Month: March 2010

How to Burn Firewood More Efficiently in a Wood Stove

How to Burn Firewood More Efficiently in a Wood Stove or Fireplace

Learning to burn firewood more efficiently can help you get more heat and save money by burning less wood. This also gives the benefit of cleaner air for you and your neighbors to breath, both inside and outside your home. A cleaner burning fire will produce less creosote buildup in your chimney and on the glass on your wood stove. Smoke not only causes pollution, it is a wasted energy since smoke is unburned fuel that wasn’t converted to heat.

If you don’t have a modern certified wood stove, you might want to look into one since they are usually cleaner burning and produce more heat from less wood. But with some practice and the right knowledge you can make a clean burning and more efficient fire with both older non certified and certified stoves that will produce little or no visible smoke.

Here are Six Steps to A Cleaner Burning More Efficient Fire

Burn Seasoned Dry Firewood

It is very important to burn firewood that is seasoned and dry. Burning green or wet firewood will significantly reduce the heat output of your wood stove and increase smoke an creosote buildup in your chimney. Firewood should be seasoned for at least 6 months or up to a full year in some conditions. Learn how to season firewood.

Start Your Fire Right

Start a small hot fire using small pieces of firewood and kindling. Starting a fire with small dry pieces will give you a hot cleaner burning fire more quickly. It is good to keep your wood stove door slightly open for about a minute to allow extra air flow to get the fire going quickly before latching the door. Just make sure you latch it after the fire gets going. You don’t want an unattended fire to escape and burn your house down.

Get Your Stove Hot

Get your stove hot enough that it will re-burn the smoke the way it was designed. Start with a small hot fire and load more in one at a time as they are needed. Loading up your stove with several large pieces at once can cool the fire and create an inefficient burn and even a smoldering situation.

Maintain Your Fire

In older stoves especially, don’t close off the air flow too much since this makes the fire smolder and smoke. Don’t overload any stove since this also causes it to smolder and smoke. This wastes your fuel and money, causes creosote to build up and pollutes the air.

Keep the Wood Stove Doors Closed

Once the fire is going you shouldn’t open the doors unless you are putting in more wood. Wood stoves are designed to operate with the doors closed. When the door is opened, much of the heat will go out the chimney.

Never Burn Garbage

Garbage, newspaper or junk mail should never be burned in a wood stove. In some areas it is illegal. Paper can be used for starting fires but other than that the only things that should be burned in a wood stove are firewood, fire starter and manufactured fire logs approved for burning in a wood stove.

If all these steps are working properly you should be able to go outside and see no visible smoke coming from your chimney. There should be only hot air and water vapor.

How to Make Lumber out of Firewood

This is a video I found of a guy showing you how to make lumber out of firewood. I have not tried this but if you wanted some small pieces of lumber I can see that it would work. This might be good if you had some firewood made from a good quality hardwood and wanted it to make a small project.

This guy uses a jointer and a bandsaw but there are other cutting tools you could use to cut a piece of firewood into lumber. After you have some flat edges a table saw would probably work well to rip it into boards.

With any of this be very careful. Working with these irregular shaped pieces can be dangerous with power cutting tools so I suggest you not try this if you are not experienced and qualified. Actually I should take my liability disclaimer a step further and say don’t ever do this, ever, it’s too dangerous.

How to Start a Fire Quickly Even With Wet Wood

As a kid growing up in Oregon, my grandfather used to take me fishing and camping and one wise thing he taught me was how to start a fire quickly even when everything is wet. He used to take me hiking to a remote place at the river to catch winter steelhead and in the winter it was cold and sometimes rainy and he knew that making sure I could start a fire if I got lost or in trouble was very important.

At a young age he taught me to always have a road flare in my backpack when going out in the wild like that. A road flare lights like a match and will burn with a hot flame for a long time. Once it is lit you can start putting dead branches or other dead wood into and around the flame. With a 15 minute flare even if the wood is soaked there is enough time for the hot flames to dry the wood and get it to burn.

If you don’t have dead wood available live wood can work too. It is more difficult to get green wood to burn but if you start putting small twigs in and around the hot flame from the flare they will eventually burn. Leaving the leaves and needles on the twigs can help since they dry out and ignite faster. It is much more difficult with green wood so always go for the dead wood if available.

Keep plenty of wood accumulated around the flame from the flare to make a hot core of burning wood as soon as possible and that will be hot enough to support the fire after the flare goes out. Place the wood so it holds in heat but can still get good air circulation to supply the fire with plenty oxygen. The tee pee shape can work good for this. Once you get a good hot core of burning wood with a bed of coals you can throw just about any kind of wood on it and it will burn.

It have heard stories of people going out in the snow and kids going on family outings and a kid or even an adult gets separated and lost and freezes to death. If they had a flare and were taught how to use it, it may have saved their lives.

Any time I am out in the wild in cold weather I always have at least one flare in my pack or at least in my vehicle if I know I am not going far away from it. It is a good habit to get into and something that is good to teach your kids. A road flare is very inexpensive and having one on hand may save your life.

How to Split Firewood Using Only a Small Folding Handsaw

In this video you will learn how to split firewood using only a small folding handsaw. This technique could be useful for backpacking or survival situations. The man in this video claims that he would rather pack a light saw than an ax. An ax is heavy and dangerous but a saw is safer to use and more versatile. He will also show you at the end of the video the proper way to use a hand saw so you can cut for a long time without getting tired.

To split firewood with a handsaw, make a cross cut in the middle of the log about half way through. Then hit the cut area of the log against a hard surface like a tree, rock,stump, log etc. The cut spot makes a weak spot where the log will split down the middle since it is easier for the log to split than break across the grain.

In the video he explains that if you are in a survival situation and you are tired, dehydrated or otherwise not performing at your best, an ax is especially dangerous and difficult to use. In a situation where you were injured and unable to swing an ax, the saw technique would probably be easier if you needed to split your firewood into kindling to get a fire stated.

Fatwood Kindling

Fatwood kindling or fire starter is a name that comes form the South. It is made from the heartwood of pines that are naturally saturated with dried resin, also called pitch. Fatwood fire starter is much easier to light than regular wood, it even lights when it is wet. The resin in fatwood kindling will also burn much longer than regular wood kindling.

This wood often comes from stumps of trees or from logs from trees that died standing. Under the right conditions after a pine tree dies, the hartwood will fill up with resin, which eventually crystallizes and hardens. It’s also common in pine stumps. This wood is very resistant to rot and will usually last until it is burned. It is the same material that amber is made from. It is common for the sapwood to rot away from the fatwood and the fatwood will be all that is left of the tree or stump.

It only takes a small amount of fatwood kindling to get a fire started. You can light a piece of fatwood fire starter directly with a match or lighter, no paper is needed. Some people like to cut shavings off of it with a knife to make it even easier to light. I like to break a piece in half while twisting both ends in opposite directions. This sometimes makes it splinter and the splinters are even easier to light.

Forget Firewood Rack Plans, This is Easier

If you are looking for firewood rack plans, you should first take a look at this simple way to build a firewood storage rack. It is so simple that you don’t even need plans. You can quickly build a rack that is very strong, and adjustable from low cost materials.

All you need is some 2×4 lumber and some firewood rack Brackets. And if you want to make it extra string you can add nails or screws, but they are not required.

You take two 2×4’s and cut them to the length that you want your rack to be. Then cut four to the height you want the rack to be and two to the width, which will typically be the length of your firewood pieces. Put the ends of the 2×4’s into the slots in the brackets, and you are done.

The brackets create sturdy right angles between the sets of 2×4’s that can easily hold up your stack of wood. The wood will be held up off the ground and the end uprights will help to make a stable stack.

This type of rack is easy to move and easy to disassemble and reassemble. It is very versatile in size, and you can adjust the size by cutting or replacing the lumber with the size you want. These racks are great for other types of racks, storage racks, work benches, tables, and many things where you need a simple strong right angle between 2×4’s.