What does your typical burn cycle consist of?

[vincem77]

Looking for some info how others typically run their stove. Assuming you aren't starting the fire but reloading it. What are the general details of how you burn. Things such as:

How low do you let the temp get before you reload?
Wait till its down to coals or something that still resembles a piece of wood?
Have the wood slowly get up to temp or get it blazing and cut it down?
How often do you adjust the damper/wood during the cycle?

 

[Steve NW WI]

With my old non-EPA stove, it's usually come home to coals, stir em up a little, add a couple small pieces and wait for them to catch good. After about 10 minutes, I'll go back down, fill it up, give it a couple minutes to get good and rolling, then close the damper to where I want it and forget about it for the next 8-12 hours.

Sometimes if I'm lounging around the house on a weekend, I'll throw a couple sticks in every few hours to keep a more consistent level of heat in the house.

Once I've got my new stove in the next couple months, I suspect I'll be learning a whole 'nother system.

The best advice I have for you is trial and error, keep trying different things till you find something that works well for you. Every setup is just a little different, and there's no "right" way for every stove. That's one of the fun things about burning wood, mastering the art (it's never really a science, different wood, different weather, all manner of things are constantly changing) of burning wood.

 

[sgt7546]

I heat with an insert so my results may not be valid for your stove.

I have a medium size fire box which I can usually stuff with about six splits. I run the air wide open until I have a good hot fire going then step the air back half way then finally closed. The intervals from one step to the next is usally about 5 to 10 minutes depending on how the fire looks. From then on for the next few hours I do nothing. At the end of the burn cycle, I usually scrape all the coals to the front and open the air wide for 30 minutes or so to burn down the coals. I do this mainly due to the medium fire box, I'd love to let a big bed of coals but that robs space for new splits. I repeat this cycle three or four times a day depending on wood type that I'm burning. I pretty much burn 24/7 from October(ish) until april(ish).

 

[Whitespider]

I ain’t figured out my EPA firebox yet… and it’s really startin’ to pizz me off. I was blaming the EPA design for a while (well I still am to some extent) but now I’m thinking a big part of it is how I’m running it. I went down to fill it this morning after an overnight burn (it’s 66[sup]o[/sup] in the house) and the firebox was half full of coals… Yeah, that’s right, half full, it was so full they fell out when I opened the door!

I’m startin’ to think I’m trying to run the thing at too low of a setting with too big of fuel load. When it’s cranking it will near heat us out of the house, but once the fire collapses into a coal bed the heat just shuts down. Rather than “fill ‘er up” and “choke it back” this morning, I laid three little splits on top of the coals and set it wide open… that was about an hour ago. I just went back down to check it and a bunch of those coals have been consumed and it’s throwing good heat.

With the old smoke dragon I’d pack it full, get the blaze going, and choke ‘er down. I’m thinkin’ I need to change the way I regulate heat to smaller loads and a bit more air, rather than large loads and choking it back (dump the old smoke dragon mentality) and save the “full firebox” for overnight burns… and give it more air… more air… more air. Maybe the problem isn’t that this new firebox doesn’t heat as well as the old smoke dragon did. Maybe the problem is (when run properly) it heats too damn much causing me to run it improperly (choke it back). We will see.