I Tested the 5 Most Popular Wood Stove Gadgets. Four Do Nothing. One Doubled My Heat.

Every farm store has the shelf. A fan that runs off your stove. Bricks made of sawdust. A blower for the doorway. A hood to throw the heat down. About $300 of boxes, all promising the same thing: more heat out of the wood you already own. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011. I bought all five and ran them one at a time for four weeks, with a thermometer on the stove top, one in the back bedroom 31 feet away, one at the ceiling, and a tally of every split that went through the door. The numbers: heat-powered stove fan, $130, one degree at the far end (and it quits at 11:40 at night) - compressed sawdust bricks, about double the cost per night and coals by three in the morning - doorway blower, $30, a bucket and not a furnace, and it works better turned around - the heat hood, two degrees off a ceiling nobody sits on - and the $25 infrared thermometer, which found 150 degrees of spread across my own stove top and took me from 19 splits a day to 13 in a warmer house. Four of them do something to the heat after the stove makes it. The fifth one told me I'd been running this stove at half throttle since Reagan. Plus the $110 gadget I bolted to my own chimney in 1994, and what it did to the pipe by January. Shoot the front of your stove top and then the back, and give me both numbers in the comments. If the spread is over 70 degrees, your fire is in the wrong third of the box. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. Notes: one house, one stove, one winter, 900 square feet with a straight pipe run. An open floor plan or a stairwell will read different, especially for the fan. Shoot flat black cast iron, pipe and firebrick only; glass and polished steel read low. If your stove came with a manual, follow it. #woodstove #woodheat #firewood #homestead #oldways