On Thu, 14 Nov 2019 12:38:08 -0800, Joerg
wrote:

On 2019-11-13 17:45, John B. wrote:
On Wed, 13 Nov 2019 15:23:24 -0800, Joerg
wrote:

On 2019-11-13 14:49, John B. wrote:
On Wed, 13 Nov 2019 07:31:27 -0800, Joerg
wrote:

On 2019-11-12 17:00, John B. wrote:
On Tue, 12 Nov 2019 16:39:34 -0800, Joerg
wrote:

On 2019-11-12 14:43, John B. wrote:
On Tue, 12 Nov 2019 07:03:29 -0800, Joerg
wrote:

On 2019-11-11 20:29, John B. wrote:
On Mon, 11 Nov 2019 06:58:31 -0800, Joerg
wrote:

On 2019-11-09 14:57, John B. wrote:

[...]

In fact I can't remember any house having it's chimney cleaned so it
must not have been a common happening.


That is like with safety belts, grandpa's car didn't have them and he
lived well into his 90's. Yet we won't drive without.

I'm not saying that they don't happen, just that I never saw it happen
and we lived in one neighborhood and my grandparents lived about a
mile away and I think that if a chimney fire had happened in either
neighborhood it would have been BIG NEWS all up an down the street so
I think I would have heard about it.

But I would winder about why a chimney fire occurred twice within a
reasonable length of time.
Not setting their stove correctly, i.e., burning too rich a mixture
and generating too much "soot"?


The usual, making a fire in the stove and dampering it down too much.
That results in a hardcore creosote layer. They had smoke crawling out
of the chimney all the time. Even after those fires they did not learn.
Most people do not learn this, for whatever reason. Problem is that the
incompetence on the part of people with wood stoves also results in a
lot of wood burning bans that hit people who are competent in that domain.

Probably a defect in the modern educational system. Nobody seems to be
educated regarding how to manage wood fires any more. :-)


To my surprise the vast majority of "smoky burners" are old people. They
are also very resistant to learning anything knew about it, proclaiming
to be experts. One woman had the chimney smoking so bad that people
walking farther up the street started coughing. She usually threw one
lone log into the stove with just a few burning embers in there and
didn't even bother to open the air intakes. Upon suggesting to do it a
little differently she respomnded "Well, that's how my late husband
always did it and he knew!"

Loyalty! I just love it :-)


But both the "damper" in the pipe and the air inlets on the stove work
together to control the fire and improper adjustment have a major
effect on both the heat generated and the amount of wood burned.


Modern stoves like ours only have inlet controls. Primary air jets for
the initial phase (on/off control) and then a secondary air control with
vernier. The trick is to adjust that secondary so you have a sustained
hot burn above the wood (it mostly burns the wood gas) but no less air.
The result is a wood burn with no smoke and no smell as it should be.


... If
you have to cut and split your own firewood you will learn to be
frugal :-)


I just split another half cord of oak, by hand. Yet I'd never pollute
the neighborhood with smoke. Smoke crawling out of the chimney means
lots of unburnt particles in there so dampering a fire down too much is
actually a wasteful use of firewood. This is the key fact that most
self-proclaimed "experienced" wood stove users do not understand.

Perhaps, today. But when I was a boy wood fires were apparently much
better understood although no one worried about smoke in the sense of
contaminating the atmosphere but certainly in the sense that they
weren't burning the wood efficiently and therefore "wasting" wood...


I remember the not so good old days when as a cyclist I came through
small valleys or villages during winter and had to cough. There are
undoubtedly lots of people who lived there and needlessly and gruesomely
died of lung cancer because residents didn't know how to properly
operate a wood stove.

When I was a boy growing up in a northern New England town everyone
heated their house with either wood or coal, some people, my paternal
grandmother for example, were still cooking with wood, and I can't
remember any fumes floating around. Granted that 50 or 60 year old
memory is perhaps not so acute, but still, I think if the town had
been covered with a choking cloud of smoke I would have remembered it.


It's not the memory, it that you were used to it. Just like we all were
used to the fumes of car traffic while nowadays I can immediately smell
if a vintage car passing me had a stock engine or a modern one.


You just wrote, " I came through small valleys or villages during
winter and had to cough". Perhaps I should have been more explicate
and said that I don't remember ever having to ca ugh when I walked
down town.

As for your idea that it was because we were used to it, I think that
you are wrong. We lived about a mile outside the built up area of the
town and I walked to school and coming from the "country" with two
houses in a half a mile to a built up area with a house every 50 yards
I can't remember notice any bad smells.

I think that you are exaggerating.



remember that in a northern New England climate where things certainly
do freeze that what's in the woodshed has to last until spring as the
snow is too deep to get to the woods to cut more.

My grandfather used to spend a month a year cutting trees in his "wood
lot", cutting to length, splitting and hauling back to town in order
to heat his house for the winter.


We have become decadent and now buy 3-4 cords/year. I add about a cord
each year from our yard and from splitting rounds that neighbors didn't
want.

Four cords of wood is about 512 cubic feet of wood. My grand dad's
"wood shed" was a building about (from memory) 25 ft long 10 ft wide
and probably 12 feet high. He packed it, literally, to the rafters by
late September or maybe October and burned it all by spring.


NE is a very cold area of the country in winter. We and neighbors used
to get by with two cords. Then global warming ... didn't happen and now
it has crept up to about four cords. Just fired it up again.
--
cheers,

John B.