You're Loading Your Wood Stove Backwards. I Tested the Old Logger Way. It Burned Till 6 A.M.

It's ten-thirty. You slide the splits in end first, pointing straight at you, turn the air down and go to bed. At four the house is fifty-six and there's nothing in the firebox but gray ash. The wood was fine. You loaded it backwards. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011. Last winter I loaded the same stove four ways for two weeks: the same red oak at 18%, 22 pounds a load on a kitchen scale, a thermometer on the stove top, one on the pipe, one in a bedroom 31 feet away, and a white rag through the clean-out every morning. The numbers: Ends to the door - stove top 470, pipe 360, nothing to relight from at 4:15 (5 h 45). Rag light gray. Crosswise, loose - 430, pipe 320, relightable at 4:55 (6 h 25). Rag gray. Crosswise, packed and choked - 340, pipe under 250 for six hours, wood left at 6:30 (8 h), glass black, and by the fifth morning the rag came out black and tacky. The old night man's way - 420, pipe 285-300 all night, live coals at 6:00 (7 h 30). Five gray rags. The longest burn was the dirtiest night my chimney had all month. The last thing on the list is what a night man named Ollie did in a logging camp bunkhouse on the Williams River in 1971, and it takes thirty seconds and a poker. Tell me your state, what stove you run, and which way you load it tonight. If your stove has secondary tubes or a catalyst, try the night man's way once and tell me what your pipe does, because mine is old and yours is not. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. Notes: one stove (old, no tubes, no catalyst), one winter, one species, straight pipe. Stoves with secondary burn tubes, a bypass or a catalytic combustor are built differently and many manuals say how to load them; follow your manual. Chimney Safety Institute of America: creosote condenses below roughly 250F in the flue. EPA Burn Wise: don't let the fire smolder. Nothing here removes creosote that is already on the wall; brush the flue. #woodstove #firewood #woodheat #homestead #oldways