Since you are writing a series of articles, you should have the time to go into details on the different points, and as the saying goes, the devil's in the details".
I'll give you a couple examples.
First; on the issue of careful care and handling the of ashes from the stove, we always use a metal bucket, but on one occasion my wife emptied cleaned the ashes out of the stove and into the bucket, but thinking that they were just extinguished ashes left them in the bucket behind the stove. I came home and the first thing I noticed was a smell of smoke in the air. I asked her if she had left the stove door open, but she denied that she had. After much "conversation" I noticed the full bucket of ashes behind the stove, and when I touched it it was hot enough to burn my fingers, I quickly realized where the smoke smell was coming from.
Now another twist on the same topic. As I said, we always use a metal bucket to remove our ashes, on this occasion I emptied the ashes into the bucket and put it outside the back door on to a cement surface, but not far from a fabric rug we had beside the door. Just by coincidence I went outside that night and saw to my terror that it was windy out and the wind had blown away the ashes of the surface of the bucket and reignited some of the active coals, and sparks were blowing out of the bucket onto the fabric rug next to the door. So as Weatherguy suggested, it's good to put the metal container into another metal container, or at least make sure the pail has a lid and can't blow over.
Second point is the subject of dry wood. It's easy to say make sure you only burn dry wood, but the truth is the average person has no idea what that is. Many here will say simply that it is wood that has been cut and split and stacked for 2-3 years, but the fact is almost no new wood burner is going to have cut and stacked wood that just happens to be sitting in their back yard for 2-3 years. Nor are they likely to find anybody selling it. So that leaves it up to the new wood burner to figure out what he is gona do for wood for the first 2-3 years. Thus comes the tricky part. My suggestion is to buy themselves a moisture meter and learn how to use it. Thus will at least give them an accurate tool to gauge what properly seasoned wood really is. The nonsense about banging pieces of wood together or looking to see if there are cracks in the wood or dark coloring on the outside of the wood just isn't accurate, and gives no precise moisture contents reading like a moisture meter does. It's true that a moisture meter can be out by a few points, but banging wood together or cracks in the wood can be out by tens of percentage points or more, depending on the experience level of the person. Remember we are talking about new wood burners here, not people who have been burning for 20 or 30 years. Less then 20% moisture content is what they should be striving for, and the only way to tell that with any degree of accuracy is with a moisture meter, not cracks in the wood, not dark staining, and not by banging wood together.
Actually the last statement is not totally accurate. There are other ways of telling the moisture content of wood more accurately than a moisture meter. One way is to cut the wood into little squares, precisely weight it on an little scale, cook it in a microwave on low heat until all the moisture has evaporated, then weight it again and calculate the weight missing and then do a little math and you'll be able to figure out what the moisture content was. But moisture meters are a lot cheaper than those little digital scales, and moisture meters are a lot simpler to use.
