# Four hours of fire....in one minute!



## Corey (Jan 14, 2010)

Did a little time lapse of the nightly stove loading:  



A little description:

I set up my camera to take one 640x480 shot every 30 seconds.  Loaded up the stove at around 10:40pm and tripped the shutter.  The camera took 499 photos over the next ~4 hours until the battery died.  I then compiled the shots to make a movie about 1 minute long.

As far as what you see:  (or not depending on youtube compression - go full screen, high quality if you have the bandwidth)

The silver square LCD digital readout – in the upper left quadrant are four numbers.  The upper left of those is room temp, upper right is outdoor temp.  Lower left is  indoor RH, lower right is outdoor RH (I don’t think those two work anymore – they are always around 20/30 even in the rain, etc)  The bottom right number is the local time.  Barometer, date and other info are also displayed though not terribly interesting in this case.

Green/yellow LED – This is a temperature controller/display.  The green LED is the stovetop temp from a Type K thermocouple on the top/center (outside) of the actual firebox.  The yellow is a ‘set temperature’ showing 450F – it’s not hooked to anything at the moment.

The stove.  Normally I’d have the air open a little more in the beginning to get the fire going a little more.  But as you can see the room temp is 78 at the start of the video, so I really didn’t need more heat at that point.  So the video starts with the fresh wood on a hot coal bed and the air already set for the overnight burn.

Up to about 11:45, you see secondary combustion flare up over and around the wood.  The rear-most pieces are burning and generating heat for the secondary.  Note the front pieces of wood actually char from the radiant heat of the secondaries without ever actually catching on fire.  A little after 11:45 fire erupts in front of the wood.  Sometimes it almost appears to be shooting from the door to the wood.  I haven’t have much luck maintaining a successful seal between the double front doors.  It was originally just a metal to metal seal.  I milled an extra slot and added rope gasket, but it’s become compressed over a few months and seems to leak again.  I’m considering bigger gasket, but don’t know if the doors would close then.  I’m sure this is why most, if not all, modern stoves have a one-piece front door.   I think better sealing would allow for an even longer, but lower temperature burn.

About 12:15 max stovetop temperature is reached around 880F – again running a little cool because of the moderate outside temp.  By 1:30 the secondaries have gone out as there isn’t much more ‘wood gas’ – we’re burning carbon and carbon monoxide into CO2 now (sure would be nice to shut the secondaries off!)  Coals continue glowing brightly until about 2:48 when the camera stops taking pictures.  Stovetop temp then is ~490 and house temp is ~83 by the stove.  Woke up this morning to about 70F in the hallway/bedrooms – which I consider a ‘successful’ burn.  I shoot for 68-70 If it’s much below 66, I think I should have loaded more or larger chunks for a longer burn.  Much above 72 and I wish I’d loaded less wood and not been so wasteful.

This was a load of hedge.  Since the temp only dropped ~20F outside, I loaded some of the ‘medium’ splits left on the wood pile as opposed to the huge chunks I save for the bitter cold nights.  I probably had room for one more split in the stove, but judged this load to be ‘enough’ for the heating I needed.


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## clamp01 (Jan 14, 2010)

That is one cool Video!  I love the digital thermometer what kind is it?


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## SlyFerret (Jan 14, 2010)

Pretty cool!!  Thanks for posting that!

-SF


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## savageactor7 (Jan 14, 2010)

Wow I really like that elapse time video...thanks for posting.


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## Corey (Jan 14, 2010)

Glad everyone likes it.

clamp - the silver 'thermometer' is an Accurite Weather Station, the stove 'thermometer' is a REX-C700 PID temperature controller hooked to a type K thermocouple.


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## firefighterjake (Jan 14, 2010)

I loved it . . . pretty neat way to show folks what their woodstove is doing when they're sound asleep. Made me want to watch more  . . . kind of a start to finish video. Very cool.


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## Adios Pantalones (Jan 14, 2010)

huh huh- coool


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## Pagey (Jan 14, 2010)

That was awesome!  Thanks for taking the time to put that together.


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## joat717 (Jan 19, 2010)

Very cool video!!


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## GatorDL55 (Feb 16, 2010)

What kind of camera do you have/  I looked on mine but don't see a scheduled shutter feature.  There's only a 2 or 10 second delay for a group picture.  I have a Nikon Coolpix


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## Corey (Feb 17, 2010)

It was done with a Nikon Coolpix S10.  I don't know if all the variants have the time lapse or not, but the S10 does.


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## fyrwoodguy (Feb 17, 2010)

NICE VIDEO.....don't ya love all the different things, how we all love wood heat!


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## raybonz (Feb 17, 2010)

Interesting video and cool idea! Thanx for posting that!

Ray


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