(Curious) George said:
Ah, an educational example of situations that may have unrepresentative reporting--some of the people who have tried this may no longer be "online" to say it didn't go well.
I'm one of the lucky ones who's still online....
Back about 20 years ago we moved into this place. I brought a cord and a half of good seasoned wood from the last place we lived in, then had another 3 cord delivered. Red oak so wet it was not burnable. I would get the fire going with the seasoned stuff then add the green stuff a bit at a time. Obviously, I ran out of seasoned well before I was halfway through the green wood. I started to place several splits around the stove every day to dry out a little. No problem. I worked full time in the basement where the stove was, right?
So one day I got the bright idea to put two large steel blocks on top of the stove and put some small splits lengthways across them to speed dry. I put two side-by-side, then one on top between them. The idea was to trap the rising heat and speed up the drying. Every half hour I would rotate them (they would be
very hot), then when the stove got low, I'd toss them in, open up the air, and put three more on the stove. It actually worked pretty well and I was proud of my new system.
Then one day the phone rang upstairs and no one was home to answer it..............
Well, by the time I finally smelled the smoke, it was pouring up the basement stairs like fog. The smoke detector at the top of the stairs never even went off. I ran downstairs and saw my little pile of splits burning happily away like a campfire on top of the stove. Elapsed time was way less than three hours.
If you're going to do stuff like that, chain yourself to one of the legs of the stove. You
will get careless as you get cocky with the system. Just like leaving the ash pan ajar or the door cracked, there is always the danger that you will be distracted by something. At least in the case of the cracked door the fire is contained inside the stove, but with wood on top you will have a fire right out there in the open. I learned my lesson and never again did anything like that.