Low on firewood and money, need advice

[Huntindog1]

If your wood isnt ideal then here is a trick is bring in your next load of wood and set it next to the stove.
Youi may need to rig up some kind of box or rig to hold the next load of wood. But dont set it so close that
it will get too hot. The heat from sitting close to the stove will dry out the wood quickly in the few hours of the current load of wood burning.
If you can stack the wood log cabin style so as lots of air flow in between each piece.

Having that wood good and dry gets you more heat out of each piece of wood. It allows you to get your stove turned down to its lowest long burn setting. Wet wood most of your heat is wasted as the stove is boiling water and the stove isnt operating the smoke burning mode we call secondary burn up in the top of the stove.

 

[Z33]

If your wood isnt ideal then here is a trick is bring in your next load of wood and set it next to the stove.
Youi may need to rig up some kind of box or rig to hold the next load of wood. But dont set it so close that
it will get too hot. The heat from sitting close to the stove will dry out the wood quickly in the few hours of the current load of wood burning.
If you can stack the wood log cabin style so as lots of air flow in between each piece.

Having that wood good and dry gets you more heat out of each piece of wood. It allows you to get your stove turned down to its lowest long burn setting. Wet wood most of your heat is wasted as the stove is boiling water and the stove isnt operating the smoke burning mode we call secondary burn up in the top of the stove.

View attachment 166196

This is pretty much a myth. You aren't going to do any significant amount of drying by setting your wood next to the stove for 3 or 4 hours. If it sets there for weeks on end that would be a different story. It will probably lite off better because the outside of the wood is 90-100 degrees instead of 40 if its outside.

The there are only two ways to get dry wood and that is heat and time. If you have the time, heat doesn't need to be that great. If you have heat then the time will be shorter.

 

[begreen]

Wood brought indoors will lose moisture fairly quickly, especially in the winter dry environment of a heated space. We've seen splits drop 5+% in a week. I was visiting a fellow up north and he had wet alder drying on a rack above his stove. (Yes kids, don't do this at home. He got a kick out of my expression when I saw this.) His wood went from lousy to burnable in 24 hrs.

 

[cookin2night]

This is pretty much a myth. You aren't going to do any significant amount of drying by setting your wood next to the stove for 3 or 4 hours. If it sets there for weeks on end that would be a different story. It will probably lite off better because the outside of the wood is 90-100 degrees instead of 40 if its outside.

The there are only two ways to get dry wood and that is heat and time. If you have the time, heat doesn't need to be that great. If you have heat then the time will be shorter.

I disagree with you on the myth thing. I have seen the benefits of leaving wood next to a stove for the next load. Sure some wood will do better than others but it will over all be better.

 

[iamlucky13]

I set my wood next to my stove if we get a heavy fog or wind blown rain onto the porch where my soon-to-be-burned stash is. It will dry out the moisture from that pretty quickly, because that moisture is near the surface.

Green or partially seasoned wood won't dry much because the moisture is much deeper and takes time to work its way out. It can't hurt to try in hopes of a small improvement if you're in a pinch and have marginal wood, but it's not a true substitute for fully seasoned wood.

Here's a Forest Service paper on kiln drying firewood that is relevant:
(broken link removed)

At an air temperature of 140 degrees, with a relative humidity around 20%, completely green oak splits (granted, not an easy to dry wood) took 10 days to reach 20% moisture content. None of us keeps our house at 140 degrees. Radiant heat might help get wood right next to the stove that temperature, but there's not room for 10 days worth of wood right next to a stove.

 

[begreen]

True it will dry from the outside in. Partially dry wood will dry out faster indoors. It may not be perfect but it will be much more burnable after a week indoors especially when starting out in the 25-30% range. If you saw the soggy that alder was coming into this fellow's house you would have been amazed he was burning it in a Lopi Liberty 24 hrs later. Hogwildz did this in Rubbermaid totes in his living room. Over a few weeks the difference was significant. There's a thread on this a couple years back.

 

[Seanm]

smoke burning mode we call secondary burn up in the top of the stove

Cool Secondaries Huntindog1!

 

[spirilis]

From a BTU balance standpoint, drying wet firewood by the stove is better than burning wet firewood because while you are being robbed out of BTUs either way, as water requires a prodigious amount of energy to evaporate, two factors serve in your favor with "drying firewood indoors":

1. The water isn't limiting secondary combustion and generating creosote, since the fuelwood you're burning is already dry, thus the total amount of "lost BTUs" is lower with extracting water via proximal heating vs involving wet firewood in the burn process
2. The water vapor produced is a welcome addition to the otherwise parched, bone-dry air inside your house

 

[maple1]

parched, bone-dry air inside your house

That is a symptom of poor air sealing in the house envelope. The increased stack effect the house sees during winter months when it is cold outside & warm inside can amp up the flow of dry air from outdoors to indoors and highlight poor sealing. Source of heat doesn't have much of an effect.

 

[jb6l6gc]

Wonder if op will revisit his thread

 

[mass_burner]

Wonder if op will revisit his thread

Sounds like another one and done.

 

[jb6l6gc]

Well nobody said heating with wood was easy. Thankfully I enjoy the work and get a sense of self sufficiency by building my wood storage amount and capacity. I see dollars saved sitting on my racks, plus the work keeps
Me busy and outta trouble lol

 

[BrotherBart]

The OP last logged in around two this afternoon.

 

[begreen]

The first year of wood heating is a learning curve, especially if the wood was split late. It does get better and easier once one is ahead of the game in the wood dept..

 

[Huntindog1]

Cool Secondaries Huntindog1!

Just a pic I grabbed off the internet not my stove. But I have had some nice secondaries my self.

 

[sportbikerider78]

This is pretty much a myth. You aren't going to do any significant amount of drying by setting your wood next to the stove for 3 or 4 hours. If it sets there for weeks on end that would be a different story. It will probably lite off better because the outside of the wood is 90-100 degrees instead of 40 if its outside.

The there are only two ways to get dry wood and that is heat and time. If you have the time, heat doesn't need to be that great. If you have heat then the time will be shorter.

LOL...40 degrees outside?
Says the guy from Hotlanta! I used to live in Marietta.
Most of the winter, it's well below freezing at my house. Last year was nuts. I would think there would be a 50-80 degree differential between outside and inside.

 

[Jazzberry]

Trolling for a handout is my guess

 

[saskwoodburner]

Trolling for a handout is my guess

I didn't want to be the first to say it, but I wondered that as well.

If he's been burning wood for a couple years, he should have the fire dialed in, and not be smoking the place up. If he is, it's because the fire isn't hot enough. There's no magical way to make 3 cords of wood last as long as 5 cords or whatever, without a drastic change (aka freezing).

He really needs to pick himself up and put on his "arborist" hat.

 

[jb6l6gc]

Trolling for a handout is my guess

Ya and Im sure he'd want it split and stacked neatly too

 

[Z33]

LOL...40 degrees outside?
Says the guy from Hotlanta! I used to live in Marietta.
Most of the winter, it's well below freezing at my house. Last year was nuts. I would think there would be a 50-80 degree differential between outside and inside.

Easy now...we got down to the low low temp of 48 here last night!

You are just making my point for me!

Atlanta is far from great but why in the hell would you want to move from Marietta to Syracuse?

 

[sportbikerider78]

Easy now...we got down to the low low temp of 48 here last night!

You are just making my point for me!

Atlanta is far from great but why in the hell would you want to move from Marietta to Syracuse?

I didn't. I moved from Marrietta to Greenville, SC to Bangor, ME to Wilmington, NC to Farmington, CT to Syracuse, NY.
I'm only here because I have family within 2 hrs. Family that has been really resistant to moving South.

 

[begreen]

Wilmington is a nice compromise.

 

[edyit]

must be a different wilmington, 36F here right now and that's warm for this time of year

 

[begreen]

Very different. Wilmington, NC. 71F currently. Looks like 77F on Thurs. That would be a nice day for the beach.

 

[WouldBurn]

Hey, hope I'm not reviving an old thread at this point but you guys were wondering if I was going to revisit the thread. Truthfully I have been revisiting it a lot, it's just that at first I was a little overwhelmed with all the new information, and then other things took over my life a little. I wanted to put together a more thought-out reply after the dust had settled a little, so to speak.

I want to say I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and by the way, Thanks for Giving me so much excellent advice, hah! You guys literally blew me away. But I am proud to say that thanks in no small part to this advice, I have finally swept out my flue. I went to Lowe's just before Thanksgiving and got a 6" wire brush, three fiberglass rods, and a roll of Visqueen, which I would fold it up and close my stove's door on it to hopefully seal out any fine soot. I was advised that the stuff can fly around in the house for months and appear on bright smooth surfaces if you wipe it with your finger. Since that didn't sound fun, I decided not to take chances and I put some down on the carpet too.


While investigating around that day, I found out that the door on the bottom of the chimney, on the outside of the house, was open. I guess this is a cleanout door of some kind. Upon researching I found out that it certainly could have caused issues with draft! While I was out there I looked inside of it and there was a pile of ashes, coals, and for some reason, fasteners - either small bolts or large screws. I think these might have been left over from the previous owner of the house, but I hope it doesn't mean something worse. I didn't see any bits of masonry.


Then the day of Thanksgiving rolled around and it was pretty out - cold, but the sun was there to melt the frost. I hopped on my roof using a jury-rigged solution; I'm working on getting a taller ladder but this definitely worked in the meantime. GF was there to catch me if I fell, lol. Once I got up there it was much easier than I invisioned, at least to clean out what I could see. It was so easy, the GF decided to have me clean the sunroof, sweep the pine needles off and clean the gutters. Whew! Good thing there was lots to eat later on.

I left the Visqueen on for a few days, removed it and swept out the woodstove. I didn't see any chunks of creosote or even any soot. This is where I am right now; I'm not really certain if I swept out the whole thing or even if I did it properly. I don't have a bright enough light to look all the way down from the top, so all I could do was feel the resistance on the brush. It was pretty easy on the top half, but as I kept going down I felt one point where it seemed to get tight. Then it let off, but got tight again a little further down. After that there wasn't much resistance at all, and then I seemed to hit bottom.

I hope I didn't brush all that stuff down the pipe just so it could sit on top of the stove and blow up my adapter or whatever next time I light a fire. I can't see anything from inside of the woodstove, so do you guys know if there's a way I could do this? It was professionally installed and if I could avoid tearing it apart that would be pretty cool. I sure would like to see in there somehow or at least determine somehow that I swept it out thoroughly and safely. Is it still a DIY job at this point or should I begrudgingly dig out my wallet?

Again thank you so much to everyone for the wonderful advice and interesting discussion. Sorry for not writing sooner but I have been lurking all the while and I really appreciate you all.