Thursday’s sunset deserves a reprise:
Friday morning’s fire was a hot one:
It had to be — 20°F outside, 50°F inside. Fortunately, with the help of a little supplemental electric heat, Smudge and I had warm noses again in less than an hour.
I talk a lot about “flue temperature,” and it occurs to me that I may not have explained completely why I pay such close attention to it. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll divide my reasoning into the primary purpose and a downstream benefit.
An inexpensive analog thermometer mounts to my woodstove’s single-wall flue with a magnet, about 18 inches above the stove’s collar. I use it to monitor the temperature of the gas as it leaves the firebox, with the goal of keeping the yellow needle in the red zone — between 300°F and 550°F.
Sustained burns registering lower than that create conditions for creosote buildup due to incomplete combustion. Higher temperatures for extended periods risk damage to the structure of the stove.
So that’s why I installed the thermometer in the first place.
The resulting benefit of knowing flue temp is that it’s a “leading indicator” of how effectively the woodstove is heating the cabin. While the flue itself does contribute a certain amount of radiant heat — that’s why I went with single-wall stovepipe indoors rather than double-wall — it simply doesn’t have enough mass to hold onto it for long. That’s the job of the stove and its hundreds of pounds of cast iron.
The flue, then, will cool hours before the woodstove does, and the thermometer shows that. It’s my cue to boost the burn in the firebox by adding fuel or adjusting the dampers.
Naturally, just as the stove’s mass takes longer to cool, it also takes a good while to build heat. The trick is in learning how to stay ahead of the thermal cycle.
There are other benefits as well. Keeping an eye on the gauge tells me which species of wood develop heat faster or produce it longer — for example, it’s shown me that there’s an enormous difference between cherry and oak.
When I first heated a home with a woodburning stove over four decades ago, it was an old-school, seat-of-the-pants proposition. I didn’t have a thermometer to go by. I developed a sense of what to do when, of what works and what doesn’t, and I still call on that experience.
A rudimentary gauge stuck to the flue is just one more source of information. Where I come from, knowing is a good thing.
I don’t suffer sloppiness gladly — in fact, it’s difficult for me to tolerate a domestic Charlie Foxtrot at all. As a grown-ass adult, I have no excuse for self-inflicted disarray.
Heating with wood creates a genuine mess, and I mean indoors. The mechanics of burning, trucking wood in and stacking it, and feeding the stove all produce debris of one sort or another — ash, dust, bark and chips, plus the occasional bug. That’s something I take care of every single day, often more than once.
I rarely break out the vacuum. My grandparents called that appliance a “sweeper” because, in their lifetime, it mechanized what they once accomplished with broom and dustpan. And so, in their honor and in the name of simplicity, I sweep.
It takes no time at all. (Pro tip: Most regular chores, performed regularly, take no time at all.)
When I do vacuum the whole cabin, I spend extra time on the hearth and surrounding floor. But for routine tidiness, broom and dustpan have no equal.
Smudge has figured out all of the signs — she knows when I’m about to leave the cabin and go do some work. She responds by pouting. Hard.
It’s both adorable and pathetic. Those eyes. But leave I did Friday morning, knowing that the reunion later would be joyous.
At long last, I returned to the east slope. My bum knee had improved to the point that I felt it could take some productive abuse. And it’d be a great day to work under the rising sun — temps still in the mid-20s, but brilliant, clear and calm.
Every bit of the hardwood I began harvesting last month has to come out to the road and get hauled to the wood yard. Though my plan has been to skid-out log lengths with the Ranger’s winch, then process them after bringing them back, lately I’ve been reconsidering that. I thought maybe I could do the bucking before the hauling.
Yesterday, I decided to see how much I could get done. I equipped myself only with my DeWalt 20V chainsaw and two 4AH batteries. (Obviously, I didn’t intend to buck the trunk with that.)
I began with the pile of five-foot lengths created from a pair of dead leaners. This…
…became this:
Easy. That’s two or three days’ worth of stove lengths for next winter. Eventually I may split some of it by hand.
Next, I tackled a much larger pile from the crown of the downed oak. That finished off the first battery and all but exhausted the other. When I was done, all that was left was the trunk — roughly 29 linear feet (17 inches at the base) of prime cordwood-to-be.
The picture below doesn’t do justice to that second round of bucking, but this was the resulting pile:
That’s four or five times more home-heating fuel than the first round yielded. Very satisfying.
And it all needs to come out, one way or another. That wouldn’t happen yesterday — I’d accomplished enough. I packed up my gear and headed in the direction of the cabin.
I did make one stop. Since I was passing right by the wood yard, I pulled in and grabbed enough from the stacks to replace what I’d burned overnight.
That’s how I roll. “Waste not” applies to time, too.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable