits on before i go to bed and if the blower is still on when i wakeup so much the better. As long as the gas furnace doesnt kick on until i bump it up when i first wake up-so much the better.

does anyone else not 'try hard' to get an overnight burn?

Click to expand...

Well, in order to keep my family warm and keep a warm house, I burn 24/7 once it gets cold enough to do so. We just fired up the wood stove this week, light it up once, and still going. Easier to keep it going than to restart a fire, not so much a priority but just the way we burn. Load the stove before bed, load it when I get up, no problems getting an overnight burn. Our house does cool off overnight even with the wood stove burning, and the furnace kicks on sometimes, I don't have a problem with that either.

Not sure I understand your thinking, as it seems contradictory to me. Your priority is to keep your family warm and use the "free" wood, yet doesn't your house cool off overnight without burning wood all night? My guess is that your insert/fireplace is keeping enough heat radiating to keep your house warm enough that you don't need overnight burns. If it didn't, you would be wanting a bigger firebox, and overnight burns would move up your priority list.

If there are coals in the morning then essentially you have a long overnight burn. I guess then it must hinge on intent. If you use those coals to get a fire going in the morning, then for all intents and purposes, you have a long overnight burn.

I really don't get what this discussion is about. If you toss wood in just before bed and don't use the coals in the morning, then I guess you side with the OP. Likewise if you don't put wood on at bedtime and let the fire die out.

I don't try for an overnighter, simply because I'm not going to get one. I might get usable heat for about 4-5 hrs., then reload.
With the cold we're having, I don't like to let the stove get below about 300*, because the house starts cooling off. I'm talking 55* in the am with no reload. Chilly. If I don't get up in the night to reload at least once, it takes a long time and a lot of wood to warm the house back up. Seems like it requires at least, if not more wood to do that.
Seems silly to me to let the house cool down like that, but I don't have to get up for work anymore. Getting up about 2:30-3:30 is beginning to feel normal.
Just remodeled the back porch into our bedroom, and reinsulated, but not much heat gets back there. The rest of the house needs more insulation in the attic, and that's going to happen eventually. In the meantime, I do what I have to do to stay warm.
Cold=bad, warm=cool. :coolsmile:

Scraper said:

If you have a quality stove and are using quality seasoned hardwoods, an overnight burn is no problem without even trying. I run 2 quadra-fires and have no issues with having a nice bed of coals and still 200+ degrees on stove top thermometer at 6 am after filling at 9 pm the prior evening.

Click to expand...

funny you say that -this year i am using optimum wood ie two years old and now i get a decent coal bed in the mornings with my quadrafire insert all i need to do is toss a few pieces of kindling and she's off heck sometimes i even see a few hot coals when i get home from work - last year i had to re-lite the stove every morning on the weekends

.this is like the amish saying they dont care if they cant drive a car ,the reason its no big deal to them is becuase they cant .or havent done it so they dont realize the advantages ...here are the reasons i build overnight fires
1-for my wood furnace it requires more to start a fire from scratch then to sustain one-less wood
2-it gets dang cold here and i dont run any back up heat source
3-i dont like waking up to a house i n the low 60's
4-when i get up i dont have the time or desire to play boyscout before work
5-if there is not a fire running while im gone, the house will be chilly when i get home from work
6- i like to sleep toasty and dont care for heavy covers over my body
7- the wife wears less clothes in bed if shes too warm
8- the family dog enjoys stealing my spot in bed when i go down to reload in the morning
9-i do it becuase i can

I think the main issue is what people consider "an overnight burn". I believe different people have vastly different definitions of what this is.

THere's 2 extremes to the definition:
Some consider a bed of coals and a 200* stove a successful over night burn.

Some consider it successful only if your house is still 70* or above in the morning.


And as you might suspect, some think anywhere in between or a mix of the 2. Some people have houses that a 200* stove and a bed of coals will keep warm. Others have huge drafty homes and unless your stove is running med-to-full tilt, it's not gonna keep the house warm. It really comes down to how well the stove is sized for your home. If you have a huge drafty house, almost no single stove is gonna do it on those cold windy nights.

If you were to call an HVAC company in to install a new central heating system in your home, they would do a complete workup on your's homes BTU loss, heating degree days for your location, number of windows, doors, sqft, construction type, exposed wall surface area....etc.....and that gets them a good accurate estimate of what size heating system (in BTU output) they need to install. I think the same should be done at least in part for a stove installation, or at least know where your stove is in comparison to your homes BTU loss. And again, once you get into large homes, the stove choices really start dwindling down, only a select few are rate at 100,000+ btu's, and that's only at full tilt, during an overnight burn it's running at probably 20% of the rated BTU output. On the plus side, a stove is putting out constant heat unlike a forced air furnace which comes on and blows full tilt and shuts off. So 20,000btu's for an hour is very close to 120,000 btu's for 10 minutes.

I have a 2500sqft home with 28' ceilings, it's newer (late 90's) but the builder didn't take any time to seal anything. In some areas it's almost drafty even. On a 25 degree day I can load up my North Star at 11pm and the house is still 68-70 or so at 7am. On a windy 10 degree day like we've have the last 2-3 days ,it just doesn't happen, the stove acts the same, but since the home loses BTU's at a much quicker rate, around 3-4am the temp in the home starts dropping,quickly. On those days, I don't even try, I still load at 11, but I don't try to build up coals or wait until the most opportune time to load or anything like I might on a 25 degree day. I just throw some wood in, let it get going and close off the air. On a 25 degree day I might spent alot more time to build up to the overnight burn to help it last longer and be more productive.

With that, I can state that my objective in the context of "overnight burns", is if I can keep the propane from burning in the AM to put the house back to temperature, if that's possible with my stove in my house for a given outside temperature and wind conditions, then I try really hard to do that. But I know enough to know, on a windy 5 degree night, it just not gonna happen no matter what I do, so I don't really try.

At any rate, yes, with most newer stoves and dry wood, it should not be any issue to have a bed of hot coals and a 200* stove after 8-10 hours. Weather that's keeping your house warm is a completely different story.

73blazer said:

I think the main issue is what people consider "an overnight burn"...

Click to expand...

EGGSactly! I have no purist notion of 100% wood heat and the furnace not coming on. That's not my definition of 24/7 burning. My gas furnace runs almost every morning to bring the house back up to temp from the overnight setback. My intent of a long overnight burn is to be able to reserrect the fire quickly from a bed of coals. If that doesn't happen, the furnace will run throughout the day until I get home from work to start a fire. Like you, I don't have time to play "boyscout" as you put it. The wife will not start a fire but will keep one going. This might change once I get my order in for Super Cedars.

Stoves and houses will certainly vary. With my house and stove, I have a choice of a shorter hot burn that keeps pace with heat loss, or a slower burn that cannot. On cold nights the house temp will fall on a slow burn but rather than waste a load burning hot and fast only to awake to a cool house and no coals, I prefer coals. Either way, if it's cold out I wake up to a cool house unless I get up early to add wood. Fortunately my bladder doesn't get me up early but the pets sometimes do.

The rate of heat loss is commensurate to the temperature difference between inside and outside. The hotter it is inside or the colder outside, the more heat will escape. What is the point of wasting heat on a hot overnight fire if you are not awake to enjoy it? That is the whole point of a setback thermostat on the gas furnace. Better IMHO, to have a slow burn and the ability for a quick warmup in the morning. I will gladly pay the gas company $2 a day for the bit of gas I use since in includes what I use for cooking and DHW.

There's no free lunch here. If you run your stove too hot, you loose more heat through the walls/windows and you waste heat up the flue. Not hot enough, and you're not in the sweet spot of stove efficiency. To the OP's comments, you generally have to "work at it" to eek out efficiency and the convenience of an easy start come morning. How much you value the effort is entirely up to you.

cighon said:

Not that i don't care for a long overnight burn, but i just focus on a warm house that is low cost relating to my heating method. i have not had 1 night that i get 6+ hours out of an overnight burn. Might be me; but isnt one of the highest priority items with my insert. Getting free wood is; getting it split and dried; keeping the fam warm. I throw a few splits on before i go to bed and if the blower is still on when i wakeup so much the better. As long as the gas furnace doesnt kick on until i bump it up when i first wake up-so much the better.

does anyone else not 'try hard' to get an overnight burn?

Click to expand...

I load up my Pacific Energy Spectrum Classic (Which is working great, BTW)and close the vent and it burns all night whether I want it to or not.

I kind of agree with everyone. What most who say they do not burn overnight are referring to is shoulder season up here. I do not stuff the stove to the gills to keep the fire going all night until about 0f to 5f. Below that the fire better go all night as we have no backup. When its -40 for over a week and the end of the cold is not in sight you become a serious overnight burner.

Ummm . . . I don't get it. I mean, on my last reload of the night I pretty much do everything that I do during the course of the weekend or evening on a reload with the exception being that I may select wood that is a bit bigger and maybe add a little more wood than normal . . . but honestly, there really isn't much of a difference in my last reload of the night and my regular reload.

My goal -- whether it be reloading the fire during the day or doing the overnight reload -- is the same. To keep the house warm and reduce my dependence on oil and the high price of paying for that oil.

I think 73Blazer is absolutely right about the whole definition of an overnight burn. Before I started burning wood I assumed an overnight burn would mean a fire that would have flames burning right through the night. I foolishly expected to get up the next morning to see the fire still burning in the firebox . . . well I did expect the fire to be smaller, but I thought there would be flames. Now, with a year or so under my proverbial belt, I realize that for me the definition of an overnight fire is one that keeps the house warm enough to be comfortable, warm enough to keep the oil boiler from coming on (I have the thermostats set for 60 degrees) and one that will have coals in the firebox and a stove top temp of 150-200 as the combination of coals and temp means a much easier and faster reloading process in the morning . . . one that takes only a few minutes vs. one where I have to restart everything from "scratch."

I guess what I'm saying is that shooting for an overnight fire and trying to keep the house warm can be one and the same . . . they are not on opposing goals.

I think Chargerman is also right . . . the results of an overnight fire are dependent on a number of factors -- insulation, size of the home, size of the stove, outside temps, etc.

Normally I don't make a point to get up during the night . . . although it helps to drink lots of fluids before bed . . . however after awhile you kind of get used to temps in the house and in my case I find myself waking up during the night occasionally to throw in a few splits . . . which means I'll have even more coals . . . but honestly, if I don't wake up during the night I often find I have enough coals to get the fire restarted easily enough . . . and if I don't wake up during the night and find the fire is actually dead and the oil boiler has kicked on . . . it's not a big deal . . . the woodstove kept the place heated most of the night so what little oil I used is not a big deal.

firefighterjake said:

the woodstove kept the place heated most of the night so what little oil I used is not a big deal.

Click to expand...

Agreed. If the furnace kicks in a bit, it's not the end of the world. I don't have as big of a firebox as some, so I try to be realistic and make do with what I have. My goal is to burn my wood as efficiently as possible so I can get as many Btu's as possible out of a cord of wood. That's why I am not a big fan of full damper down smoldering overnight burns. I'd rather burn out my wood efficiently and re-start the stove the next morning. To each his own. Also, my forced hot water NG primary heat is not the worst thing in the world ;^)

If I put another wood burner in, I would just make sure BEFORE I purchased it that it would hold a fire overnight. It feels great to wake up to a 70 degree house knowing your furnace did kick on all night. Toss some more wood in the box and head off to work. Come home to a toasty warm house..warm with that wood stove heat, not furnace heat..it's a nice life.

Overnight burns are not a problem for us, the problem with us is cold floors. We have oil fired HW in-floor heat that is throughout most of our 1st floor and it is nice. I'm constantly trying to find the right thermostat setting to get the furnace to fire twice a day to keep some heat in the floors so we are comfortable. Warm tile floor in the bathroom is really nice. This equates to about 1-2 gallons per day which is fine with me. I can heat the whole place with the stove but comfort is key. My old stove was not a good overnight heater, after midnight temps would drop fast so we burned thru more oil. My next investment should be a programmable t-stst.

As others have said definition of what a overnight burn is key here. For me a stove with enough coals to easily re-light with a top temp. around 200 is a successful overnight burn. If we have 20-30's temps. at night the furnaces doesn't run(t-stat set at 70). When we had a few cold days in the lower teens last week/weekend the furnace ran for about an hour in the morning. The stove still had enough coals for an easy re-light so for me it was still successful. Once my son is old enough to sleep with a blanket I'll turn the t-stat down to 65 or so which should help to keep the furnace from running.