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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. |
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#3
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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. |
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