So Much Dust!

[Bigger_Al]

So, I’ve been burning wood now in a stove since the end of February. In that time I have not run the gas forced air heating system that obviously has a pleated filter associated with it. So no air is moving or being filtered in the house.

My questions are this. Is the large amount of dust accumulating on every surface normal? Is it a result of no air circulating through my heating system or air being sucked in from outside through the walls, etc? Could it be from wood burning and the general mess it makes? How do you all deal with it?

 

[spolleypt]

I don’t have forced hot air but ... is it possible that the stove could be drawing air in from your ducts back out in reverse? We burn 24/7 from November through April... stove is in basement but I wouldn’t say dust is extreme. We actually “dust”very little.


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[Happy Stacker]

If you are not careful removing ash this can create a significant amount of dust in the stove room on objects. If your stove has an ash pan this can help keep the dust to a minimum.

 

[jetsam]

I run a shop vac with a fine dust filter while I'm emptying the stove. I have the intake maybe a foot above the ash can. It really reduces the amount of dust that gets away if I go too fast with the shovel (which I always seem to do at some point, usually around the time that my welding gloves get to be almost too hot to wear).

 

[spolleypt]

I also found making sure I have flames in the back or too side while I scoop helps draw ash dust up instead of out the door. A handful of kindling at scoop time helps. My stove happened to have an ash dump/drawer which I initially didn’t want to spend the extra coin on, but the shop had offered a bunch with so Gave it to me for free so he didn’t have to reorder one. BEST GIFT EVER!


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[xman23]

I don't have any dust issue in my house when we are burning. My house and country location is fairly dust free. So unless your getting ash all over the place, I don't think the stove is the source.

 

[jetsam]

It probably has a lot to do with your stove and burning habits too. My ash is 500° and mixed with red hot coals all year. If you're putting cold ash into a bucket, I imagine the bucket ejects a lot less ash because there's no thermal convection.

 

[Ashful]

Wood stoves make dust. Folks who claim they don’t probably just never kept their house clean enough to notice.

Sources of dust include, likely from greatest to least:

1. Emptying of ashes
2. Loading the stove
3. Make-up air drawn into the house

We have our house dusted weekly, but there are still areas (eg. Book cases, behind the television, etc.) where it is not caught every week. I can see it is worst in the vicinity of my two stoves, than elsewhere in the house, re-enforcing the idea of my first two listed sources.

The good news is that the dust is pretty minimal. Even areas that may only get dusted twice per year (eg. Behind the TV or behind the computer printer) aren’t all that extreme, and we’re pretty fanatical about it.

Your options are:

1. Just keep up with the dusting. In our case, we’d be dusting weekly, whether we burn or not, so it’s not a lot of extra work.
2. Lower your standards.
3. Hire a cleaner. Our cleaning lady dusts the easy to reach stuff every week, and I get the areas she can’t reach a few times each year.
4. Develop better habits. The amount of dust is mostly dependent on your loading and ash removal methods.