I Burned Nothing But Pine for 30 Days. The Chimney Was Cleaner Than Half My Oak Winters

I believed the pine rule for fifty years and I never once checked it. Last winter I did. Thirty days, November into December, nothing in the stove but white pine off my own ridge, cut the April before. Every piece on the meter. Twenty-two pounds a load on the kitchen scale. A thermometer on the stove top, one eighteen inches up the pipe, one in the back bedroom thirty-one feet away, and a white rag through the clean-out every morning. On day thirty I ran the brush down the flue and weighed what came out. Four of the five things I found say the old men were wrong. One says they were right, and that one explains where the whole rule came from and why your grandfather was not a fool for repeating it. It has nothing to do with your chimney. What is in here: what actually came out of that flue and how it compares to my oak years. Why creosote is not sap. Why dry wood is dry wood, pound for pound, and why a cord of oak still has twice the heat in it. The one place pine lost badly, measured with a stopwatch and a thermometer. And the fifth thing, which is the reason the rule exists and the reason it stopped being true about fifty years before anybody stopped saying it. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five winters on this stove. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: this was one stove, in one house, for thirty days, on wood off one ridge. A woodshed test, not a laboratory. If your chimney has no liner, if it is an exterior masonry flue on a cold wall, or if you run an open fireplace, the margins get thin fast. Get a certified sweep in once before you change how you heat your house.