A Real Wood Heat Thread (No Robots Allowed)

[Landscraper]

Having been duped by a robot this morning I'm still thinking about how much I love wood heat.

How many of you free heelers are also running wood in the basement?

As we round the corner of early-late-mid-winter let's discuss all things wood heat.

Pellet Head? Log Daddy? What's your flavor / what's your furnace / hows it circulating?

We're running a Sam Daniels Wood Furnace with a Sam Daniels Sheet Metals plenum feeding into a Skuttle blower.

"Keep it in the burn zone dudes!"

[Roelant]

The trees around here are in a vast majority birch, european red pine, spruce and larch. Birch burns the cleanest, has the least sparks, the highest energy, and grows back in a reasonable time frame. So birch it is. A bit more expensive than "mixed wood" to buy.
I use Contura 810 recirculating wood oven. Works fine.

[Landscraper]

Whoa, that looks like a classy stove

We've got a Jøtul of roughly the same size, but the styling isn't nearly as contemporary. Matches our old house.

I've got a love hate relationship with Birch, personally.
It's such a great tree, really good habit, incredible in stands, marks the landscape well. Great habitat, good color. Very rare in my part of Vermont.

**I should say that it's just rare to get a majority mix of birch in your log loads.**

In the furnace it can be a bit off. Sometimes oily fuming, acrid smoke. Odd. I wonder if that's the birch or just my imagination.

We usually get a noticeable amount in our log loads, but have the fortune of being near actively managed lands that yield some impressive hardwood cordage.

[joeatomictoad]

Wood heat anecdote:
My aunt once caught fire to her vacuum cleaner when cleaning bottom ash out the Franklin stove before it properly cooled. Was the talk of the town for years.

[Landscraper]

@joeatomictoad

Unfortunately this is still an issue with today's vacuums
Fortunately the trend for clear plastic dust catchers in vacuums means you at least get a SHOW prior to catastrophic failure.

[vt_trees]

Whoa, that looks like a classy stove

We've got a Jøtul of roughly the same size, but the styling isn't nearly as contemporary. Matches our old house.

I've got a love hate relationship with Birch, personally.
It's such a great tree, really good habit, incredible in stands, marks the landscape well. Great habitat, good color. Very rare in my part of Vermont.

**I should say that it's just rare to get a majority mix of birch in your log loads.**

In the furnace it can be a bit off. Sometimes oily fuming, acrid smoke. Odd. I wonder if that's the birch or just my imagination.

We usually get a noticeable amount in our log loads, but have the fortune of being near actively managed lands that yield some impressive hardwood cordage.

Big difference between white birch and yellow birch. IMHO yellow birch is fine firewood for a VT winter, white birch not so much.

[Roelant]

Thats interesting, I had to look it up. We have different varieties of birch here than in North America (mostly silver birch and european white birch, which is a different species from the american one). As there is no hardwood here it is the next best thing.
Jotul, Dovre and Trolla stoves were very popular for a long time and are still typical in wood cabins. However they are less efficient in that more heat goes out of the chimney, and the modern ones burn with less soot, supposedly. Ours came with the house when we bought it and it works great

[Landscraper]

Thats interesting, I had to look it up. We have different varieties of birch here than in North America (mostly silver birch and european white birch, which is a different species from the american one). As there is no hardwood here it is the next best thing.
Jotul, Dovre and Trolla stoves were very popular for a long time and are still typical in wood cabins. However they are less efficient in that more heat goes out of the chimney, and the modern ones burn with less soot, supposedly. Ours came with the house when we bought it and it works great

I love our Jøtul, it wouldn't be Christmas without it, in our case it's VERY ornamental ... wouldn't rely on it outside of those occasions where the power is out and the blower doesn't work.

We had a wicked storm here last October that knocked the power out ... without the assist of the electric blower the larger furnace is kind of DOA ... granted there are ways to get convection going without the blower, but log for log the Jøtul is a great emergency stove.

[connyro]

We have a jotul 602 from the early 80s in a remote cabin in far northern michigan. It's my favorite stove due to its looks as well as it's function. Great design and based on my experience, it's very durable. Ours has the hotplate top so it works very well for cooking as well as heating. It does not like shit wood or anything wet. We burn mostly yellow birch and hard/soft maple and beech. The chimney is a straight shot through the roof so if burned properly the pipes stay very clean. I've been tempted to swap it out with a stove we have at our home but feel like I would like a glass door for fire-viewing which our 602 doesn't have. New versions do have glass doors but they won't swap correctly with the old stove.