I’m largely over my morbid fear of chimney fire. And by ‘largely,’ I mean ‘not entirely.’ And I hate that pang I get first thing in the morning when the tinder is fully involved and the stove’s airflow is starting to roar a bit and dragging the flame right up the chimney.
I know it’s supposed to do that. I know it needs to do that. But it still gives me a pang, first thing in the morning.
Then when the fire settles down, so do I.
BTW, as a Secret Lair status report – during this sort of no-man’s-land between autumn and winter, when the cabin is shivery in the morning but hot and stuffy in the afternoon, I could almost wish for a smaller stove. Doesn’t take anything for this one to drive me right out, and I’m hoping that’s the added floor insulation talking and not just the ambiguous season. Landlady offered me a smaller stove, and I don’t think she was joking. I was…unenthusiastic about that plan. But I do recall days last winter when I needed to light the fire two or three times during the day because the weather was cold enough to need heat but the stove heated things up too much. I just label it as a good problem to have. 🙂
I suspect that this is a dumb question but here it goes anyhow… Can’t you just build a smaller fire in your present stove?
Not a dumb question at all, it’s one I’ve wrestled with for over five years now.
The answer seems to be, “not if I want it to burn well, and it’s my own stupid fault.” An enthusiastic fire requires a lot of air flow, and that’s what an iron stove is designed to provide. The flame is supposed to heat the collar and the stovepipe right away. Hot air rushing up the hot stovepipe draws more air into the stove inlet, stoking the fire. But as an unintended consequence of the Lair’s peculiar design, which is supposed to maximize summer airflow, the stovepipe is extremely long – fourteen feet in all, almost six feet of which is sticking out in the cold to clear the front peak. A small fire can’t heat it all up, so the air doesn’t flow right and the fire stagnates. This puts me in an all-or-nothing situation not really suited to a 200 sq. ft. microcabin.
Small slow fires make creosote. Creosote gets stuck in a cold chimney and makes fuel to make chimney fires. Hot fast fires burn much more efficiently, burn fuel completely, heat the whole system and leave no residue to burn out of control in your chimney. Hard hot fires are safer than slow smouldering ones.
Yeah, and that. But I’ve been cleaning my stovepipe obsessively ever since the chimney fire of 2012.
Just out of curiosity, all that air going up the chimney had to come from somewhere. Is the lair so “leaky” that air supply is not an issue, or do you leave a smallish opening for this purpose?
The Lair used to be leaky as hell, now not so much. I have one deliberate inlet built into the bathroom that draws air from under the cabin. And the front door leaks like a sieve.
Possibly dumb suggestion WRT enabling smaller fire – insulate the stovepipe, or at least the outdoor portion?
Not a dumb suggestion. As far as the health of the fire in the firebox is concerned, that would help.
In fact the upper (through the roof and outdoor) section of my stovepipe is double-walled and insulated. The lower eight feet is single-walled, because that was all I had money for when I installed the Vogelzang in December 2012 at the beginning of the winter after the chimney fire.
There really ought to be double-wall pipe all the way from the stove to the ceiling box. That would probably keep the stovepipe interior much hotter and cleaner. But frankly I never saw the point. The whole point of the exercise is to heat the cabin interior, and all that heat radiating off the thin tin of the stovepipe does that admirably. I’m going to have the pipe down for cleaning at least once a month anyway, because otherwise I’ll start obsessing about chimney fire and won’t be able to bring myself to light the fire in the first place.
Wait – you have a bathroom?
Of course I do. Where else would I put the Lair’s crowning ornament, my Real Flush Toilet?
It’s not a very large bathroom…