Heating your Home with a Wood Stove.

I wanted to post his as its such a simple topic. But I see many people having issues heating their homes with a wood stove.

The thing I wanted to point out is timing is important when you reload and such.

Use your house as a heat storage device.

When you get home from work and before bed time build the heat up in your storage device we call a home.

If at bed time you reload on a hot bed of coals and have a nice warm house the house will stay warm easier while your sleeping.

If you have a house thats a couple degrees too cool when you go to bed dont expect the stove to over come that in a over night burn mode setting.

I would suggest burn your stove to get your house 2 or 3 degrees on the hotter side rather than mess around and have the house too cold at bed time.

So plan ahead and use your house as a heat storage device and things will work out better for you.

Your house and its walls and brick and wood structure will store heat for you if you keep the heat up in the house. That is why keeping your stove going 24 hours a day works because your keeping the structure up to temps, nothing harder than getting the temps up in a cold house that the stove has gone out.

My stove is in the basement and is the only heat we use down there. If the stove goes out and the basement cools off, it takes at least 12 hours to heat the place back up even with the stove going full tilt.

Agree with you completely. I also use the daytime to conserve some fuel. A full load before I go to work. The wife is home this week, so she keeps a small fire going during the day while the sun is out to warm the house. When I get back home, a medium fire to get me to bedtime, then another full load through the night. Only works once the basement is hot.

Things become easier once you get a routine down pact. Burning 2 or 3 loads a day is much more pleasent then loading the stove every few hours.
Once I get the house up to temp I can even drop the # of loads down to two a day and the house will stay warm.

Timing is crucial but once you get it down, that's when operating the stove becomes a pleasure no longer a chore.