February 5, 2008

• Fire Maintenance

  We have been living with this cold snap for over a week now.  A couple of days ago, temperatures went down to around 30 below zero (F, which is colder than C, all the way down to -40, where the scales cross) at night, and have been creeping lower by a few degrees each day.  They come up to single digits below zero in the daytime, which is a great relief, but I’ll be even happier when once again we start getting positive readings on the thermometer.

  We have had to keep a roaring hot fire in the woodstove all this time.  [aside:  To the ones who have from time to time suggested small portable space heaters -- We have a few of them, which we used to use, but we can no longer use them due to insufficiencies in our electrical system.  There's a whole blog there, but not today.  Just visualize a bunch of heavy duty extension cords carrying current from functioning outlets in unused rooms, to rooms where the outlets are dead.]  Keeping the fire hot all the time involves burning small splits and filling the stove with fresh wood before the previous load has had time to burn all the way down.

  One consequence of that is an accumulation of coals, growing deeper all the time.  Ideally, the top of the bed of coals is lower than the sill of the stove door.  When it is higher than the bottom of the door, burning wood tends to fall out when the door is opened.  That’s hazardous at best, usually painful, and sometimes destructive.  This morning when I woke, I could see through the glass in the stove door that the bed of coals was so deep that only a single layer of splits, none of them over about three inches thick, would fit in there. 

  Since most of the air for combustion comes in around that door, then is channeled up over the fire and out the stovepipe, the front edge of the bed of coals burns down, leaving an accumulation at the back with a sloping front face, just waiting for one of us to open the door.  Ever heard the phrase, “live coals?”  It doesn’t just mean hot, afire.  They are active little things, popping, shooting sparks… perhaps you get the picture.

  Midday today, I stopped feeding wood into the fire and let the coals burn down.  Doug had the kitchen range going, heating water for dishwashing.  While he washed dishes,  I periodically raked the coals with our fancy high tech fire tool:  a blackened old rock hammer, blunt on one end, pointy on the other.  Raking lets the fine ashes sift to the bottom and brings up dead chunks of charcoal that have been suffocated under accumulated ash.  Raking, if done gently, can also pull up massive chunks of clinker, encrustations of metallic debris.  One of those I hauled out of there today was larger than both of my hands together.

  I spent three hours going back again and again to rake up the coals and encourage them to burn.  Each time, I could tell it was time to quit raking when I started burning my chin on my zipper pull, which became very hot from the radiant heat.  After six or seven rakings, I shoveled out most of the fine ash and whatever small coals were mixed with it, leaving enough large live coals to restart a fire. Then I tossed a bunch of small pieces of birch bark on the coals and greasy black smoke started billowing out into the room.  Doug went up on the roof to poke a smoke hole through the bottleneck of creosote accumulation where it condenses at the roofline.  (A thorough cleaning of the stovepipe will have to wait for warmer weather and a cold stove.)

  On top of a couple of layers of bark scraps, I placed a few layers of thin kindling (a byproduct of regular wood splitting that accumulates during times when we don’t let the fire go out) under enough small splits to fill the fire box.  Then I blew (through a soda straw) on the coals at the base of the fire until the fire was roaring again.  Now, since the house has cooled and the sun is going down, I’m going to do some baking.  While my bread pudding is in the oven, Doug will do another load of dishes.  By then, it will be dark and much colder, but the woodstove should be back up to adequate heat.
  

  • 8:25 pm
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