A Kingdom Where The Sky Is Burning

Well, now that we’ve warmed up with lots of talk about firewood, I’ll going to pull the rug out from under you. I apologize in advance for that, and for the pun, too. We don’t burn firewood anymore.

We haven’t for a while now. It was the only way we could figure out to avoid freezing and starving here in the hinterlands. It’s bad manners to freeze and starve at the same time, I think. Smacks of an inability to make up your mind. So we had firewood for heat and ate peanut butter a lot and got by.

I could wax poetic about fires, if you like. I used to rouse myself at around 3 AM and go down in the basement in the dead of winter. I always loved that term, the dead of winter. There are two or three weeks here in late January where the daytime and nighttime temps don’t budge. The average is something like low 20s in the day and 6 at night. It just hangs there like that until a day or two into February when the average ticks up one degree, and you know the sun is spinning properly and the earth is tilting a smidge and you’re coming out of it. It’s generally those three weeks when you see -20F at night, and sometimes the daytime temp never cracks zero.

So I’d get up a half an hour before I went to bed, I think. I’d shuffle through the chilly kitchen, and stand for a long moment at the top of the stairs, and look out over the landscape. There’s no moisture in the air at those temps, so everything is as clear as the instructions for a hammer. If the moon is out, the bare trees spray their shadows over the snow in perfect relief, and you can’t tell what’s the tree and what’s the shadow sometimes. There are more stars than you’re used to. They were sprinkled nicely on the firmament in summer, but they’re blasted all over in the winter. There are so many that they seem to be holding hands. It’s too cold for anything to be out and about, but you look for foxes and fishers and moose and bears and deer just the same.

If you get up a little later, the sun puts on a show just over the horizon. It slinks behind the mountains and lights up the sky with delicate pinks and powder blues, with more than a hint of Maxfield Parrish in them. But you can’t linger. Down the stairs to the furnace, to make a fire.

When you’re really burning wood for heat, not just amusing yourself, you can make the old joke that this winter was so mild that you only needed one fire. It lasted from Halloween to St. Patrick’s Day, but it only took one match.

It’s really cold in the basement. We keep the rat run from the water meter to the water heater just above freezing, and leave the faucet dripping all night in the kitchen to keep the pipes from freezing. The first glass of water in the morning was kind of slushy sometimes.

I placed an overturned milk crate in front of the furnace door. There were buckets filled with junks of firewood nearby, placed there the afternoon before, because you don’t want to go outside until the sun is full up if you can avoid it. It takes twenty to thirty minutes to make a fire, and you can’t force the issue. Lord knows I tried, and failed, to hurry it up. It just does.

The fire looks dead out but it ain’t, unless you slept overmuch. You take a poker and rake through the coals, and they brighten up a bit. I coveted anything that could start a proper fire. Paper of any kind immediately got scarcer than a husband when the dishes need washing. My wife would collect egg cartons for me, the gray kind made of cellulose. I’d tear them in half. I’d go in the cutoff box from making furniture and such and fill the little egg holes with little bits of pine and curly maple and cherry and whatever else was in there. You’d lay some paper in, but twisted, so it wouldn’t ignite immediately.  Then you put the egg trays on top of the paper, and then a few sticks of kindling. Then you plopped the three or four logs from the bucket on top, while trying not to smother the whole thing. Open the ash door on the bottom of the stove, and you’re in business.  You hope.

Opening the ash cleanout door lets air underneath the coals, and if you did it right, the the whole thing comes alive without a match or any fussing. Do it wrong, and you have to take the whole mess out and start over in the cold.

This is when the cat would come out of nowhere and sit in my lap. Cats just know these things. The fire would start to perk up, and the heat coming out of the open furnace door was instant summer. The bottom door has to be closed as soon as possible, and judging the knife edge between the fire going out and a four alarm fire got to be an art. There is a cast iron spinner on the ash dump door, that lets in a little air after you close the door, but if you’re doing it right, you can close it. There’s a little air inlet in the firebox you’re supposed to fiddle with. I think it’s there to keep you busy, like a mobile over a crib.

The fire really gets going, and the jacket on the furnace creaks and groans like an uncle sitting down after Thanksgiving dinner. You wait and shiver until the temps in the chase between the firebox and the outside of the stove gets hot enough to trip a switch, and the big fan wakes up and starts blowing air up into the house, and you can go upstairs. In two or three hours, you can go down and simply drop more logs on top of the existing fire, and keep the thing going like that until you falter and fall asleep, and then it’s back to raking through the coals again.

A five-gallon pail holds a single fire.  We began to refer to days as “Six bucket days” or “eight bucket days” after looking at the weather and guessing a bit. On really cold days, you’d need twelve of them lined up. As E.B. White said, in Maine, winter is a full time job.

We did what we had to. We hung curtains in parts of the house to cordon them off from the heat we were hoarding elsewhere. For about a year, we put a thick sheet of foam insulation in the stairwell and abandoned the second floor entirely. My wife and I slept in our clothes sometimes. We turned on electric baseboard heat in the kid’s rooms at night, because kids shouldn’t suffer for their parents mistakes, should they? I could always rob a convenience store or something when the electric bill came, I thought.

And through the whole escapade, I patted myself on the back for my mental fortitude. By that, I mean I resisted the urge to climb inside the furnace each and every time I lit a fire. And for the whole twenty or thirty minutes it took the flames to infect the paper and the kindling, and creep up and over the logs in a wave, I daydreamed of sleeping four hours at a stretch. There was only one thing to do. Buy a pellet stove.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting and hitting the tip jar. It is much appreciated]

This Is Not ‘nam, This Is Firewood. There Are Rules.

Well, I’m going to tell you the rules, right now. These are not the rules you’ll find elsewhere on the intertunnel about drying firewood. I know, because before I gave up on that information enterprise, I checked them all out. They’re all wrong. Forget them. This is how you do it:

First, get a nice mix of hardwood. People get confused about burning hardwood and softwood, and start arguing, and hitting each other with axes, and nothing gets done. It’s interesting, but basically all wood is simply two ingredients: cellulose and lignin. Different kinds of wood have different ratios of those substances, and a varying melange of trace elements. If you like, you can read all about calcium carbonate and compare the trace amounts of manganese compared to boron over at Wikiwhatsis. Study up on alkenes and alkynes and alkanes to your heart’s content. But leave me out of it.

Why do you want hardwood? Because it’s denser. All other things being equal, denser is better. That’s about it. Oak makes great firewood. Maple makes good firewood. Birch makes good firewood. Around here, that’s about all you’ll get in your firewood delivery. Oak is the best, because it’s the densest. Denser wood burns longer and so you get to sleep three straight hours instead of two-and-a-half because you’re tending the stove, and if the fire goes out, it’s in the thirties in your living room in a hurry.

Oak is great for another reason. You see, when you burn wood, it becomes pyrolized. Pyrolosis is what happens to wood when you heat it up. It chars, and releases volatiles. It’s the volatiles that burn. That’s why flames appear in the air above a fire. It’s hard to get pyrolosis going if your wood isn’t seasoned correctly. Please notice I didn’t say “wet.” If the internal moisture content of your firewood is low, you can throw it in the furnace soaking wet on the outside, even caked with ice, and it will burn fine. Dry on the outside and wet on the inside won’t burn.

Another factor to consider is called coaling. Good luck looking that up on the intertunnel. I’ll explain it as best I can, seeing as how I barely understand it myself. Good firewood, like nicely dried oak, is dense, has a lot of BTUs in each junk, and burns longer than species like pine. It also coals nicely. Coaling is what happens when the wood is completely pyrolized, and slowly combusts with nearly no flame. In a furnace like ours, you can get quite a show in the observation window when you’ve got the air intakes just right, the fire just right, and the firewood just right. The charcoal remnants of the original logs emit some volatiles, but no smoke. The volatiles are ignited in the air above the fire, just under the baffle that leads out to the flue. They dance around like the aurora borealis. The wood is all black, and doesn’t seem to really be on fire, but it’s slowly consumed and gives off beaucoup heat. That’s coaling, and you want it.

So, how are you going to get it? Like this.

• Stack your split logs in single rows. Never in a pile or with rows touching each other. Air has to circulate all around to dry the wood
• Never try to dry your wood inside a structure or up against a structure of any kind. Sunshine and wind are your friend
• The rows of logs should run vaguely east to west. The sun is in the south in our hemisphere. You want it shining on the long face of your woodpiles, not the ends
• The woodpiles can be five feet high or so, to save space, but higher is a PIA
• The wood piles should not be on turf or soil if you can avoid it. Moisture will come up out of the earth and set you back. Pavement is great for this. If you don’t have any, put down heavy plastic first
• If you’re on pavement, you don’t have to put the wood up on anything. On bare ground, use pallets or something to get it up out of the muck
• Put your first row on the southernmost part of the area you’re stacking wood in, at noon
• Look at where the first row’s shadow falls. Put the second row up against the shadow, but not in it. The sun will shine on the face of every row, all day, more or less, if you repeat this strategy with every row.
• You don’t need any kind of props to hold a firewood rick. Stack logs in alternating layers of three junks on the ends of the rows. They’ll hold
• Your firewood will dry faster if you cover the top so rainwater or snowmelt doesn’t filter down into the center of the rows, but don’t cover the faces under any circumstances. If your firewood is 16″ long, cut OSB into 18″ strips and plop it on top of the rows. With barely an inch of overhang, the faces of the logs get wet during rainstorms, but that will help you, not hurt you. When the sun comes out, the wetness wants out of butt ends of the logs, and they split open nicely. That lets air get further into your junks. That helps get moisture out of the interior of the junks

That’s it. I’ve dried eight cords of wood in my back yard parking area in less than two months. And I have a moisture meter, so I’m not funning about it being dry. I took a sample from the middle of the pile, split it, and laid the moisture meter on the fresh face. Under 20% moisture in there and you’re good to go.

And what’s it like, to burn firewood for your heat? It’s fine, as long as you show no enthusiasm but don’t complain.