13-NC is keeping the 2nd floor toasty tonight during this single digit cold snap in Yinzerville. Just started burning chunks of hardwood flooring that I got from a contractor who had a dump truck of it ready to haul off to a farm to just burn it off to avoid dump fees. Probably 1000+ ft. I have been cutting into 12-18 inch pieces.
Got a real hot bed of coals on the bottom from these flooring cuts then dropped in a couple splits. Topped off the splits with couple layers of the flooring right up to the pipes and then completely shut the air intake down to nothing. Was shocked at the secondaries burning bright dirty orange out of every hole in all the pipes. Had to turn the blower on just to keep the temps under 800 on the deck.
There is a lot of renovation of 100+ year old houses in my hood and I occasionally get to scrounge nice piles of those ancient 2x4s (real 2" x 4") and bigger beams that are dirty brown in color and bone dry from a century of curing inside the walls of an old house. It is ton of work cutting up those lengths with a chop saw, bending nails (used to pull 'em but just gave up on it and catch the nails in the ashpan) and changing circular saw blades after accidentally cutting through 100s of those old triangle shaped nails. I took a 15 sec vid of the secondaries that burned like this for a half hour with the air shut all the way down all the while with the blower fan running and the deck reading almost 800F.
(broken link removed to http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~thoffman/misc/hearth.com)
Got a real hot bed of coals on the bottom from these flooring cuts then dropped in a couple splits. Topped off the splits with couple layers of the flooring right up to the pipes and then completely shut the air intake down to nothing. Was shocked at the secondaries burning bright dirty orange out of every hole in all the pipes. Had to turn the blower on just to keep the temps under 800 on the deck.
There is a lot of renovation of 100+ year old houses in my hood and I occasionally get to scrounge nice piles of those ancient 2x4s (real 2" x 4") and bigger beams that are dirty brown in color and bone dry from a century of curing inside the walls of an old house. It is ton of work cutting up those lengths with a chop saw, bending nails (used to pull 'em but just gave up on it and catch the nails in the ashpan) and changing circular saw blades after accidentally cutting through 100s of those old triangle shaped nails. I took a 15 sec vid of the secondaries that burned like this for a half hour with the air shut all the way down all the while with the blower fan running and the deck reading almost 800F.
(broken link removed to http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~thoffman/misc/hearth.com)
