Thursday, September 11th, 2008
It was a bit chilly last night at around 50 degrees. It wasn’t chilly enough to make a fire, but I did anyway. I wanted to see how everything worked. I mean, I know how everything works, I just wanted to see it in action.
I made a fire with some fairly green wood I took out of the woods a few weeks ago. It was a little smokey and hissed, while the moisture evaporated out of the ends of the logs. I know that kind of wood isn’t meant to be burned, but it had to be done.
After a while, the fire got going pretty good…
I am not sure how much heat this fireplace is going to produce this Winter. From what I have been reading, not much. Fireplaces aren’t too efficient. I guess the issue is that when the fire goes out, all the heat in the house goes right up the chimney. This fireplace does have glass doors though, so I can close them before we go to sleep, stopping some of the heat from escaping the house.
I really want the Hampton Wood Insert HI300. This wood burning stove insert has a nice, glossy baked on enamel so it looks really good. It has a BTU of 75,000, an efficiency of 77%, can handle a log size of 18″ and has a burn time of 8 hours. Also, this wood stove has an optional blower, so you can really pump up the heat.
I hate the fact that I have been thinking about this wood stove so much, because that means I am most likely going to get it. I just want to get into the season a bit to see how the pellet stove does.
I like the idea of having both a pellet stove and a wood stove.
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Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Well, we found out last night.
Back when I was trying to make my decision between purchasing either a pellet stove or a wood burning stove, I heard that a major benefit of the wood stove is that it will keep burning if the power goes out. Ok, that was a factor, but not a huge one since we could probably figure out some other way to keep warm if the power went out and the heat shut off. It might suck, but I think we would figure something out. The other argument was regarding the pellet stove. Some people told me that if the pellet stove was burning and the power went out, the fans would stop and the house would fill up with smoke.
Last night, I was laying in bed having a dream about me running nude through a field of marigolds, when I was suddenly awakened by the sound of our computer battery backups beeping. I said, “Uh oh.” I jumped up to see everything pitch black. It was about 2AM. I knew the power went off because our white noise filter shut off and the neighbor’s lights weren’t on. I got out of bed and powered down the computers and checked on the pellet stove, which was humming right along a few minutes before. The pellets were kind of sitting there glowing. There was no smoke coming out anywhere, because I sealed up the exhaust pipe earlier, nice and tight, with high temperature sealer. I was walking around trying to find the flashlight, which I couldn’t. I silently blamed Laura for this until I found it on the bathroom floor this morning. I kind of left it there. Whoops. I used our oil lamp.
Anyway, when the power goes out, no smoke will escape a pellet stove, unless you open the door, like I did. I wanted to see if there was a natural draft, due to the exhaust pipe being higher than the intake pipe and the stove itself. No, there was no natural draft, which leaves me a little puzzled, because it was the manufacturer’s suggestion to set things up this way, for this particular case. I only opened the door a crack, just to see inside. The instant I opened it, I noticed a thick steam of smelly smoke floating up from the opening. I quickly closed the door, but the smoke already kind of stunk things up a bit. Not too much, but enough to smell.
I went back to bed with no further incident. There you have it. Bye.
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