Chapter 18
Keeping the Sanctuary Lamps Burning
My woodstove is my sanctuary lamp. As it burns, it symbolizes the presence of the life force of nature keeping my family alive through the cold death of winter, keeping us safe—or as safe as life can be, despite civilization’s determination to destroy itself. By keeping my sanctuary lamp burning, I celebrate the possibility of everlasting life right here on earth.
Burning wood will only be practical, however, when the keepers of the flame learn how to burn wood efficiently. I am embarrassed when I remember how ignorant I was when we started heating with wood in 1979. And I do not claim to know it all, by far, even nearly forty years later. Much of the lore and learning about wood heating has been lost and is only slowly being relearned. Some of it, I suspect, is not yet known and will only be discovered if and when more and more people turn to wood for lack of other handily available fuels.
Keeping the sanctuary lamps burning properly involves three divisions of efficient labor and technology: the kind and condition of the wood itself; the stove or other vessel in which the wood is burned; and the circulation system that transfers the heat through the house and smoke out of the house. I am going to start with that last category because the exhaust systems for heating stoves and furnaces are what most of us are most ignorant about. Certainly I was. When we built our house, I assumed that the masons who had laid up the fireplaces and chimneys knew what they were doing. Not so. They knew all about laying brick; they knew only a little about proper wood heating systems. Today the situation is much improved because many more people are putting in woodstoves or fireplace inserts for backup wood heat, but in the beginning we made several mistakes simply because traditional knowledge had been forgotten.
First mistake: our builder said that a chimney need not have a cover on it because updrafts would keep rainwater from running down inside most of the time, and what water did get in would be channeled away in the masonry foundation below the chimney. We learned that this was a mistake, especially if you install steel fireplace inserts. Water inevitably gets down the chimney and rusts anything metal it comes in contact with. If the cover is not removable, it needs to allow space enough to get cleaning equipment into the chimney. Chimneys can be cleaned out from below, but there are times when you will want to do it from above. We now have removable covers for our two side-by-side chimneys, although we can actually clean them by sliding a log chain up and down the chimney without removing the covers completely. The opening of the chimney should also be screened to keep out birds, bats, and raccoons.
Second mistake: side-by-side chimneys must not top out at the same height, the way ours did in the beginning. If they do, inevitably when smoke is issuing from one chimney, downdrafts will suck it down the other chimney if it is not in use and fill the room below with a tiny but discernible bit of smoke. Make sure one chimney sticks up above the other by at least a foot. We had to add on that much to one of our chimneys.
Third mistake: It is better for a chimney to have a crook in it rather than run straight up from the fireplace. Almost all old houses have such chimneys, and I have heard people make fun of them, believing that the builder made a mistake and had to correct it by angling it to its proper position. Something about putting an angle in the chimney about halfway up discourages downdrafts. I don’t know the physics involved, but I do know the results. One of our chimneys has a crook in it, the other runs straight up. The one with the crook, fortunately the one we use all winter, almost never has a downdraft. The other does puff out smoke from the fireplace occasionally. This is not a problem with a woodstove, because the stovepipe has a right angle in it after it issues from the stove and is connected to the chimney.
Fourth mistake: beware of improperly shaped or designed fireplaces or a chimney too short or positioned above the roof where it can cause downdrafts. To draw well, they must have the proper ratio of height to depth and of chimney diameter and height to the fireplace opening. All inserts I know about today have these proper design ratios, but where the fireplace is handmade with firebrick or other masonry, the mason in charge may or may not know how crucial these ratios sometimes are. Nor is there a particular set of numbers that covers every situation. There are several kinds of fireplaces, including very shallow, tall ones that are designed to throw more radiant heat into the room. What you must do is find a builder who constructs fireplaces that really do draw the smoke up the chimney, not puff it out into the room. The only sure way to do that is to look at fireplaces that work and hire the people who built them. But keep in mind that during weather changes, when the barometric pressure is falling, any fireplace might occasionally back-puff.
If you are really interested in the most efficient and effective wood heating system, you will avoid fireplaces and fireplace inserts of all kinds in favor of cast iron or soapstone stoves that sit out in the room with stovepipes that rise straight up from the stove a few feet then through the wall into the chimney. Many experts will no doubt disagree with me on that, especially if they are selling fireplace inserts. It’s a free world, so go ahead and believe them if you wish. Or if you just like watching a fire burn in a fireplace and are not particularly interested in the most efficient setup, fireplace inserts are fine.
We built our house with a fireplace in the living room before we understood that a woodstove was far more efficient and effective, so when we installed a stove, we had to run the stovepipe from the back of the stove into the fireplace and then up the chimney. This works okay and avoids putting a hole in the living room wall for the stovepipe to enter the chimney, but the draft is not as strong as it would be if the stovepipe went straight up from the stove sitting out in the room, where the pipe could be acting as a radiator too, and then into the chimney through the wall.
Metal stovepipes are easier to clean than masonry chimneys. Eventually, we extended stainless steel pipe up into the lower part of the chimney about ten feet high, the part more likely to collect creosote. The pipe needs to be stainless steel because the moisture that comes down the chimney, even with a cover on it, will rust out a regular stove pipe. I can shove a wire brush up the pipe in the fireplace opening quite easily where it goes up into the chimney, cleaning out any creosote in one fairly easy pass. But again, it would be easier to remove a stovepipe when it rises directly above the woodstove, carefully carry it outside, and clean it there.
Sometimes creosote forms in a blob right at the very top of the chimney where the hot smoke meets the cool air. It is easy to remove, but not a place you’d expect blockage to occur.
Fireplaces lose more heat up the chimney than stoves or furnaces and so are less efficient. I won’t get into the numbers involved because BTUs can be manipulated just as imaginatively as biblical quotations and end the same way: in more argument. But there are ways to cut down on the fireplace heat loss. If the fireplace is in a room that is somewhat separated from, or can be closed off from, the rest of the house, it can’t suck warm air out of more than that one room where it is located. That room is benefiting from the radiant heat from the fireplace so the loss is not as significant. If you love to watch wood burning in the fireplace, and who doesn’t, you can draw your wing-backed chair up close to the fire so you can hardly feel the room air rushing past you and up the chimney and know that at least you are not drawing air from the whole house.
We use our open fireplace on the lower level of the house for holiday time. It is more efficient than a regular fireplace because it has a heavy steel insert in it with its own air ducts below to draw in air and ducts above to direct the heated air out into the room again. The insert has its own electric circulating fan built into it, which is supposed to enhance the air movement, but we hardly ever run it because convection alone pulls in cool air below and emits warmed air above quite strongly. It is especially important to us that the fireplace, like the woodstove upstairs, can operate entirely without electricity because our main objective is to have heat and sustenance when the electricity goes off. Because the fireplace is on the lower floor, convection increases efficiency even more. The radiant heat can rise up through the entire house. If you stand in the kitchen at the top of the stairs, which are about ten feet from the fireplace opening below, you can easily feel the warm air coming up the steps. We figure that the amount of warm air so distributed about equals the warm air being sucked up the chimney. We can also close the fireplace doors to further slow the inflow of air up the chimney, but this cuts the radiant heat from the fire into the room, so not much is gained, if anything.
Makers of woodstoves, made of metal or soapstone or whatever, often boast about the internal design of their appliances, which circulate the heat through various chambers, thus seeming to take advantage of it longer. The increase in efficiency of such stove designs is somewhat exaggerated in my opinion, although again experts might disagree with me. A woodstove really warms better than a fireplace insert because it stands out in the room a little and radiates heat all around it. You can snuggle up next to it. No matter how many internal tubes or chambers the heat moves around inside it, the unit as a whole is the bulk or mass which soaks up the heat and radiates it into the room. Our Defiant, from Vermont Castings, has a built-in damper that can direct the heat straight into the stovepipe, or route it around to the end of the stove and back to the stovepipe before it exits the stove. The distance of the reroute is hardly two feet, not enough to make much difference in delaying the hot air on its way to the chimney. The main advantage of this rerouting, I think, is that the hottest air from the fire does not go directly into the stovepipe unless you want it to for increasing draft and so minimizes the chance of a chimney fire. Cast iron will “hold” more heat than steel and soapstone more than cast iron, but whatever, the bulk of the stove is more important to heat output than the internal recirculation design. Friends of ours, Dave and Pat Haferd, have only a very simple, cheap old Franklin stove, but one with a fairly long length of stovepipe involved, and they not only heat the house with it most of the time but cook their meals on it too. In this day and age if that is not remarkable, I don’t know what is.
The most efficient heaters in terms of requiring lesser amounts of wood to heat a house are usually referred to as masonry heaters. They are large, even massive, walls or formations of stone or masonry which soak up the heat from a hot, quick fire within them, then slowly release the radiant heat absorbed by the mass over the next twelve to twenty-four hours. The more massive the heater, the more heat it will retain and the longer it will keep a house warm on one charge of wood. A masonry heater might take up, or actually be an integral part of, a whole wall of a room, or be built as a highly ornate stone formation in the center of a room or house. In fact the heater can conform to any size or shape an artisan builder desires, so long as it has a pathway inside for the smoke and heat to make its way out of the house. Since its heat output is closely related to its size, masonry heaters are almost always found in larger-than-average homes. Always they are beautiful beyond words but can cost the price of a new car easily enough. That is the only reason they are not more in vogue. (A good book on the subject is Masonry Heaters: Designing, Building, and Living with a Piece of the Sun by Ken Matesz [Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010.]) According to the author’s figures, a house with a masonry heater needs only two cords of dry wood per winter for every one thousand square feet of room space to stay comfortably warm if the house is well insulated and designed to take some advantage of direct solar heat from the sun. I don’t know of any more eloquent testimony to the practicality of home heating with wood for a significant part of our population than what Matesz writes in chapter 10, “Fuel to Burn.” As he puts it: “Whenever I go to my woodshed, I marvel that nature not only sends all the free energy to the earth [by way of the sun] but also provides the free batteries [wood] for its snowy-day storage. Each air-dried pound of wood stores 6,400 BTUs of solar energy. A single oak log contains over 30,000 BTUs. Holding a 5-pound oak log is like holding 60 square feet of sunshine in hand because that one log when burned efficiently, will release about 1,000 BTUs per hour through an efficient masonry heater.”
Most of us, alas, do not believe we can afford massive masonry heaters, although in hindsight, I think that if we had built our home with one in mind, working the extra cost into the very design and structure of the house, it would have been affordable, even on our limited income. This would be especially true in locations where plenty of fieldstone is available on-site for free, and the owner-builder had some skill in masonry. In the future, surely, masonry heaters will become more common.
Another kind of heater gaining in popularity is the outdoor furnace or outdoor boiler. These units stand alone at some safe distance from the house, and the heat is piped into the house. The big advantages are that the danger of fire in chimney or house is removed and the heat is transferred to the house, not the smoke. Most outdoor furnaces are advertised as needing to be filled with wood only once a day, but I wouldn’t take that as gospel. These furnaces have the ability, so owners tell me, of burning quite large pieces of wood, hay bales—in fact anything combustible. Some of them also heat water for the house. Most outdoor furnaces are now made to comply with EPA pollution regulations, removing the main objection to them. Expect to pay around $5,000 and up. You can find tons of information about them on the Internet. Owners respond to my questions enthusiastically most of the time, but lukewarmly some of the time. Like all technologies, there are pluses and minuses. The remark I hear often is that you have to be prepared to go outdoors in cold, nasty weather to put in more wood.
Although outdoor furnaces are supposed to burn wood even if it is not well cured, in all other circumstances make sure your wood is very well dried. Heating with wood requires menial, everyday tasks. Making sure these tasks are easier to perform takes the drudgery out of the routine and encourages more people to heat with wood. As I have said earlier, wood ought to be split and dried for at least two summers before use. In the winter it is to be burned, make sure there’s a good supply under cover close by so you don’t have to fight snow to get it into the house. We line the walls of our attached garage with ricked wood.
There is one detail, never mentioned, that can mean cooperation or opposition to burning wood if you have a wife who is as persnickety about dirt as mine. We have tried all sorts of carriers to bring wood into the house, most of which dribble dirt and bark on the rug. That will never do in our house. There are wood carriers now that resemble a sort of large satchel. They will hold about six pieces of wood completely enclosed and so do not dribble. I just set the satchel of wood next to the stove, and when it is empty, I go get another satchel full. The pieces of wood never get the chance to let loose that awful stuff called dirt, except right close to the stove where it is easy to sweep up. And of course, you must have a little shovel and broom right there handy to make that little bit of dirt disappear before “the missus” sees it.
Having really dry wood not only means more efficiency and less creosote, but it makes lighting fires much easier. Every day, sometimes more than once a day, one must rekindle the fire. The more easily that can be accomplished, the better. There is an art to it, especially in arranging the pieces of wood that are about to be set on fire—what the old-timers called “laying the fire.” Like all art, there is more than one way to do that, but the principle involved is that two or three pieces of wood together will kindle faster and easier than one. The pieces should be very close to each other, but not touching, so that air and flame can course up between the pieces of wood.
Our stove has no grate, so, after years of experimenting, I now lay two pieces of wood averaging four inches thick side by side in the ashes of the previous fire to act as a sort of temporary grate. Our Defiant will take lengths of wood to about eighteen inches long, which is better than dinking around with little twelve-inch pieces. Between the two pieces I lay in maybe three or four very dry twigs. Then I place a third log piece and maybe a fourth, slightly angled, on top of the lower two and over the twigs. I place a wad of paper in front of the twigs. I light the wad, and the draft draws the flame into the twigs, which ignite readily. The flame then advances through the twigs and upward, lighting the log pieces. Until the flame strengthens, I leave the stove door slightly ajar so that there is plenty of draft to spark up the flame, but not open enough for sparks to jump out onto the floor.
Sounds simple enough, but any deviation from that method will often result in a flame that smolders out rather than igniting the wood. Not until the wood is crackling well do I close the door completely. When the temperature on the stovetop thermometer gets to 300 degrees, I close the damper and set the thermostat opening about medium.
Cooking on a woodstove is a skill learned only by experience. We keep a kettle of water for tea on the stove and cook only stews and soups or, most often, warm up leftovers. Our stove has a griddle for pancakes or frying meat, but we rarely do this kind of cooking on it.
In childhood days my parents had a big wood-burning furnace in the basement, which fed warm air by convection through big ducts to all the rooms on the first floor. I still think that is the most efficient way to heat a house entirely with wood. We children would fight for space to sit on the registers in the floor out of which the heat rose on cold mornings. That big old furnace would take enough wood at one filling to keep the house fairly comfortable nearly all night. I was describing it to Rick and Suzie Roth, a couple I met at a book signing recently. They nodded knowingly. They still heat with one just like it. Suzie, after a pause, casually added: “I got my pencil out the other day and figured that in the last twenty-five years, we’ve saved $88,000 heating with our own wood.”
Woodstoves can be very temperamental creatures. Each one has its own personality, so to speak, in the strength of its draft and the way it has to be babied to get the best operation. That is why it is difficult to generalize a set of directions. But always they will behave better if the barometer is rising than when it is falling. When the weather is very cold and the wind is blowing briskly, mine will draw more strongly than in warmer, calmer temperatures. In a January blizzard, it can almost suck the cat right off the hearth, but in March, when the weather is warming, I must open the thermostat vent wide, maybe even leave the stove door slightly ajar, to get a good draw, at least until the stovetop warms up to 300 to 400 degrees.
The trick here is to always set the stove to burn hot so that combustion is complete and the smoke leaving the chimney has only minimum pollutants in it. The whiter the smoke and the lesser the volume, the better. Black, billowing smoke means you are not burning the wood completely and therefore are losing money while at the same time coating the inside of the chimney with creosote and irritating your neighbors.
Our stove, like so many built in the 1970s, is an airtight model, the idea being, back then before we knew better, to burn the wood with limited oxygen so that a charge of wood would last longer. An airtight stove operated in this mode is an excellent way to start a chimney fire because a low draft builds creosote in the chimney. Keep a thermometer on top of your stove to make sure that the fire is burning hot—in the 500- to 700-degree Fahrenheit range. Your situation might dictate an operating temperature a little higher or lower than that, but I get nervous if the stove heats up to more than 700 degrees. On the Defiant, the thermostat vent will automatically start closing in that case, which keeps the temperature from getting excessively higher than that, but I try to avoid that situation by never putting more than three or four pieces of wood in the stove at one time. (It will hold six easily.) First of all, more means wasting wood in my estimation, since three will keep the stove plenty hot enough in most situations. Then when the three pieces burn down to the equivalent of one and a half, I add a chunk. By adding pieces at just the right stage, I can keep the room warm with about a fourth less wood than I used to burn. Burning this way is just as saving of wood as using four or more pieces with the draft closed down, and it actually keeps the room warmer. Of course this means that at night the fire will go out before morning. I have to get up at night to go to the bathroom anyway, so I can at the same time add wood to the stove. The only real advantage of an “airtight” stove is that, if you do get a chimney fire, you can close the stove down completely and snuff out the fire.
Of course neither my wife nor I can always be right there by the stove to add pieces at the right time. My office is just a few steps away, however, so I can take a break from writing when I need to stretch my legs and usually keep the fire going. What I want to avoid, but don’t always, is letting the fire go out during the day. Then I have to go through the whole ritual of starting it up again.
Since starting the fire inevitably becomes more than a once-a-day chore, I make it as easy on myself as possible. In the fall, I gather up a woodbox full of tree twigs from windblown branches in the woods. There is a little know-how involved, even in this. It doesn’t make much difference which kind of tree I gather from, but to make the job easy, I snap twigs off various downed branches till I find some that are just at the right age of decay, where the twigs are old and dry enough to break easily but not so old as to be starting to rot. Such twigs kindle almost as easily as any of the products on the market for starting fires and of course are free.
I think it is wise to have another kind of heat as backup, particularly for older people. This is especially handy in late fall or early spring when the weather is almost warm enough to do without any heating. On such days, younger people can do without; old folks need to raise room temperature just a few degrees.
Laying a fire in a fireplace so it will start easily and burn well is more of an art than laying a fire in a stove. A grate is not at all necessary, but I use one because it makes starting easier in my estimation. First I put a big chunk of wood in the back of the fireplace, behind the grate, for a backlog. Here is where I use knotty wood that I can’t split with the maul. I always think of my father-in-law, who used to regale me with stories of his mountaineer aunt and uncle in the hills of Kentucky who bragged that they used only one match a winter to light fires. Into a big yawning open fireplace they would roll a backlog in the fall way too big to lift. It would keep hot coals glowing all winter long.
Then, in the bottom of the grate I lay a fistful of dry twigs. Over the twigs I put two or three very dry sticks maybe three inches in diameter. On top of them go a couple of splits or log pieces about five or six inches in diameter, sometimes more. Here is where I use wood that won’t split easily or that is partly moldy or greenish stuff that I wouldn’t use in the woodstove. A fireplace has almost unlimited draft, and if there are a few good, dry pieces of wood at the base of the fire, this less-than-ideal wood on top will dry out and burn okay. Sometimes it will sizzle for a while. I would rather burn all dry wood, but this is one place where I can get rid of the less-than-ideal stuff. I pay for it, though, because it won’t burn nice and crackling like really dry wood will. I usually mix in pieces of dry wood after the lower dry pieces burn up to keep a bright flame going.
The secret of a good fireplace fire is to lay the wood pieces in with about half an inch to an inch of space between them. The fire needs that space for the flame to climb up through the logs to give you that picturesque fire you always see in the movies. If you love fiddling with fire like I do, you can spend lots of time making sure space remains between the burning embers when you add new pieces of wood. This is my favorite activity of the Christmas season.
I have a sentimental attachment to our fireplace. In 1978 during the Big Blizzard, it literally kept us alive. I did not yet have a woodstove, so all of us, including the two families next door, huddled around the fireplace for three days waiting for the electricity to come back on. The wind was howling and the snow piling up even over my woodpiles outside (this was the very last time I did not go into winter with plenty of wood in our garage for storms like this). The temperature bottomed out at twenty below. Fortunately, since our lower floor is below ground level on three sides, the fireplace could keep the room warm enough to be almost comfortable. Carol kept a big pot of stew on the fire crane over the fire, and I spent nearly all of the daylight hours swimming and digging through snowdrifts to find the wood I had ricked up in the woods. Nothing melts so slowly as snow on wood or in a bucket in front of a fire, but we managed to get enough water that way to drink and enough fairly dry wood to keep the fireplace going. That was the day of my enlightenment, the biggest milestone of my life. I promised myself that I would never again be without wood heat, at least for emergencies. So far I have kept that promise.
About the Author
Ben Barnes
A prolific nonfiction writer, novelist, and journalist, Gene Logsdon has published more than two dozen books, both practical and philosophical. His nonfiction works include Holy Shit, Small-Scale Grain Raising, Living at Nature’s Pace, and The Contrary Farmer. His most recent novel is Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food. He writes a popular blog, The Contrary Farmer, as well as an award-winning column for the Carey, Ohio, Progressor Times, and is a regular contributor to Farming magazine and Draft Horse Journal. He lives and farms in Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
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