Greenstorm's Journal

So a thing I've been worried about for awhile happened.

Whatever is going on with my mind for the last couple years, it's included some things like forgetfulness and more difficulty holding thoughts and daily tasks. One of my daily winter tasks involves the woodstove, and that's really a string of tasks: I open the air, open the catalyst, open the door, put wood in, put the de-sooting agent in, blow any shreds of bark or wood off the ledge and gasket seal of the stove, close the door, if the stove is hot enough I close the catalyst (it pretty much stays hot enough all winter), wait until the moisture is driven out of the wood and it's burning super hot (depending on the ash bed, dryness of wood, species of wood, and my timetable this hot-burning period lasts anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour), then close the air down, sometimes in two steps.

I'm always pretty cautious about the hot burn phase. This is one of the two points the chimney will catch fire if it's going to, but also between the catalyst which intensifies the heat, the length of my chimney which creates a blowtorch effect, and the size of my woodbox the stove could overheat, or overheat the chimney, if I left it open to burn a full load of wood from beginning to end. If I'm in the room with the stove I will definitely notice: the fire roars and the room gets extremely hot. If I go upstairs or go outside during this time I am very careful about time, and go back and check every fifteen minutes or so.

Yesterday morning I forgot to close the catalyst. This is relatively minor, as these things go: I got home and saw smoke coming out the chimney, which the catalyst normally eats and spits out as more heat. The stove had burned through a 24-hour load of wood in roughly 12 hours and the house temp was a (welcome, it's been warm out) degree or two cooler than expected. I'd never done this before but it was fine, it just means the chimney soots up a little faster and I use up more wood for a day.

Then, during the hot burn phase last night, I stepped out to load grain into buckets for this morning and kind of shrugged off coming in to check on it for about half an hour. The birch is often slow to catch, but still, this is longer than I normally leave it. I came back in to a very, very hot stove (it hadn't been up that high since last winter I think, or maybe my first fire this fall), a very very hot room, and the chimney clanking and groaning with heat expansion and probably burning off whatever small fragments of creosote that were inside it. Luckily the chimney had just been cleaned a couple weeks ago so there was nothing to catch in it. I turned it down and monitored the chimney and it was fine, but then this morning I woke up and the house was still very warm- I hadn't turned it down enough for the forecasted temperature overnight. I've been adjusting the stove to the forecast automatically for years.

So. I get that doing tasks in what work calls "upset conditions"-- when one thing has gone wrong -- makes those tasks more likely to become an issue. So the one moment of forgetfulness, leaving the catalyst open, means that I'm putting in wood in the evening instead of the morning, so that throws the automatic parts off and makes it more likely that I'll do something like leave it in hot phase too long, and then enough is disrupted that my habit of turning down the stove before bed is thrown off. But. The stove is both very dangerous and is lifesaving here. It's the heartbeat of my home but it's also what keeps my pipes from bursting and my everything alive in the cold spells. I need to be able to use it, and I need to be able to use it in a safe way.

Last night, when I was checking the chimney after the second stove mishap in 24 hours, I asked Threshold if this was its way of telling me it's time to leave. I was talking to a chimney, there was no answer, and there was no major omen unless you count waking up into an extra warm house this morning.

I know I'm overloaded here right now. If I take some of the load off (fewer animals, finish up sewing, scale back on visitor scheduling uncertainties) it might help. But I am thinking about what happens if I don't develop a good community here in the middle term, and exploring options for that; not to lock in place, but to have available.

I got six cords of birch for the woodstove this year, enough to last me roughly two scant years, depending, since it was priced way below value and birch isn't even often available here. Besides, if we're post-dead-pine, I'll need to keep two years' worth on site to season.

To start, I have a fancy catalytic stove, a Blaze King, which is definitely larger than my house needs. It has a catalyst, a grid over which the smoke passes, which burns a lot of the stuff in the smoke so gives me more heat and less dirty chimney and waste for the amount of wood I use.

I have a certain set of expectations about how the stove works from the last five winters, how much heat it puts out with wet or dry dead wood (though the density of wood varies, as does the resin content, and that shifts things), what the shape of heat output looks like (big spike at the beginning, another spike when the catalyst is engaged, then a long long cooling period), how dirty the chimney and window get, how to start it, all sorts of things. For all the time I've been burning beetle-killed pine, killed roughly fifteen years ago or maybe twentyish by now, that was standing dead all around and was easily harvested for firewood. It had dried/seasoned, standing, for a long time and didn't need much management on this end.

I did a test fire a couple days ago, it got the house super warm even though I didn't fill the stove more than a scant half full, if that. The birch barely caught; once I put some pieces of pine in it went long and warmer than expected. I added a couple more pieces of birch overnight, three small splits, and the house spiked up and held at 26C or so, well above my summer comfort level.

I've let the house cool for a couple days, that basement holds thermal mass from the stove well, and then just now lit another fire. It's just an amazingly different wood. I'm going to have to order a little more pine to start fires, the birchbark will burn right off and leave the wood itself scorched but unlit. I can't tell how wet it is (need to get my measuring device out of the storage) but it's super heavy, I cannot tell if that's density or water or both. It burns much cleaner than pine right at the beginning, but dirtier later in the cycle. It seems to be hotter, and maybe (?) more reactive to the controls in the beginning -- possibly because there's no resin to light?

This will definitely be some learning.