Ditto for me too.Grew up burning wood, taught by Dad. Had a brief hiatus while I went to college to drink beer. Started back up after I bought my own place. Man it feels good to start back up again.
Yeah I've been "burning" wood for about 11 years, but been heating for about 6yrs after finding this site.
Oh, this is bringing back some bad memories. I've been burning up wood for 26 years. Not much heating was done; I mostly burned dead standing Red Oak that had been split for four or five months, tops. It was a battle just getting some of that stuff to burn. I knew at the time that I should have been splitting my wood earlier, but always ended up putting it off. Once in a while I would get some White Ash and would say to myself, "Wow, this stuff sure is easy to light...what's up with that?" I never did figure it out. My wife's grandma bought her the Englander before I moved down here. The guy (not a certified sweep!) that installed it just put plate steel over the fireplace opening and ran the pipe into the fireplace. Unburned smoke and gas built up in the fireplace and smoke chamber and when she opened the stove door, the extra oxygen ignited it and blew the door wide open, knocking her on her butt. Her cousin, who had worked for a sweep for a time, told her "You need to run pipe all the way up the masonry chimney." First I put regular stove pipe in there, and it would rust the pipe through every few years, due to all the condensation from the wet wood. The creo would run out of the snap seams on the pipe and stink the place up. I knew it was time to clean the flue when the draft would start dropping and smoke would roll out when I opened the door. The adjustable elbow would be more than half blocked off with creosote. I would get a five-gallon bucket or more out of the pipe. We had a few chimney fires but I usually got them snuffed within a minute or so. Then I went to stainless snap-together pipe, which solved the problem of rust-through.More that ten years, however, I didn't know anything until I came here and started reading everything in sight. I have done it right since 2010. Before that I was lucky not to burn a house down.
... I got dry-wood religion from Brother Backwoods Savage, Brother Brother Bart and others, and never looked back.