Bought a house last year with a wood burner. We had to reline the chimney after getting an inspection but other than that it was good to go. We used it a decent amount last year but it is not our primary source of heat as we do have a furnace. I would like to get to a point that the furnace is secondary and rarely used.
The previous owners had it tucked back into a corner of the house in what would have been the original third of the house. the room that the wood burner was in was easily 95°+. The living room was on the other side of the old exterior wall and wouldn't even feel warm so we got next to no radiant heat out of the burner. It did have a blower with heat box around it that was plumbed into the HVAC directly below in the crawl space. This was enough that I could keep the living room at roughly 70° if I stayed on top of the burner and tried to keep the flue temps right around 500°. I thought this was a bit depressing because I had hoped that I could keep the house at 70°+ with not much work or not over firing the burner. I checked the air temp coming out of the burner and it was rather toasty! The problem is that the air cools down so much being pumped from one side of the house all the way to the other. Here in the next week or so I am going to install a new chimney in our living room so that I can centralize the heat source. I think this will really help out.
The wood burner is pretty old and just has the two slide air inlets on the front. It is a big fire box and is a rectangle with the air flowing lengthwise with the rectangle from inlet to flue. There is no gasket on the door and it looks like there never was. I have a magnetic speedo type gauge thermometer 18" from the woodburner on the stovepipe.
As a semi newby I need some tips:
How should my fire start, sustain and trail off - When I start a fire I have to open everything up to get the air moving to get good coals and a good burn. Once I do this the fire climbs quickly and the flue temp skyrockets 700-800° in a couple minutes. At this point I close down the air inlets to a sliver and it sustains around 500° flue temp for a while then slowly falls and I keep opening up the air inlets until its time to start again. Is this normal for you to have to adjust the air inlet once every 45 minutes or less to keep the flue temp up?
What is a safe stovepipe temp? The gauge I have shows about 500° being about the top, 600° gets me into the red. Is my goal to keep my stovepipe temp around 400-500° or is there something else that I should be monitoring? Obviously room temperature is going to be the important thing but In the past I had to keep the stove pipe right at the 500° mark to keep my house anywhere near 70°.
Should my stove have a gasket on it? Is this thing just really old and not designed to maintain a good fire without lots of adjustments? Best guess is this things from the 40's or 50's maybe?
I have a flue damper but keep that wide open to avoid getting smoke back fed. I have so far only adjusted the air inlet to adjust fire temp.
Anything you guys can give me hints on that you can pickup that I'm doing wrong based on my short novel here???
I have tried to read as much as I could on best practices for fires, how to build the best fires, how to control fires the best way but most of the information out there is so vague it really doesn't help much.
Thanks in advance!
