Good morning everyone,
Sorry if I came off as a a-hole but I was pretty frustrated at the time. I was just telling my wife that we need to put up a pile of some sort of soft wood for next year. I thinking maybe a face cord or so, So that I can have something to burn while burning coals. I cannot get my head around burning soft wood ha ha I have an abundance of soft wood on my property. We have Fir, Spruce, Hack/ Tamarack, Pine, Cedar, and loads of Poplar. So what is the best position to rake the coals for the fastest bur rate. I have a hoe and I have been raking them up high and a far forward to the door edge as possible. About every 30-40 min I go back knock them flat and rake them forward again essentially getting all coals a chance to be " front and center " for a while. So what species of soft wood , would you put up for the sole purpose of using while burning down the coals? Thanks for the advice and I will eagerly be awaiting your replies, Jeff
You didn't come off badly to me at all, and I/we totally understand the frustration factor. We had one heck of a learning curve with our pellet stove, much more so actually than with the wood stove. No one in our families had owned or operated a pellet stove before us. The guys and girls on this forum helped us learn now to use it, what to expect out of it, and how to calculate how many actual BTUs we were getting out of the stove and the pellets. From there our situation clearly pointed toward adding insulation to our attic and sealing air leaks in the house.
Member stoveguy2esw, Mike Holton, sat online with us one evening while I was literally calculating burn time/burn rate per pound of pellets vs. the temperature in the house. He also answered questions by phone for me when I was pulling the stove apart to clean it for the first times- and our pellet stove isn't even an Englander! Another member (I am embarrassed, I've forgotten his user name, I'm sorry) is a retired engineer, and he helped me figure out BTUs generated per hour vs. feed rate vs. the auger rheostat settings. (I can't even remember why I was that far into the weeds, but it had to do with how much heat the stove was putting out.) Great group on here. All of us have been frustrated by one thing or the other (or several things!) on this journey.
<:3~
Your initial inquiries opened a topic that I'd never considered and didn't even realize I knew nothing about. It was fortuitous, because we dealt with this very issue this weekend. We arrived to a cold house with a frozen up HVAC system that was offline. We had to push our wood stove to warm the house in the face of cold, wind and wind chill, and temps that dropped rapidly and stayed below freezing for a couple of days.
When we started "coaling" ourselves I understood what was happening and I knew we'd have to back off of the stove a little bit and live with the cooler temps in the far reaches of the house for a few hours. If you hadn't brought it up I might not have known what was happening or how to deal with it. Because you brought up the topic and people here discussed it with you (and explained it to me) it was a simple matter of opening the t-stat and holding off on re-loading the stove.
Again, we (Hubs and I) totally get the frustration part- BTDT.
As far as your question about wood types vs. heat output, we are burning 100% oak here, so I got nuthin' on that.
As far as the little bit of "coaling" we've experienced this weekend, my novice answer is that we just raked it flat and opened the t-stat up. The coals burned down within a couple to a few hours and we reloaded the stove. If it helps for context, when we were trying to get the most out of the stove, we were only able to add one layer of splits on top of the coals, not a typical two layer re-load. And that's with the coals raked flat.
Once the house got up to a comfortable temperature we were able to cruise on coals for a few hours, and the bed of coals burned down far enough that re-loads were back to our more typical 4 to 6 splits.
EDITED TO ADD: Our CAT stays active in the coaling phase as well. We have been running on coals this afternoon for the past 3 or 4 hours. We are now down to about 4" deep coals in the bottom of the stove. CAT is still active. Stove top temps over the CAT are running about 340'F. House temp is 70'F in the living area. We are letting it burn down because we'll leave this evening to go back to town- no point in reloading now.