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Lana Reyes wrote:**If you had $100 and one weekend to make an older house hold heat better, what would you tackle first?**
Paul starts out by stating the wisdom that you should only burn dry wood. However, sometimes you need heat and you don't have any dry wood - sometimes, you have to use wet or green wood but burning green wood is not a good idea - what you need to do is dry the wood fast.
Using wet or green wood for heating is a lot of extra work. If you really need heat now, you can also burn cardboard or paper waste.
Having a place to store wood makes a big difference, especially if you can store the wood indoors so it dries better. You can get or make crates to store wood. Stacking wood on end makes it dry much faster; also cutting the wood down to smaller sizes makes it dry faster. Cutting the wood shorter also helps.
Paul uses crates to hold wood, which can be brought inside to dry faster. They're great for stacking wood to dry in, you can stack them around the stove, a couple feet away. You shouldn't put wood right against or on top of the stove as it's dangerous, it can emit fumes and could even catch on fire. By using all these tips wet wood can be dry enough to burn in just a few days.
Samantha joins in. She has lived in the Pacific north west where wet wood is common. She says if you find a dead tree which is leaning, the underside of it can be drier and also the inside of the wood can be drier, even if it's been in the rain. Split off the outside of the wood to leave that to dry more while you burn the inside parts.
The question is asked about burning green wood in a Rocket Mass Heater. Paul feels that it wouldn't get hot enough to burn off the creosote and smoke as it should. With that said it is probably safer to burn wet or green wood in an RMH than in a regular stove, but you still should avoid burning green wood at all.
The best plan is still to dry the wood as much and as fast as you can. You need to establish a system to process the wood and to know which wood is ready to burn and you will have to store a LOT of wood inside. It will be more work and you need to plan.
Further to the problem of heating your home, There are other things you can do to help reduce wood use. You can stack wood near the stove, but leave at least 18" space. You can fit angle iron to the top of the stove to make a rack to stack rocks above the stove to store heat for overnight. It's important not to put stone directly on the stove, the angle iron allows about a 2" gap for air to circulate and avoids overheating the stove top. Especially with a steel stove, getting it too hot is bad for it. If you have power, you can use a fan to create air movement to dry your wood faster.
Another contributor asks about how thick a brick mass can be. Paul feels if you stack a single layer of bricks it will work well - it needs a gap between the bricks and the wall. If you stack more than one layer the heat won't conduct well unless you use cob or other material to bond the bricks together.
Finally a contributor asks about heating a small home - they are trying to heat 600 sq ft. Paul feels that with a simple wood burner, that can be a challenge. Adding some mass could help even out the heat.
