Heating with Wood
For many, a rural residence or cottage is synonymous with wood heat. There is nothing quite like the soothing crackle and the dancing flames of a good burning fire. In Canada, the burning of wood is allowed in most places, as long as proper safety precautions are taken. Using current wood burning technology, the use of wood for heat is as environmentally benign as most other forms of heat.
Safety
You local municipal building codes will contain the full regulations regarding the proper and safe installation of a wood burning appliance. In many areas, the installed unit must be inspected by the local Fire Safety Marshall. These rules must be followed to the letter for reasons of safety. In addition, your insurance company will insist that the unit has been properly installed and inspected.
Units installed following codes established in the early 1980s are no more hazardous than any other form of home heating. If you have not had your unit inspected in the last 10 years, you should have it re-inspected.
The codes and any manufacturers recommendations must be followed to maintain safety. Clearances must be kept clear. Never put combustible items such as furniture, draperies, woodboxes, magazine racks, or other items within the clearance zone. A problem with constant heat exposure, such as that produced by a wood heater, is that over time, materials dry out and change in composition, lowering their combustion temperature (the temperature at which they catch fire). Wooden studs behind plaster or sheetrock have been know to catch fire after years of exposure to a heat source. Current building codes, which establish clearances and setbacks, take this into account.
Most fire accidents come from chimney fires. If you have an efficient wood appliance, use dry wood, and regularly clean your chimney, you will never have an accidental fire. Your chimney should be cleaned at least once a year. Use a chimney brush specifically designed for your size of chimney. Brush out the entire chimney making sure that you have removed all the creosote. At the same time closely inspect your wood appliance and all the chimney components (especially joints). Make any repairs that are required.
A good alternative to the do it yourself approach is to hire a chimney sweep, making sure that he or she will conduct a full inspection of your system in addition to cleaning out the chimney.
Types of Appliances
The consumer these days has a wide choice of efficient wood burning appliances. They range from fireplace inserts to central heating furnaces. All modern units are designed to burn wood with maximum efficiency. An efficient unit extracts the maximum amount of heat from the wood and produces little or no smoke. There are a myriad of choices out there these days. Check out some of the wood heating links below for detailed information on wood burning appliances. Any unit that is EPA approved will do a good job of efficiently burning wood.
The most common type of unit for a cottage is a free standing stove or a fireplace insert. A fireplace insert will convert your current standard (poorly efficient) fireplace to a high efficiency unit. It should be noted that with a standard fireplace, when the temperature hits about -10C, your house gets colder, not warmer. At that temperature, the cold air sucked into the house due to the fireplace draft has more cold BTUs than the warm BTUs the fireplace can produce. This is not an issue with modern sealed fireplace appliances.
Wood stoves come in several varieties, those with catalytic converters to promote complete burning of exhaust gasses and non-catalytic that use heavily insulated fireboxes to promote complete burning. Some of these are radiant heat units (cast iron stoves that radiate heat) and some are convection heating units (flow air around the firebox).
The first design parametre you should consider is size. Do not oversize your unit. Small hot fires are much more efficient than large smoldering fires (which is what you get with an oversized unit). Once you determine the proper size of unit, shop around for the style of appliance that best meets your needs.
The Wood
Dry, this is the main thing you need to know about wood. Dry wood (wood with less than 25% moisture content) burns efficiently with minimal creosote output. Wet wood sucks up much of a fire's energy in drying out and produces a cooler, creosote producing fire. Fresh cut green wood should be split (to maximize surface area) and allowed to air dry for 6 to 8 months prior to burning. Ideally you should always be a year ahead in your wood piles. Hardwood produces more energy and less ash than softwoods, but in today's modern stoves, any kind of (dry) wood will do.
Cutting your own wood should only be done by someone highly familiar with wood cutting practices. A chainsaw requires knowledge and extreme safety to use. Cutting your own wood is long hard work and most people are better off buying wood from a reputable wood dealer.
A reputable wood dealer is one who maintains his own sustainable woodlot. There are several locals in the Rideau region that do this. Buying from them not only is an environmentally sound way of obtaining wood, but it also supports local people, many of them farmers who depend on wood sales to supplement their incomes.
Setting a Fire
The ritual of fire starting. Everyone has their own method, and it is best to use what works for you. The basics involve using paper, nice dry kindling, and your standard firebox wood. Lay out the wood, make sure your unit is at full draft, and light it. Now enjoy the warmth of a good fire. Here are the details:
Conventional Method
- Loosely ball up some newspaper and lay it on the firebed.
- Lay kindling (small wood strips, preferably softwood, cedar is excellent) on the paper. Crisscross it to make sure there are lots of airspaces.
- Set wood on top of the kindling, smaller pieces on top of the kindling, larger on top of that.
- Make sure your unit is drafting upwards (no cold air flow down chimney). If it isn't, ball up a piece of newspaper and shove it up into the chimney (above the baffle in a wood stove) and light it to warm up the chimney. This will achieve an upward draft, so now light your main fire.
- Maintain full draft until your fire is well established (hot firebox, glowing embers), then damp it down to your desired level.
The fire should always burn with visible flames (maximum efficiency).
My Method
- Remove all the ash from your firebed. If there are any coals, rake them to the front.
- Lay a single piece of moderate size wood at an angle in the firebox (generally back to front).
- Put wadded newspaper up against one side of the big wood.
- Lay kindling so that it is lying over the paper, but supported on one side by the big piece of wood.
- Lay larger pieces of wood crossways over the kindling.
- Light the paper.
- Maintain full draft until the fire is well established.
This method works very well because the large piece of wood at the bottom supports the kindling, maintaining a good draft until the fire is well established. It avoids a problem with the conventional "log cabin" method in which the larger wood can compress the kindling on top of the paper, reducing the draft and making the fire hard to start. .
Insurance
Be sure that your insurance company is aware that you have a wood burning appliance. This is particularly critical if this appliance is used for heating the house. If your house burns down, for whatever reason, and your insurance company didn't know about that wood stove that now sits proudly among the ashes, you will likely find yourself with no insurance coverage, even though the stove was not the cause of the fire.
Wood Heating Links
For more information on heating with wood, check out:
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URL: http://www.rideau-info.com/local/local_woodheat.html
© 1997-2008 Ken Watson
