This Summer when we were fearing $5 USD a gallon oil price, we decided to burn as much wood as we could this year. The idea was that we'd set the furnace where we would normally and let it make up what the fireplace didn't make. We got the chimney cleaned as started using it at the beginning of the month. (October, 2008)
The house has a little wood burning insert in the fireplace and the previous owners were kind enough to leave the paperwork. The paperwork claims 37,500 BTU output with an estimated efficiency of 62%. (It's not a question, it's just what's written down.)
About the best way that I can quantify the results of the burning wood for the first month: There were 450 heating degree days, that is about 1/15 of our average yearly. Over the last few years, we've burned about 1500 gallons of fuel oil. 1/15 of that would 100 gallons. (It's a big house and we have two people that, medically, need to be warm.) This month we burned about 50 gallons of oil at $3.09 USD per and one face cord at $60 USD. That's a savings of about 28%,
The savings would have been more if oil prices stayed insane. I'm glad they're lower and hope they won't go back there but that's likely an empty dream. And the savings might have been higher if/when I learn to build a smaller fire. Seems to me that it's easier to build a larger fire than a small one and the house has often been warmer than we would normally keep it. It seems that I can keep a nice fire going with the flue set from a little below half open to all the way. In that range, after I get a nice bed of coals, I put a piece of wood in more or less once an hour. About the only luck I've had with the lowest setting is to put two or three pieces in before I go to bed and usually there's enough coals left to restart the fire in the morning.
It's probably a temporary issue since, once it gets colder, I'll need to be running the insert all out...
Implements:
The picture shows a little crowbar. In the past with "regular" fireplaces, it's was my favorite poker: not so long as to be unwieldy, sturdy and the curved part make a good grip when wrangling the wood. For this insert, though, the shovel is my most used tool. The cavity is small enough that it does not have a grate or wood rack. The instructions say to push the coals to the sides to create an air space in the middle and to put the wood directly on coals. That seems to work very well but those were the only real instructions I got.
It was probably three weeks before I figured out that opening the flue all the way and then cracking the door for a few seconds would get the smoke up the chimney and not in my face; too bad I didn't read more of the "heat" section here sooner as that's written in prior posts.
There's a jug of water there. Besides the obvious use, my saltwater aquarium needs make-up water to compensate for evaporation. Instead of storing the jugs by the tank I thought why don't I put it by the fireplace... in addition to the safety factor, it preheats the water so it's not so much of a temperature shock when it goes in the tank.
There's a cast iron dutch oven. In the morning, I use the shovel to sift out the rollover coals and put the ash in there. I use the little broom to sweep up spilled ash and debris and put that in the pot as well. It takes two days to fill the pot. The pot will still be warm from the previous day's ash, with the current days ash in it it's too hot dump anywhere but the burn barrel... certainly not in the trash can.
The slippers get a good amount of usage. The little wood basket holds a medium armful of wood and needs to be filled a few times a day. I put on my slippers and go out to the enclosed porch were I keep a day or two's supply of wood. I'm pretty pleased with the wood rack that I built:
Besides being extremely simple to build, (just cut four 8 foot 2x3's in half and put together,) I want something up off of the ground to save my back from one more bend and lift. It's very sturdy and holds enough wood that, so far, I haven't had to go out to the wood pile when it's raining or snowing.
One more feature I'd like though, is a way to keep incoming wood which might be wet from being piled on top of wood that's dry. I'm not sure whether I'll put a divider in the middle of this rack or build another rack to accomplish the same thing. It depends on how fast I'll be burning wood and I think I'll know better by the end of November; we typically have twice the heating degree days then.
Air and heat quality:
We are seeing some grayish ash in the room. I'm not sure where it's coming from. I'll try to remember to open the flue before the door and to make sure that I get the door cranked shut. It might just be ash that falls out gets sucked in by the ventilator fan. Even though I sweep the front of the fireplace, some stays in the rock. We have a HEPA vac but I'm scared of sucking hot embers into a vacuum cleaner.
Temperature wise, it's been great! One "trick" I learned here was to blow the cold air to toward the hot. All the rooms have ceiling fans but they don't do much to move air from one room to another. The house is long and with the fireplace at one end, it can be 10F degrees cooler at the other. With a fan at the cold end, that difference drops to 2F degrees. And since the far end is the bedrooms, we don't have to run that fan and heat the bedrooms all day and can choose to keep the heat at the occupied end. We have four heating zones in the house with the furnace, we're doing almost as good with the fireplace and fan.
Thank you very much,
- Ed.