Set the IR at 1:30 in the afternoon. Then left for a 12 hour business trip. My wife is out of town so I returned to a 57 degree house and hat coal. Built a nice fire. Then had the privilege of waiting and fiddling for 45 minutes to fire it up, get the secondaries firing and closing her down. It was 0 out. Yep I could have turned on the force hot air gas. NO WAY! Any of you have similar experiences?
Waiting to go to bed!
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Sometimes it just doesn't want to go. Usually when barometric conditions are not good for draft. Suddenly supercedars seem like a good idea.
I thought the tube stoves fired up quicker than that. 30-45 min. or more is what I would be looking at with the various cat stoves I run. Do you have good draft? How tall is your stack? Full-length liner?
Not since I stacked Hickory, BL and White Oak, and got cat stoves.Not since I retired.
It happens to me rarely since I work out of the house. When it does happen, I usually will use the gas furnace to rapidly boost the house temp until the Isle Royale catches up.
I need to be gone this weekend overnight. I'll set the thermostat for 68 and return it to 58 after I get home. My wife doesn't like to run the stove.
45 minutes isn't bad if he's including the fiddling around at the end to feel comfortable enough to go to bed.
I need to be gone this weekend overnight. I'll set the thermostat for 68 and return it to 58 after I get home. My wife doesn't like to run the stove.
45 minutes isn't bad if he's including the fiddling around at the end to feel comfortable enough to go to bed.
I used to be stubbornly determined not to use the furnace at all. When I realized I could heat the house with the stove alone, I decided that a few hours here and there of running the furnace isn't going to break the bank.
Though I'm no longer averse to running the furnace, it still rarely gets used.
Though I'm no longer averse to running the furnace, it still rarely gets used.
Heck yeah, if you can get the house back up to temp in 15 min. or so while waiting for the stove, why not?
prezes13
Minister of Fire
maple1
Minister of Fire
I don't like running the boiler but will when it makes sense to. Bedtime is not one of those times because I really don't want the house too warm then.
Yesterday evening, I got home fourteen hours after the stove had last been stoked and I ran the boiler to warm things up a bit while I got the stove heated back up. I admit to cringing a bit when I turned the thermostat up though. It just goes against my grain.
Yesterday evening, I got home fourteen hours after the stove had last been stoked and I ran the boiler to warm things up a bit while I got the stove heated back up. I admit to cringing a bit when I turned the thermostat up though. It just goes against my grain.
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Oh no it's not a problem. I am just stubborn and cheap! If the wife was home I am sure I would have kicked the furnace up a few degrees. The IR is perfect, I was just being finicky about getting the fire perfect before I went to bed. I had a firelight cat which was fine.....I though like being able to see when the stove is running at peak efficiency
The Firelight did great for 18 years. It really is a beautiful cream colored stove. It got to the point when the the burn plate cracked, and the material that held the cat in place was deteriorating. Someone with some know how can bring it back to life. It is now in the corner of the garage.
The IR is doing great as well. I have burned my entire life 59 years worth.....but it is taking some practice to master this baby. I am 90% there. Glad I made the move last summer......the headline in today's paper was "coldest month in history"!
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BradleyW
Burning Hunk
I figure my stove can do 99% of the heating when temps are relatively normal. With average lows below zero for the month of February, the furnace ran a little more in the mornings than I'd like, but that beats getting up in the middle of the night to load the stove.
Nick Mystic
Minister of Fire
Hey baseroom, I'm with you. We heat exclusively with wood and I have to give my wife a lot of credit for dealing with the cooler temperatures in the morning when she gets up before I stoke the fire back up. Yes, we could use the central heating system and pay for the propane and always have the house at whatever temperature we set the thermostat at. However, heating with wood is very rewarding on many levels. I figure the day will come when we'll have to rely on the furnace, but while I can process our wood and load the stove that's how we'll get our heat. I think facing the challenge of keeping the house warm with wood provides an added richness to ones life and gives one something to look forward to with the changing of the seasons.
I agree with you. But the equation is a little different when you're dealing with 15 double-digit-below-zero overnight temperatures out of the last 30 days. I'm at the point that I'm ecstatic at a forecast of 5 F overnight. Wheeee!
Neither my stove nor my oil boiler can cope alone, so I've had to run both a lot of the time this past month to keep the house temp reasonable.
Bagelboy
Feeling the Heat
We have heated for 30 years with wood. My furnace is only used when we go away for a few days, which is like twice a year. With that being said, I would have tweeked the furnace on to get the house up a little while rebooting my fire. My house is usually around 74 degrees with two stoves going no matter what outside temps there are. Going from 58 to 74 takes time, and getting the furnace going for a half hour or so doesn't cost that much. If it costs me $5 or $10, it would be worth it. I already save thousands a year heating with wood!
Had several such experiences, it's a big part of the reason we got the BK. We're sorta like Nick Mystic around here to. We put our money, time, and effort toward heating the home with wood so that's how we will heat as much as reasonable possible.
When we had propane heat I did anything I could to keep the furnace from coming on. The ductwork was uninsulated (by vermin) and running through an open crawlspace. It cost a fortune to run in cold weather and propane prices kept going up rapidly. When we did the remodel in 2006 and raised the house we tore out the old duct lines and furnace and replaced them with a good heatpump system with fully insulated supplies and returns. The crawl space also got sealed and insulated. Now I don't mind hearing the heat come on if it needs to. The cost of running is small and the comfort is good.
Ashful
Minister of Fire
Two 3 cu.ft. stoves, 6-zones of baseboard on the oil boiler, 3-zones of heat pumps, and 3 zones electric baseboard. They've all run in tandem this winter, to keep this joint warm. Our walls hold 52F this time of year, pretty much no matter what the interior air temp might be. Each cord of wood I burn is one tank less oil I'll burn, but I no longer fool myself into thinking I can keep the boiler from running. I'm down to 3.5 - 4 tanks of oil per year, now. We were what the oil co. calls "7-10 day customers," meaning a fill of our 275 gallon tank every 7 - 10 days, before we started running the two stoves.
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When it's this cold for this long, every solid object, including the walls of the house, are frozen and just keep sucking the heat out of the room until the outside temperature warms up. The frost line of the ground here has now moved deeper than historic levels, and municipal water mains are freezing and breaking all over the state, to say nothing of household pipes that have never frozen since they were first put in.
Looking at the forecast, I'm only seeing one more day of below-zero overnight temps here next week, thank God. I'm just trying to figure out whether to burn my remaining supply of firewood over the next week or so or pay the oil company now and use the firewood spread out over a month or so this spring.
Ashful
Minister of Fire
It pays to have wood on hand in case there's a power outage. I went thru that last year, after our four-day outage in the beginning of February. Noting my wood supply was getting very low, I shut down the stoves for a few weeks when reserves got to 1/2 cord. When we hit mid-March, I figured I was in the clear, and fired the stoves back up to burn the remainder.
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