Living off Wood?

Ok another question. I do use oak but its not an airtight insert. Its pre EPA and has a small gap at the top where the doors meet. There are no firebricks.....should there be? Are you saying I should leave the ashes in there? Don't they blow around when you blow on the fire to get it restarted? I think Im doing something wrong. Anyone have experience using older inserts?

Even if your stove is not airtight and you're using oak, you should still be able to produce a bed of coals. We get plenty of coals to cook on from an outdoor campfire.

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This is the government the Founding Fathers warned us about.....

Oooo I didn't think this thread would take off so well Thanks everyone!! I know how to cook on a fire using coals and not burning things so I think that experience will translate well here. Thank goodness for rugged Outback husbands who like to teach a lady a thing or two. For this, a crocodile skin belt and kangaroo stew.

I'm having daydreamy moments of taking the 4wd to the back forty with a rifle, shooting myself a rabbit or two, cleaning them up, going to the garden and picking a heap of vegetables, preparing it all on the potbelly and having the whole thing ready for when my husband gets home from a long hard day at work, "Honey I started the fire, shot some rabbits and made dinner." I mean, it just sounds so romantic, right? [And here my friends want handbags and sunglasses]

Oak is such a nice wood for burning! I think we'd only use the wattle and gums lying about. I imagine a wattle-smoked meal would taste lovely, too. Not that oak wouldn't - just oak is so expensive!

I also never thought to keep my alcohol near it to ferment.

First time in years I wished it was winter already.

It will be near minus 15 to 20 degrees F around me and Cabin Fever this coming Monday.

What kind of temps do you get?

Here in the real cold, a very efficient wood burner is needed, or what happens is most of your inside air goes up the chimney, and very little warmth stays in the house.

The more efficient styles of stoves will cost more, but bring you a lot more indoor heat per log.

The trade off depends on how much heat you need.

The old farm house I live in has been in the family since 1928, and was heated only with wood until the 1970s. With the water pipes and water radiator heat, this means someone was there to put more wood in the voiler at least every 20 hours or so, much more often when it is below zero F.

Many of the wood furnaces and boilers around here were designed to burn wood or coal, and had the grates in them.

Paul

Keeping baby goats and little chicks or other baby animals warm. can't imagine not having a wood stove of some kind always...

They're in Australia, its summer for them.

I'm a they!

In winter, though, we can get to like.. almost freezing. I think. Ha. I'm starting to wonder why I posted this. I probably will only use the potbelly for two weeks of the year! But now I want to use it a lot.

Currently it is 120F.

Is my location confusing? I wonder because Queensland is the [size of nearly a quarter the country] state I'm in but more than one person has asked me if I'm from the UK because they think I'm in Queen's Land. Maybe I should specify?

I'm in the process of learning to cook with my woodburning stove. Last week I forgot about the sweet potato I had in the firebox (and dh added more wood), some of it ended up black as coal!

My grandma used a woodburner for drying her laundry. She had a stove in the basement and hung the clothes on lines stretched across the basement. She had enough room for 3 loads of laundry! I've got room only for one load. That makes every day laundry day.

Your location isn't confusing to me. Australia is on my travel wish list.

The house we're going to live in is a Queenslander with an enclosed verandah. [Hilariously similar to this picture, down to 'can't be bothered to match woods' http://www.abocadabro.net/woomanchoo...-1024x681.jpg] so I think it would be GREAT for drying clothes in, since all the rooms are basically attached without hallways.

I found a Sears and Roebuck Franklin stove, with a wide hearth on the front. The interesting thing was that it had a built-in pot hook, and a grill grate that turns out and adjusts up and down. I ain't brought it home yet, but it would compliment my old Mealmaster well.

Sounds like the wood is burning up without making a good bed of coals. If you had an air tight stove, you could shut it down (no air intake) and make charcoal. I'll bet a lot of your heat goes up the fireplace chimney.

Good luck.
While somewhat entertaining to watch, the Franklin isn't practical to use. The open front makes it more like a fireplace, no way to limit the heat from racing up the chimney. Some have bi-fold doors that seal the front a bit, but they still run through the wood.

Does yours have a chrome top piece?

In NC, you may not need the heat like I would, up north.

Quick translation on wood types Australian vs. American English:

Wattle = Acacia
Gum = Eucalyptus

We're in a very similar climate, with a similar range of temperautres -- I'm in Arizona, in a rural area way out in the desert south of Phoenix. I have LITERALLY seen people turn on the air conditioning so they can have a fire in their fireplace.

Acacia and eucalyptus both have a lot of sap in them. I would be worried about creosote build up in your chimney if you used them regularly. However, if you're only burning them a few days a year, it's probably not a big deal. It would just be something to keep an eye on. Both are VERY hot woods -- I suspect eucalyptus puts out close to the heat of oak. It will definitely give you a bed of coals. (Do have the chimney inspected before you ever light a fire in your new home. You never know what you'll find.)

Both woods will dull a chainsaw blade in a hurry, and acacia's no fun to split.

What you may find is that the stove is overkill. You'll have a choice between being chilly and having summer temperatures inside in winter. Nobody likes a 50 degree house ... or a 120 degree one! And wood stoves are a bit tricky to regulate, particularly if you're trying to cook on them.

If you want to use the stove for cooking, you might consider moving the stove outside into your yard -- you could have your wood burner as the center piece of a patio, maybe with a sink and table for preparing food, and a stone or cinder block barbeque pit as well. That way, it won't heat up your house in the summer but you can still use it for cooking year round. And in the cooler months, you can sit around the stove for warmth in the evening, and toast marshmellows and enjoy being outside. The chimney would lift the smoke away from your face, so it's nicer than sitting around a firepit.

I used to cook on an old Franklin stove; it had the double doors on it. It was made for a 10-inch stovepipe but was necked down to 8 inches, then again to 6 inches. The 6-inch piping helped keep heat in but had to be cleaned often!

Now, about the cooking on it. Add firebricks, or concrete bricks in a pinch. I made a little box inside of mine for the coal bed and this helped a lot with keeping coals in it for cooking with a dutch oven. I would also put beans on to cook all day on top of the stove in a cast iron pot.

Re: what I mentioned about an outdoor kitchen for cooking. Something like this might be more practical in a Queensland climate:

http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Gear-Out...d_sim_sbs_lg_4

-- Note, I wouldn't recommend ordering this one. (Not sure if they ship to Australia anyway.) The reviews all complain about cheap metal. But something similar, either home built or bought, might work nicely.

(If I built one like this, I'd make the top of the firebox flat so you could put a frying pan on it or a camp oven for baking bread. The ledge in front would be nice for baking things like potatoes or veggies wrapped in tin foil, or for cooking stews/chili/etc in a dutch oven. You'd just need to turn things on the ledge every so often for even cooking.)

Fill a 2 qt suace pan and put it on top of the stove while you're running it and see if you get it to a rapid boil. If it does, you can cook almost anything that you would stove top. You can get a stove top perculator and brew coffee, but you'll need a spacer to keep it off the direct heat. You'll need that spacer for cooking thinks at lower temps, also.

Wow, thank you for that specific advice! I appreciate it. I think the stove might be overkill. Such a shame. No airconditioning but a potbelly stove. In Australia. Just what I need.

Too bad, I'll put up with it so I can wood-dry me some apples!

here is a photo of a stove I had in the 1970s. Cheap China junk. They also made a tiny pot belly stove and a Franklin.

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Re: apples -- I've dried apples in Arizona, quite successfully, by making a wooden frame with wire shelves in it. I stapled old sheets to the frame to protect the fruit from dust, and set it out in the sun. I had dried apples in under ten minutes. (Okay, it took about a day, but this was in October, not June.)

My grandmother would dry apricots by putting tables in the yard, laying sheets on the tables, putting the apricot slices down, and then another sheet, and using clothespins to hold everything together so the sheets didn't blow away. (The birds would steal the apricot slices if you didn't cover them, LOL.)
I don't want to contemplate surviving 120 degree temperatures without air conditioning Actually, been there, done that, as a kid. We didn't have AC, we just had an evap cooler. I remember wrapping myself up in a wet sheet and sleeping on a linoleum floor because the floor was cooler than the mattress. I would not want to repeat the experience.