Wood Stoves
~ by Mark Blackwell
It’ s winter now. And I’ m sitting here by my stove so I can detect when it needs more fuel. Lotsa folks don’ t know how much concentration it takes to keep a wood stove cruisin’ at the exact perfect burn rate. It takes a rare blend of innate talent, a working knowledge of Newtonian physics, and a rigorous apprenticeship at the feet of a master to keep the cabin warm.
The very first thing you need to know when buying, bartering, or trading for your wood stove is that it should be one that burns wood and not one that is made out of wood. An adjunct to this caveat is to be very careful about buying a wood stove on EBay— you just never can tell what you might get. And the shipping charges are gonna be through the roof.
Let us say that you found your stove and it is a good’ un. Now you have to install it.
First, you need to pick a spot in your house or cabin where the stove will be centrally located— or more likely where it will fit. If you have trouble centrally locating your stove, your place might be too big. The answer is to get a bigger stove or a smaller cabin.
Another critical element of wood stove management is to keep the fire on the inside. I will grant you that having the fire on the outside can certainly be more festive and makes cooking weenies easier, but your insurance premiums will go up.
One of the approved methods of protecting your domicile from consequences related to wood stove over-efficiency is to place it on a hearth and firewall made from brick, stone, adobe, clay tiles, or any other non-combustible materials you might have laying around.
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You could take that old kiddie pool that’ s out in the back yard breeding mosquitoes and give it new life as a raised hearth. All you got to do is bring the pool in to where you’ re gonna locate your stove. Get yourself three or four bags of concrete mix. Make sure that you have it perfectly positioned and put the concrete with the requisite amount of water in the pool and mix it up. Let the mixture set for a day or two. And then, with the help of four or five unsuspecting neighbors, place your stove on the new raised hearth.
For a custom look, you can let the kids and pets put their hand and paw prints in the cement before it hardens. Or for a more traditional hearth, you could scrawl a motto or a facsimile of your family coat-ofarms.
To create a dazzling firewall one might take the hoods off four or five of the vehicles you got composting out in the yard and arrange them in a fish scale motif on the wall behind the stove.
Now that we have the stove located and positioned safely, it is time to connect it to the chimney( or chimbley as it is pronounced in some parts of the county). The main objective of a chimney