The wood stove (one with soapstone panels) puts out a nice, radiant warmth, the kind that soaks in to the bone. It’s orange flames, red coals, and deep heat. In a word, it’s cozy.
It became the heart of the home. Starting a fire meant committing to at least an hour of being available to tend it. It also tended to pull in the cats and humans, to bask in its warmth.
We even cooked on it, a little. Nothing messy; any spills will instantly carbonize and stain the stone. But it’s a nice way to heat oats that makes them extra soft and delightful to eat. Maybe it would work for tea, too.
Even the chores of splitting wood and bringing it inside for feeding the stove is pleasant. Basking in the heat feels like a reward for a job well done.
A wood stove was never on my list of must-have, or even nice-to-have, but only because I had never lived with one. A wood stove was a thing that was in a cabin, for winter camping.
I had known the difference between radiant heat and convection heat, because I have seen a few quartz-tube space heaters in my day. However, the wood stove is physically larger, able to put out more heat more evenly, and that makes all the difference. I don’t know how to describe it other than “it’s a hot warmth.” When cold, one could sit by one of the natural-gas furnace registers at the old place, with a blanket to catch more heat, but before one was fully warmed through, the furnace would be entering its cooldown phase.
It’s kind of like the difference between feeling the heat of a light bulb, and the heat of sunlight pouring in through an old window.
Furthermore, the wood stove can, somewhat unexpectedly, heat the entire house if outdoor temperatures are above 10°F, because its maximum rating is 45,000 BTU/h. This is a bit shy of the gas furnace’s first stage at the old house (somewhere around 51,000), but the stove has only convection and radiation to work with. Also working against it is location. It was installed in the addition, at one end of the house. The furnace(s) have always been centrally located, and benefited from a blower to distribute the heat throughout the duct work. I never expected the stove to be able to handle everything, even in the milder parts of winter.
(And? It just didn’t look that big.)
I want to be clear that this is not a hippie fantasy, nor prepper influencer dream. We did not TradWife® it and grow our own oaks from acorn to harvest (allegedly); we ordered some wood that had been processed with petroleum-derived energy, that was delivered in a hydraulic dump trailer. This is a cheap and satisfying way to provide heat and comfort.
To make it even more cost efficient, we’ve been working on cutting our own wood. It’s a strange experience for me to run a motorized saw, after having cut so much with a bow saw in the past. I know exactly how much of my own effort I am saving with this combustion. Instead of a few cuts of a trunk of a tree in an afternoon, I can limb and buck the whole thing. It almost seems like cheating. (Am I still going to do it? Heck yeah.)
🙋 Hey cat, I’m glad you like the hearth. Are there any downsides?
😸 There certainly are, and I hinted at a couple of drawbacks. It takes both physical effort to handle the wood, as well as time and attention to tend the fire. The other big issue has been heat circulation. We ended up using a Dreo pedestal fan to push cold air into the hearth room, which also pushes warm air back out for the rest of the house, while definitely helping the flue’s draft.
The Dreo fan is intended for bedrooms, which makes it well-suited for this. It’s quiet, and thus, low power. On speeds 1-5, it draws 1-5 watts on the Kill-a-Watt meter, and 3 watts is powerful enough. We have some more typical fans, but they draw multiple times the power.
In the long run, we plan to put another hole in the ex-outside-wall between the original house and the addition, to let the cats pass through, and to allow the air to travel in a loop. I can’t report on that just yet, but if the transom here🌎 is anything to go by, it should work pretty well.
Stay warm!