One Round of Green

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FireWalker

Feeling the Heat
Aug 7, 2008
380
Lake George
With my wife working into the evening and me being busy at work, I have been experimenting a little with my stove. I'm trying to get the elusive 2 loads per day down pat without making the house too hot during the day but still have something happening in there at the end of the day.

My experiment sounds strange but I'm happy with the results. When I load the stove I'm grabbing one 4" round of green maple and buring it in the back of the box under and behind otherwise perfectly seasoned mixed hardwood. I have a bunch of this round wood as I cleared some small but very tall/straight maple and oak trees this past summer. Rather than dealing with it in my stacks I'm just using it one stick at a time and I am very pleased with the results.

At the end of a given day, 12 hours after loading one green round and three good sized splits the round is still there but it is now like charcoal. When I bring it forward it's still red and lights a fresh load right up. House temp is perfect.......I get a lot of solar gain between noon and 4pm so I want a low fire then. From 4 to 6 the heating is being done mostly by the soap stone as the fire is really just one chunk of coal. Works great!

Anyway, what is the opinion........am I going to gum up my stack? Anyone else do such unconventional burning?
 
Check your stack once a month and give us a report. It's not like you're burning full loads of green, but it's definitely putting more moisture in the flue gasses, which means buildup. If the next load is hot at first, you might burn some of that off. You're using some of the heat produced to boil off the water in the green round, so I suppose you're sacrificing btus in the living space (and maybe extra sweeping) for coals at the end of the cycle.
 
Interesting tactic, certainly non-kosher as far as the folks on this site are concerned.

Smarter, more knowledgeable people than I will chime in here with advice, but here's one observation. I have the smallest Hearthstone and a 3-year-old super-duper metalbestos chimney with first-rate draft, and despite having had to burn a lot of not very well seasoned wood last winter, my sweep only got about a quart of creosote out of my 20 feet of chimney this fall, and there was zero hardened glop stuck to the inside of the kind that starts chimney fires.

I think how easily your chimney gets gunked up has a lot to do with how good the chimney and stove are. So everybody's going to have a different experience.

I think it's really essential if you're going to experiment with this to check your chimney or have it checked after you've been doing it for a few weeks to see what's happening in there. In other words, don't guess whether you can get away with this or not. ;-)
 
Firewalker, how does the exhaust look outside? Clear? Black? I suppose when you're gone for the day, it's hard to tell...?

I ask this, as I just tossed in 1 questionably season piece of slab pine into my stove. The fire was already going pretty good, so I examined it to see if it "bubbled" with water. I saw just a little at the knots, nothing else. I figured more important was to look at the exhaust at the top of my chimney. It looked pretty clean/clear.

Would I be crazy to say the exhaust "clarity" is one of the best indicators as to whether we have a healthy/safer burn?
 
That is a technique I have been using for a couple of years now. By loading the greener wood in the back and on the bottom it burns more slowly and I think gives up it moisture more slowly and therefore less likely to create creosote.And burns last and provides lot of hot coals to restart the fire with. I do this with the overnight load only.
 
Pine Knot said:
That is a technique I have been using for a couple of years now. By loading the greener wood in the back and on the bottom it burns more slowly and I think gives up it moisture more slowly and therefore less likely to create creosote.And burns last and provides lot of hot coals to restart the fire with. I do this with the overnight load only.
Click to expand...

This just allows the first wood that burns to dry out the rest of the load. Wood just plain won't burn until it's water is boiled off.

Think of it as you are burning trash cardboard and some of it is wet. If you throw the wet stuff in w/ the dry, the dry needs to use some of it's btu's to dry out the wet stuff so it can burn. Wet cardboard (or wood) will not burn until it is dried out in some way.

pen
 
FireWalker said:
With my wife working into the evening and me being busy at work, I have been experimenting a little with my stove. I'm trying to get the elusive 2 loads per day down pat without making the house too hot during the day but still have something happening in there at the end of the day.

My experiment sounds strange but I'm happy with the results. When I load the stove I'm grabbing one 4" round of green maple and buring it in the back of the box under and behind otherwise perfectly seasoned mixed hardwood. I have a bunch of this round wood as I cleared some small but very tall/straight maple and oak trees this past summer. Rather than dealing with it in my stacks I'm just using it one stick at a time and I am very pleased with the results.

At the end of a given day, 12 hours after loading one green round and three good sized splits the round is still there but it is now like charcoal. When I bring it forward it's still red and lights a fresh load right up. House temp is perfect.......I get a lot of solar gain between noon and 4pm so I want a low fire then. From 4 to 6 the heating is being done mostly by the soap stone as the fire is really just one chunk of coal. Works great!

Anyway, what is the opinion........am I going to gum up my stack? Anyone else do such unconventional burning?
Click to expand...
When I was younger this is what everybody did before going to bed at night. It was called 'banking' the stove. Many people around here still do it.

BUT, you WILL make some creosote doing this. I can't say how much and if your modern stove will burn it out and still keep the stack clean or not. Keep an eye on your chimney and pipe.
 
madrone said:
Check your stack once a month and give us a report. It's not like you're burning full loads of green, but it's definitely putting more moisture in the flue gasses, which means buildup. If the next load is hot at first, you might burn some of that off. You're using some of the heat produced to boil off the water in the green round, so I suppose you're sacrificing btus in the living space (and maybe extra sweeping) for coals at the end of the cycle.
Click to expand...

Well, I can say for sure that I know what my stack looks like when I'm doing it wrong. Over the years of "learning" I've seen it get pretty messy but never more than a bucket full in the stack. Mostly, I get buildup in my cap and in the connector (up from stove 24" then back to 8" MB stack another 24"). Things used to get gumed up before I got the EQ, I was less sensitive about green wood back then. I do run it hard and hot during my startups which I think only helps keep my connector clean but not so much the stack and definitely not the cap, it's way the heck up there at 24 feet above the connector (5 feet outside above the roof). A few more weeks of this burning and my round supply will be gone and with colder weather coming, I won't have a need for this particular burn cycle......back to 3 loads a day with a big seasoned oak chunk taking the place of my green round.

As for smoke.........yup I get some smoke at first and then again as the dry wood burns away and the secondaries go idle, but there is not much I can do as I'm not there to adjust. I just can't seem to get away from tapping the primary air all the way shut on this stove, well pretty much all the time, except during startup of course. I guess we have our habits.......this one I'm sure the good folks at Hearthstone took into account as closed is not really closed.
 
Out of curiosity, have you tried the same exact setup w/ a dried piece of wood in the back instead of the green?

pen
 
quads said:
FireWalker said:
With my wife working into the evening and me being busy at work, I have been experimenting a little with my stove. I'm trying to get the elusive 2 loads per day down pat without making the house too hot during the day but still have something happening in there at the end of the day.

My experiment sounds strange but I'm happy with the results. When I load the stove I'm grabbing one 4" round of green maple and buring it in the back of the box under and behind otherwise perfectly seasoned mixed hardwood. I have a bunch of this round wood as I cleared some small but very tall/straight maple and oak trees this past summer. Rather than dealing with it in my stacks I'm just using it one stick at a time and I am very pleased with the results.

At the end of a given day, 12 hours after loading one green round and three good sized splits the round is still there but it is now like charcoal. When I bring it forward it's still red and lights a fresh load right up. House temp is perfect.......I get a lot of solar gain between noon and 4pm so I want a low fire then. From 4 to 6 the heating is being done mostly by the soap stone as the fire is really just one chunk of coal. Works great!

Anyway, what is the opinion........am I going to gum up my stack? Anyone else do such unconventional burning?
Click to expand...
When I was younger this is what everybody did before going to bed at night. It was called 'banking' the stove. Many people around here still do it.

BUT, you WILL make some creosote doing this. I can't say how much and if your modern stove will burn it out and still keep the stack clean or not. Keep an eye on your chimney and pipe.
Click to expand...

The silly part of this "technique" is I'm too lazy to deal with the wood I cut this summer, it's laying in a heap in my yard under a really big maple tree. The yard will need raking soon and I can either move the wood or just make it slowly disappear........it is getting smaller and my good winter wood is lasting just a little longer.
 
pen said:
Out of curiosity, have you tried the same exact setup w/ a dried piece of wood in the back instead of the green?

pen
Click to expand...

Yup, I have. I still have some coals after 12 hours but the fire at around 11am is putting off too much heat and with the outside temps coming up to the low 50's and the afternoon sun, the house overheats. The morning startup is totally normal but it seems the green round sets up an early afternoon stall and after a while it actually comes back a little as the round finally burns. It's this "stall" time when I bet I get some smoke/creasote. Did I mention my glass is clear?
 
FireWalker said:
pen said:
Out of curiosity, have you tried the same exact setup w/ a dried piece of wood in the back instead of the green?

pen
Click to expand...

Yup, I have. I still have some coals after 12 hours but the fire at around 11am is putting off too much heat and with the outside temps coming up to the low 50's and the afternoon sun, the house overheats. The morning startup is totally normal but it seems the green round sets up an early afternoon stall and after a while it actually comes back a little as the round finally burns. It's this "stall" time when I bet I get some smoke/creasote. Did I mention my glass is clear?
Click to expand...
i posted a theory where its better to leave the stove [EPA] loaded so the draft would dry the wood further be4 lighting due to the draft?
 
FireWalker, as stated by quads, that is pretty much like the old times. It is also very close to what we do except that we burn good dry wood. In the bottom rear I like to load a nice sized round or a decent sized split. That is the log that will help hold the fire longer.

Will this harm your chimney? I doubt you will notice a huge difference but for sure you are using a lot of heat to evaporate all that moisture that is in green wood. At this time of year you won't notice the lack of heat too much though. If it works, that is fine.
 
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