Our new house has a wood stove. One of my childhood houses had an old-school open fireplace, but that was a much different beast than these newer “EPA” wood stoves. I’m learning all about the process, beginning in May when I started accumulating a big (to me) wood pile. I did try lighting the stove once before summer, just to see it go, but that was it. After that it was just a little maintenance of replacing some fire bricks, and accumulating more wood.
But it has been rainy and much cooler over the past few days, and this morning the house was definitely chilly enough for me to decide: it’s time.
Starting the stove isn’t difficult, but it is a process to learn, and there a bit a “feel” too it that makes it interesting. The big lesson for me been has been that the behavior of the stove at temperature is very different than cold, and you definitely need to give it some to warm up before loading in larger wood. But once going, it’s simple to keep going, and takes little more than occasional air adjustment.
The other reality is that proper, steady-state burning rarely looks like the roaring flames one imagines. Here’s 400F, right in in the middle of the target range, making our living room nice and cozy.
