oneoldbanjo
Addicted to ArboristSite
The past few years I have gone home to visit my mother during the Thanksgiving Day weekend and I have loaded up the OWB as full as possible before I left....and I have always come home to a warm house. This year I decided I would document the process and share it with you. The previous few years I would get the house as warm as possible (78 or so) before I left and then I would turn the house temperature down to 50 and turn the garage heat off.....this would reduce the amount of heat demand on the OWB. This year I just left the garage set at the normal 60 and the house was about 68 degrees before I turned it down to 60.
This is the stack of wood I was going to stuff into the boiler. It was Oak that had been sitting outside for years - but was dry from the recent drought. I was going to throw it into a burn pile, but when I cut it up to haul it to the pile I saw it was still really good inside - so I cut it up to 40" length to fit into the OWB. Other years I have used 12-18" diameter wood that is straight and easy to slide on top of each other to load as tightly as possible.
This is the wood in my Woodmaster 4400 at 2:00 PM on Wednesday just before we left. I was able to add one more piece of the Oak than was shown in the pile in the above picture - plus I had a piece of Poplar on the bottom to help get things started and a couple of small pieces of Locust that I squeezed on top.
This is a picture of the stack about 10 minutes after I loaded the OWB. I normally build smaller fires to keep the amount of smoke down - but this wood was very dry and didn't smoke much even though the OWB was horribly overloaded.
This is the temperature of the OWB after 4 days and 3 hours. I ask a fellow at work what the weather was like while we were gone and he told me the temperature was in the upper 20's at night and upper 30's during the day, and that it was drizzly rain the first 2 days. I had the OWB set to kick the draft blower off at 150 and on at 140, and the blower kicks off at 120 in the belief that the fire is out. The OWB boiler temp was down to 71 degrees when we got home and there were enough coals that after a quick raking of coals I threw in more wood and the fire took off again. The house and garage were both still at 60 degrees inside.
So......for my house and garage I am pretty comfortable with leaving for 4 days without having anyone attend to my OWB when we have normal weather for the end of November.....obviously colder weather would have made a difference. It is possible to get an extended burn when you load as much large diameter dry hardwood as possible - and do what you can to reduce the heating demand. I may have gotten a longer burn by turning the garage heat off and lowering the house temperature to 50. When I leave for longer periods I have a neighbor come by and add wood.
This is the stack of wood I was going to stuff into the boiler. It was Oak that had been sitting outside for years - but was dry from the recent drought. I was going to throw it into a burn pile, but when I cut it up to haul it to the pile I saw it was still really good inside - so I cut it up to 40" length to fit into the OWB. Other years I have used 12-18" diameter wood that is straight and easy to slide on top of each other to load as tightly as possible.
This is the wood in my Woodmaster 4400 at 2:00 PM on Wednesday just before we left. I was able to add one more piece of the Oak than was shown in the pile in the above picture - plus I had a piece of Poplar on the bottom to help get things started and a couple of small pieces of Locust that I squeezed on top.
This is a picture of the stack about 10 minutes after I loaded the OWB. I normally build smaller fires to keep the amount of smoke down - but this wood was very dry and didn't smoke much even though the OWB was horribly overloaded.
This is the temperature of the OWB after 4 days and 3 hours. I ask a fellow at work what the weather was like while we were gone and he told me the temperature was in the upper 20's at night and upper 30's during the day, and that it was drizzly rain the first 2 days. I had the OWB set to kick the draft blower off at 150 and on at 140, and the blower kicks off at 120 in the belief that the fire is out. The OWB boiler temp was down to 71 degrees when we got home and there were enough coals that after a quick raking of coals I threw in more wood and the fire took off again. The house and garage were both still at 60 degrees inside.
So......for my house and garage I am pretty comfortable with leaving for 4 days without having anyone attend to my OWB when we have normal weather for the end of November.....obviously colder weather would have made a difference. It is possible to get an extended burn when you load as much large diameter dry hardwood as possible - and do what you can to reduce the heating demand. I may have gotten a longer burn by turning the garage heat off and lowering the house temperature to 50. When I leave for longer periods I have a neighbor come by and add wood.
Last edited:
