Top Down Fires

It's now been just over an hour & a half and my firebox has an orange glow to it that would make an Islamic Terrorist jealous. :lol: I'm sweating pretty good in the room my stove is in. I've got a tall skinny fan blowing heat straight line distance from the fan down the hallway to the bedrooms. I hope this works.

sheepdog000 said:

It's now been just over an hour & a half and my firebox has an orange glow to it that would make an Islamic Terrorist jealous. :lol: I'm sweating pretty good in the room my stove is in. I've got a tall skinny fan blowing heat straight line distance from the fan down the hallway to the bedrooms. I hope this works.

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Nope - don't try to 'push' hot air to the cold air - rather - 'pull the cold air to the hot air. Trust me - blow the cold air into the hot room - it works!

Shari said:

sheepdog000 said:

It's now been just over an hour & a half and my firebox has an orange glow to it that would make an Islamic Terrorist jealous. :lol: I'm sweating pretty good in the room my stove is in. I've got a tall skinny fan blowing heat straight line distance from the fan down the hallway to the bedrooms. I hope this works.

Click to expand...

Nope - don't try to 'push' hot air to the cold air - rather - 'pull the cold air to the hot air. Trust me - blow the cold air into the hot room - it works!

Click to expand...

+1 to what Shari said . . . it sounds counter-intuitive . . . I mean pushing air towards the hot woodstove is just crazy, right . . . but it works . . . cool air drops, hot air rises . . . by pushing the cool air at the ground towards the hot woodstove the cool air is heated, rises and then moves out to the area vacated by the cooler air which dropped . . . . in essence you're setting up your own current of air.

Also, don't be afraid to try turning down the air even more . . . if the stove temp is hot enough and the wood is seasoned enough and your draft is decent . . . you should really start to see the heat pouring out of your stove . . . and see some nice secondary action. Generally I don't start to turn down my air until a half hour or 45 minutes has gone by . . . but this is just me and my own set up.

So . . . did you like the top down method? As I stated in another post, it took me a time or two to get the knack of it . . . but now I'm a big fan of not playing around with adding more wood and having to fiddle with things . . . yeah, I'm basically lazy . . . Like Shari I now use commercial fire starters having recently become a convert to Super Cedars . . . guess I'll have lots of newspaper to recycle now.

Shari said:

sheepdog000 said:

It's now been just over an hour & a half and my firebox has an orange glow to it that would make an Islamic Terrorist jealous. :lol: I'm sweating pretty good in the room my stove is in. I've got a tall skinny fan blowing heat straight line distance from the fan down the hallway to the bedrooms. I hope this works.

Click to expand...

Nope - don't try to 'push' hot air to the cold air - rather - 'pull the cold air to the hot air. Trust me - blow the cold air into the hot room - it works!

Click to expand...

Yes, it really does work to push cold air. In our house, it takes some hours for the convection loops to set themselves up and start helping the fan. Once the loops are established, the back bedroom gets up to within three or four degrees of the stove room which is on the other side of the house.

A forum member shared that convection loop information over the past year. It helped me be patient and wait for the system to move into gear. Thanks again to the membership.

I tried the top down method and liked it. I'm just gonna have to get my own system down pat. I'm a bit worried about not having seasoned wood for this year though. I have a very nice supply of wood, it's all unfortunately green. I had my young teenagers stack the wood, so unfortunately it ALL has to be torn down and restacked. The stack job isn't very stable. I laid down pallets and stacked my own little bit and showed my kids. They just looked at me and said "ohhhh." ;-) It's easier if you have something to stack against like a wall. Atleast for newbies it is. Were dealing with everything from 12" to 20" cuts. I used the pallet method I saw in the "Show me your rack" thread. It has one on each end, and a wall of pallets behind and open in the front. I tarped it off and my wife even commented on how nice it looked. Most important, it's still dry with the rain were getting. I just need to figure out where to get some more pallets. Stores want to keep em and I refuse to just take em.

I'm debating on buying a couple of cords of Oak that this guy swears is seasoned. I'll hit it with a MM to be sure first.

If I can ever get my stove ready... :blank: I think I will try a modified version of top down.
I have a ton of kindling and I will try to start the fire from the top and then light the bottom
soon afterward, so the fire can meet in the middle. Will just have to see how it works with
my (future) setup. I am looking forward to top down experimentation...sounds a little dirty
doesn't it...

I don't get the point of top-down fires, you do it to improve draft? Why not start a small fire and add larger pieces after it's going? Because it saves time because you don't have to keep adding wood? Seems like it takes more time to get a top-down set-up going anyway. You know you'll be checking the fire and temps every few minutes until it's going anyway. Whatever works for you though, just seems like doing something different without any real change in result. I'm not even convinced of the fan direction thing either. Too many variables are involved to even test the theory. Positive or negative pressure within rooms should equal out no matter what direction the fan is blowing. Sounds like a placebo thing to me. Anyway, that's just my two cents because this topic seems to come up a lot

Then you have small amounts of smoke going up pipe for a longer period of time instead of larger amounts going up for a short period of time, just seems the same to me. However, I get a good draft that doesn't need that much prep work.

I have always used the top down method long before I knew it had a name. Don't know why but I've always done it that way. Just seemed easier to me. Maybe it was the draft thing. Course I only start about 3 per year.

I did light my fire bottom up but now mostly top down; sometimes I place chunks in the bottom and back wall and then place splits n-s; placing bunched thin kindling at the top front with a thicker flat piece on top. I light the very thin pieces with a strip of envelope paper. I have lots of time; the burning kindling also falls down and starts fires below. I enjoy building the fuel load :lol:

hmmmmm - would be helpful to have a gallery of pictures of loaded fireboxes so one could see what y'alls talking about. i'm not the kind who can translate all these east-west-north-south kinda like a v, etc into a mental picture which is helpful. a photo would reallly help!

ya top down seems to work, big on bottom, medium middle, sticks on top, kindling on top that, and some crumpled up news paper or a starter on that.

tsc003 said:

Then you have small amounts of smoke going up pipe for a longer period of time instead of larger amounts going up for a short period of time, just seems the same to me. However, I get a good draft that doesn't need that much prep work.

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Not true, IME. The major issue getting a fire going in a cold stove is quenching, where flames (burning gas) approach cold objects. Combustion stops there, leaving unburnt volatiles to exit as nasty particulates. Aka smoke. Carcinogen soup. Some of the cold objects in a bottom-up start are the larger splits on top.

I found, years back, that top-down starts lets me put in a good load and let it get well underway with MINIMAL SMOKE. I have neighbors who are not interested in becoming smoked meat.

tsc003 said:

I don't get the point of top-down fires, you do it to improve draft? Why not start a small fire and add larger pieces after it's going? Because it saves time because you don't have to keep adding wood? Seems like it takes more time to get a top-down set-up going anyway. You know you'll be checking the fire and temps every few minutes until it's going anyway. Whatever works for you though, just seems like doing something different without any real change in result. I'm not even convinced of the fan direction thing either. Too many variables are involved to even test the theory. Positive or negative pressure within rooms should equal out no matter what direction the fan is blowing. Sounds like a placebo thing to me. Anyway, that's just my two cents because this topic seems to come up a lot

Click to expand...

For me it's partly to achieve a draft easier . . . but mostly because I've had the experience of building a teepee or Lincoln Log type of fire . . . and then having the bigger wood on top collapse on top of the half burned kindling . . . almost killing the fire . . . it seems as though things are just easier with the Top Down Method . . . I load it once and then don't have to bother with adding more wood and having to worry about it suffocating the fire.

As you said though . . . it's whatever works for you when it comes to lighting a fire . . . different folks, different strokes.

As for the fan . . . yes . . . things should equal out in time . . . the fan just seems to speed things up and move the heat different. Maybe it's a placebo effect, but my thermostats (objective) and sense of temp (subjective) have shown time and time again that the fan blowing towards the stove seems to warm things up faster and spread the heat better than no fan alone.

Blah, tie your silly bows. I stick with my cave method.