‘Tis the season, folks. Despite my best intention to have the woodshed full to the rim before lighting my first fire, this morning I lit my first fire. Just briefly and really just because Landlady was coming over for coffee, it wasn’t all that cold and in fact will be a beautiful warm day.
Speaking of fire, this morning we did the ground work in Landlady’s House to replace this…
With this.
Damn the sales copy, a Vogelzang Li’l Sweetie stove will not repeat not heat a small house. A microcabin or small garage, maybe. There’s simply not enough radiating surface there. Plus unless you set it on great big blocks you can only stoke or service it while laying on your belly, it’s that small.
I like my full-size boxwood stove, it’s a good size for quickly heating even the 200 sq. ft. Lair. But Landlady wants to try out this potbelly stove, which if nothing else is just really kind of cool-looking. I’ve got one issue with the stovepipe that needs to be addressed before we can fully install it, plus she wants to make a firebrick pad. But next visit two weeks from now we’ll get it smoking.
Also, look what somebody sent me!
That, my very jealous friends, is a rechargeable multi-mode LED flashlight that can go from ‘Moon’ to ‘Melt your retinas onto your cheeks at 200 yards’ with several other perplexing flashy settings thrown in just to confound me. It’s a really awesome light that pushes some of Uncle Joel’s Luddite instincts to ‘Cap’n, She Canna Take It.’
Expect a flashlight-related megapost in the near future, I feel it brewing.
We used to have a little pot bellied stove just like that. Tiny, We lived in a cabin where the winters were more cold, damp and windy rather than really freezing. We stoked that puppy to the hilt with tiny pieces of wood that were a real pain in the neck to cut to size. One winter, on a particularly cold night we got it so hot that it turned cherry red and almost white hot and we could actually see thru it and watch the fire on the wood. That’s when it put out a great amount of heat, lol. It is amazing we did not burn the place down. We also had the stove pipe go up and run horizontal for about 10 feet before it exited the house. I think that gave off more heat than the stove ever did.
I like the pot bellied stove. It reminds me of western movies and sitting around jawing and drinking cowboy coffee.
Cool flashlight. With the ‘Melt your retinas onto your cheeks at 200 yards’ feature it will be easier to scope out the area at night and find the critters both two and four legged that are prowling around.
Joel you have some mighty fine friends…
It has been my experience that pot belly stoves work moderately well with coal, not so much with wood, and they really don’t have the volume to hold logs of any useful size that will burn for more than 15 minutes. Not much use here in Maine when we have 15 degrees below zero for weeks on end.