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SmokeyCity

Feeling the Heat
Mar 6, 2011
428
Western Pa
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.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~thoffman/misc/hearth.com
 
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I have a load of unfinished oak flooring scraps in the kindling box. They are great.
 
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Hardwood oak flooring!. Can't think of anything that burns better - except oak hardwood flooring that has lots of polyurethane on it (unless your stove has a CAT of course). This is why I prefer secondary tubes to a CAT. You have to be very careful to protect your CAT and avoid old boards with paint and coatings etc. Most of my wood is scrounge from demolition of old houses or peoples scrap piles. The tube stoves LOVE all those volatile gasses forom paint, varnish, urethane and so on. Tubes are king for wood scroungers like me.
 
Not getting the best feelings from folks living downwind from you.
 
I have gotten no complaints .. oh wait..they're all dead.

Seriously though, if I'm really cranking the flames from the tube holes and maxing the temp of the burn am I not combusting a lot of that stuff just like a car's CAT burns up the bad stuff in gasoline?
 
It's hard to answer exactly because the chemicals used to stain and seal the wood are unknown. Combustion can create dioxins from some finishes. Dioxins are quite toxic and bioaccumulate.
 
Try opening the air just a fraction of an inch. I have the NC13 with the air closed all the way I just get secondaries and no flames on the wood. If I crack it just a hair I get flames licking the wood and secondaries. It burns better. With only secondaries my stove was running way too hot.
 
Yeah mine tilts toward 800 when I pack it with hardwood flooring even with the blower it on.

Do you think it burns cleaner ( more complete burn of the gases ) with a little extra air?
or should I run as hot as possible to insure max combustion of bad gases?

I'm most interested in burning as clean as possible with the wood scraps I have to work with.

Try opening the air just a fraction of an inch. I have the NC13 with the air closed all the way I just get secondaries and no flames on the wood. If I crack it just a hair I get flames licking the wood and secondaries. It burns better. With only secondaries my stove was running way too hot.
 
I'm not a scientist or any sort of professional but from what I've read if you only have secondaries with no flames on the wood you might be running an oxygen starved fire which can cause incomplete combustion.
 
I have a load of unfinished oak flooring scraps in the kindling box. They are great.
Broke my heart when I had to do this to my remodeled bedroom several years ago but the oak flooring from the 1800's just wasn't savable. Up the smoke dragon it went one of the first years I burned wood. [emoji291]
 
I prefer unfinished oak scraps. I got them by the garbage can load from a flooring installer.
 
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