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wood stove questions
Hi,
I have a houseboat that I'd like to take out some this winter, and I'd like to have a small wood stove to use in it. All the small wood stoves I've been able to find have been camping related, so I'm asking for advice in camping groups as well as boating groups. Can anyone suggest any stove(s) that they feel are good and affordable, and any suggestions about use etc? Thanks for any help! David PS in case anyone is interested in what I've found so far, or wants proof that I've done some looking on my own as well as asking for people to share what they've learned, here is a list of some related websites: http://www.calarmy.com/tents/ http://www.kni-co.com/ http://tinyurl.com/9pbxv http://www.aaoobfoods.com/shepherdstoves.htm#2%20DX http://davistent.com/davisTent/html/WoodStoves.html http://www.cylinderstoves.com/defram...ovepricing.htm http://www.walltentshop.com/CatStoves.html http://www.fourdog.com/page2.html http://www.army-technology.com/contr...manufacturing/ |
Most of the referenced web pages all have the same stoves, along with
the warning that these stoves are "out door use" appliances, meaning "don't use them in confined spaces cottages and trailers (house boats). If you are going to insist on putting a wood burning heater/stove, make sure it has facility to use external air for combustion. A good fire can consume a lot of the usable air within a closed space quickly. dh@. wrote in message ... | Hi, | | I have a houseboat that I'd like to take out some this | winter, and I'd like to have a small wood stove to use | in it. All the small wood stoves I've been able to find | have been camping related, so I'm asking for advice | in camping groups as well as boating groups. Can | anyone suggest any stove(s) that they feel are good | and affordable, and any suggestions about use etc? | | Thanks for any help! | David | | PS in case anyone is interested in what I've found | so far, or wants proof that I've done some looking | on my own as well as asking for people to share | what they've learned, here is a list of some related | websites: | | http://www.calarmy.com/tents/ | http://www.kni-co.com/ | http://tinyurl.com/9pbxv | http://www.aaoobfoods.com/shepherdstoves.htm#2%20DX | http://davistent.com/davisTent/html/WoodStoves.html | http://www.cylinderstoves.com/defram...ovepricing.htm | http://www.walltentshop.com/CatStoves.html | http://www.fourdog.com/page2.html | http://www.army-technology.com/contr...manufacturing/ |
dh@. wrote in message ... Hi, I have a houseboat that I'd like to take out some this winter, and I'd like to have a small wood stove to use in it. All the small wood stoves I've been able to find have been camping related, so I'm asking for advice in camping groups as well as boating groups. Can anyone suggest any stove(s) that they feel are good and affordable, and any suggestions about use etc? Thanks for any help! David PS in case anyone is interested in what I've found so far, or wants proof that I've done some looking on my own as well as asking for people to share what they've learned, here is a list of some related websites: You must be wacko why the hell would anyone want an woodstove on an boat? It is dangerous enough without adding another fire hazard. There are all sorts of safe fuel burners. |
On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 12:47:24 -0400, dh wrote:
Hi, I have a houseboat that I'd like to take out some this winter, and I'd like to have a small wood stove to use in it. All the small wood stoves I've been able to find have been camping related, so I'm asking for advice in camping groups as well as boating groups. Can anyone suggest any stove(s) that they feel are good and affordable, and any suggestions about use etc? Navigator Stove Works make a marine wood burner. http://www.marinestove.com/ Although, there are alternatives. Quite a bit of information can be found he http://www.cruisingresources.com/Ful...g_the_Boat.asp |
"Reynaud" wrote in message
... You must be wacko why the hell would anyone want an woodstove on an boat? It is dangerous enough without adding another fire hazard. There are all sorts of safe fuel burners. Mmm..... when wast the last time I saw wood vapour catching fire from a spark..... Meindert |
In a previous article, dh@. said:
I have a houseboat that I'd like to take out some this winter, and I'd like to have a small wood stove to use in it. All the small wood stoves I've been able to find I very much doubt that there are any canoers or kayakers who've put wood stoves in their boats, so I fail to see why you included rec.boats.paddle.touring in your posting. -- Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/ "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. |
The good news is that traditional small iron stoves are being made
again. The bad is they are priced at 10x what they should be and scandalous. A new tiny cast woodburner the size of a breadbox costs $1,600 and the one I inspected close-up last week was a piece of sh*t in terms of good cast stove construction, not worth $50 to a serious woodburner, there have been many iron toys for children made & fitted much better to use than this stove. A small iron stove of good quality - if you can find one - is better than other ways of burning wood. For a long time small laundry stoves & heaters were made for bathrooms in houses, and you may luck out and find one that has not fallen into the hands of a stove restorer, who will charge you as much or more money for one as the new repros above. But at least they are made very well. For heating a small space well & effiicently with wood, one must do opposite from what has become popular today for wood burning practices, and this will also affect the design of stove to use (that is, if you can find much of a choice these days), as well as its installation. Adequate supply air is not likely to be any problem on a houseboat or other boat, but adequate draught (flue height) for efficient combustion is. The more you can provide, the better. In practical terms it is impossible to have too high a flue on a boat, and whatever you can manage will still have you wishing you had more. No "airtight stove" type burning should be contemplated. It is very wasteful of fuel to "hold" or restrict a full fire in a woodstove "to make it last a long time", it will make smoke outside that will be miserable with its short flue height, and it will foul the flue. A boat does not have a woodshed for fuel storage and the resulting waste from such burning will nearly double the fuel requirement. Only finely split, DRY (meaning at 20% moisture or less) wood which has been cut to the proper length for the firebox should be burned. Many hardwoods take 2 years or more of drying out in the weather to get to this point. Fires should be kindled quickly and burned hot with correct underfire & overfire air at high efficiency, and resulting heat "held" in the stove & mass of the space, rather than trying to hold a cooler fire for a longer period. This means either brief, hot fires that are permitted go out, or continual ones which are frequently fed only one or two sticks at a feeding, depending upon the weather. Such fires produce very little flue smoke after warmup and sometimes none that is easily visible, when an experienced person is operating the stove, and they emit a good deal of heat for the size of the thing - especially when it is in the "clear fire" stage (mostly charcoal & no yellow flame). All this stuff may seem obvious but firing a tiny woodstove well is more challenging than one of larger size, and makes bigger differences in the heating results. Remember you will have to deal with ashes and more frequently than in a bigger stove. On a boat a covered ashcan is needed because there is usually a breeze when they have to be taken out. People are wierd today too & some may get ****ed off when they see you dump wood ashes into the water downwind because they have been culturally deprived. It IS possible to bank a fire with fresh fuel for delayed burning at night at starved draught - which is not the same thing as the usual "airtight stove" inefficient operation but has some similarities. It will also use up a lot of your ashes & cut back on their disposal, for there is a lot of unburned material in once-burned ash. Allow a clear fire to almost burn out, with only some remaining coals, and shake or remove any excess ash around them. Close all air inlets entirely. Place on top of them the largest piece of dry fuel that will fit into the stove, usually through its lifted top & often an unsplit round section loaded on its end (but it must be *dry wood*). Load the whole firebox with ashes, all the way up to & over the top of the fuel. Close up the stove & all draughts & dampers as tightly as possible (this technique depends on having good flue draught height which will pull tiny amounts of air into the stove anyway). In a few hours, everything inside the stove will be one glowing mass, and much later when it has burned out you will be surprised by now little ash is left in the morning. Throw *this* ash out, don't try to reuse it for the next banked fire. One of the best, least messy & easiest to stow fuelwood sources for a tiny stove is bagged hardwood waste product from a mill operation, such as cutoff birch dowel pieces and the like. This is kiln-dried material and it is so easy to handle and burns so fookin hot, that you will laugh at anyone who derides you for heating your boat with wood. You'll still need other larger fuel for more balanced & controlled fires, and it is easy to overheat & ruin an iron stove burning hardwood waste if you are not careful. |
Reynaud wrote:
dh@. wrote in message ... Hi, I have a houseboat that I'd like to take out some this winter, and I'd like to have a small wood stove to use in it. All the small wood stoves I've been able to find have been camping related, so I'm asking for advice in camping groups as well as boating groups. Can anyone suggest any stove(s) that they feel are good and affordable, and any suggestions about use etc? Thanks for any help! David PS in case anyone is interested in what I've found so far, or wants proof that I've done some looking on my own as well as asking for people to share what they've learned, here is a list of some related websites: You must be wacko why the hell would anyone want an woodstove on an boat? It is dangerous enough without adding another fire hazard. There are all sorts of safe fuel burners. Safe? I would like to see a snug fitting stovepipe burner for fire logs, throttleable, extinguishable, forced draught water heater, for tea, washing, remote heating, even a steam boiler an engine, excess steam vented under bustle to increase hull speed. Unsafe? How about them fireballs you always see when jets blow up? They use diesel oil for fuel. Naw! You can swim through a crowd of burning firelogs, put them out with a wet hat, even make a raft. Try that in burning bunker C, the "safest" fuel. I wonder if firelogs could be made edible from entire canola plants? Terry K |
you might try contacting a wood stove restorer like Key Center Trading Post
in WA (Gig Harbor). They often have stuff in their warehouse and will sell at a reasonable price (if there is any such thing). Brian |
Paul Tomblin wrote:
In a previous article, dh@. said: I have a houseboat that I'd like to take out some this winter, and I'd like to have a small wood stove to use in it. All the small wood stoves I've been able to find I very much doubt that there are any canoers or kayakers who've put wood stoves in their boats, so I fail to see why you included rec.boats.paddle.touring in your posting. If charcoal burning hand warmers are not wood heaters, perhaps you'd prefer a New Found Land and Labrador wooden stove? "Gives good heat, can burn for 24 hours, b'y. Replacement stoves, cheap." (The classic "Newfie wooden stove" is a packing crate, empty, with smoke pipe. They can be burned only once. Deluxe versions come stuffed with wadded up Globe and Mail newsprint press rejects and roll ends (insert most hated newspaper name, here) "Kindling included, easier to light, b'y" Do any wood burners use a 2 liter Sprite bottle of water with a hole poked in the cap for a class "A" fire extinguisher, parked right next to the wood stove? Does it save insurance costs? Haw! Terry K Terry K |
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In a previous article, Terry Spragg said:
Paul Tomblin wrote: I very much doubt that there are any canoers or kayakers who've put wood stoves in their boats, so I fail to see why you included rec.boats.paddle.touring in your posting. If charcoal burning hand warmers are not wood heaters, perhaps you'd prefer a New Found Land and Labrador wooden stove? "Gives good heat, can burn for 24 hours, b'y. Replacement stoves, cheap." You can't have your kayak and heat it too. -- Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/ Quality Control, n.: The process of testing one out of every 1,000 units coming off a production line to make sure that at least one out of 100 works. |
On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 16:31:29 +0000 (UTC),
(Paul Tomblin) wrote: In a previous article, Terry Spragg said: Paul Tomblin wrote: I very much doubt that there are any canoers or kayakers who've put wood stoves in their boats, so I fail to see why you included rec.boats.paddle.touring in your posting..... You can't have your kayak and heat it too. Good one! Brian Whatcott Altus, OK |
Terry Spragg wrote:
As well, pellet stoves can burn small wood efficiently, with forced draught. The best pellets are made from waste from flooring and cabinet scraps. The ash all goes up the pipe. Haven't seen any small pellet stoves, though. Hi Terry, We don't want to be thinking too far ashore about a boat woodstove. Even if a pellet unit of tiny size could be fabbed it would require the complexities of an automated feed auger, electricity-hungry draught blower, increased maintenance, lower overall reliability, and be restriced to a very limited type & sources of fuel. Pellets are also easy to get wet in a marine environment & hard to dry out if they do. BTW a small shoreside stove of uncoated CI will grow rust aboard a boat faster than crabs in a Carribean whorehouse, and must be continually maintained & recoated with stove paint, which is a PITA. Someone with vision & some capital needs to start spec-ing/subbing overseas & selling a tiny porcelain-coated well-fitted cast iron woodstove that is well thought-out for versatility & simplicity at a cheap price. They would sell thousands of them and make a killing, especially if they may be exempted from the ridiculous new US EPA woodstove emission requirements (and their equivalents elsewhere) as the new and inferior copies of the insultingly overpriced Lunenbergs appear to be. Those guys need some serious competition, and many people would want one ashore in small spaces as well. A lot of excellent CI goods are produced cheaply in Taiwan (along with some very crappy iron too), as long as the importer specifies good stuff; my Powermatic tablesaw is Taiwanese CI, and they are still recycling all the ships we've scrapped there. I am willing to jump into this project if anyone has the capital and cajones to do it. |
Subject
Who ever wants this nonsense has obviously never had to split several cords of wood for the winter fuel, never had to haul the ashes afterwards. Same can be said for coal. Been there, done that, will never do it again. If you truly want to get info on wood and/or coal fired stoves, the Lehman Hdwe, Kidron, Ohio is the place. Why, because Kidron is the center of a major Amish population. Lew |
On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 16:31:29 +0000 (UTC),
(Paul Tomblin) wrote: In a previous article, Terry Spragg said: Paul Tomblin wrote: I very much doubt that there are any canoers or kayakers who've put wood stoves in their boats, so I fail to see why you included rec.boats.paddle.touring in your posting. If charcoal burning hand warmers are not wood heaters, perhaps you'd prefer a New Found Land and Labrador wooden stove? "Gives good heat, can burn for 24 hours, b'y. Replacement stoves, cheap." You can't have your kayak and heat it too. Thank you. I've always loved that joke. Cyli r.bc: vixen. Minnow goddess. Speaker to squirrels. Often taunted by trout. Almost entirely harmless. http://www.visi.com/~cyli email: lid (strip the .invalid to email) |
This is the third time I have tried to say this and if it does not go
through then I'll deep six this site. There is a solid fuel heater NEWPORT by Dickinson. It looks like any other propane or diesel heater bulkhead mounted. I have one and use sterno which works fine. A friend has one and uses selfstarting charcoal to start cannel coal, which is a fireplace coal. We only haul our boats for maintenance and need some BTU's in the winter months. |
"tigerregis" wrote in message oups.com... This is the third time I have tried to say this .... And this is the last time I will say this....stop the friggin cross posting. |
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Gogarty wrote:
We eventually settled on a mix of real charcoal (avoid briquettes like the plague -- what's in those things anyway?) and pea size anthracite coal. We had to install a fan on the front of the ash drawer to provide a forced draft to keep the coal burning. Try larger coal - less draught restriction - and always coal that is rounded not broken & flattened in shape (same reason & getting harder to find). Either way it sounds like a dangerous idea; coal gas with the inadequate natural draught from a short boat stack offers deadly possiblitites. |
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Gogarty wrote:
The coal won't keep burning without the forced draft and the charcoal. The firebox is pretty small. The CO monitor is also close to hand and active. We are not running a sealed room here -- lots of fresh air coming in and a bulkhead fan to circuilate the warmed air. I know you are no dummy, but there inherent problems/dangers with forced draught & coal, some of which lead to induced draught operation in marine boilers. Doesn't take much of a gas leak to spoil your day. Another F/D issue is higher explosion potential. Much of this (and the rest) is long forgotten. Burning coal today is often problematic as you describe (i.e, both draught requirements & co-fuels needed). Coal commonly available today isn't quite what it was in quality when it was a major home heating fuel & very competitively marketed, nor are typical flues as tall or grates as well designed for it. You'll find a higher percentage of unburned fuel & clinker after firing today's coal in today's appliances. It's also pretty expensive now, & none if its mess has gone away. You are right that charcoal briquettes are usually crap in a stove. Coke would be much better if obtainable. We are especially mindful of the hazards of CO since two people died at our marina two years ago when they left the engine running to run the airconditioner. Cool way to die (not). BTW, what is the present safety concensus about keeping E/R exhaust running to insure negative pressure during motoring on yachts? |
Thanks for this, it is a good read. The jokes weren't that good though!
:-). I was thinking of doing the same thing. Had some bad experiences with gas and I don't trust diesel either (it costs money :-)) Tom dh@. wrote: : Hi, : I have a houseboat that I'd like to take out some this : winter, and I'd like to have a small wood stove to use : in it. All the small wood stoves I've been able to find : have been camping related, so I'm asking for advice : in camping groups as well as boating groups. Can : anyone suggest any stove(s) that they feel are good : and affordable, and any suggestions about use etc? : Thanks for any help! : David : PS in case anyone is interested in what I've found : so far, or wants proof that I've done some looking : on my own as well as asking for people to share : what they've learned, here is a list of some related : websites: : http://www.calarmy.com/tents/ : http://www.kni-co.com/ : http://tinyurl.com/9pbxv : http://www.aaoobfoods.com/shepherdstoves.htm#2%20DX : http://davistent.com/davisTent/html/WoodStoves.html : http://www.cylinderstoves.com/defram...ovepricing.htm : http://www.walltentshop.com/CatStoves.html : http://www.fourdog.com/page2.html : http://www.army-technology.com/contr...manufacturing/ -- |
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