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  • From: "Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Wood Cookstove
  • Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:42:27 -0800

O.K., James, maybe others???, did they perhaps make the stoves different for the West Coast vs. East Coast? Cause the fireboxes on Gramma Dorothy's and others I've used aren't that small and they do bank but we've never had the coal out here to fire them. We've always used wood and a lot of it is soft wood.

Lynda
----- Original Message ----- From: <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com>

This is a factor with old cookstoves. The fireboxes are small and if you use
wood as fuel, it you have to bank the contents of the tiny firebox well and
use very hard wood to keep coals overnight. It can be done, but it doesn't put
out any heat at all in the process.

Many (or most) of those stoves were designed to use coal as a fuel, which
easily keeps its heat overnight. But it also wears out the stove (grates,
shaker, vents, water jacket, etc) with its much hotter heat. It's also an expense
and dirty.

Many modern stoves have much larger and airtight fireboxes. It's a
trade-off. The drafty firebox of an old stove will burn literally anything for fuel:
stalks, haulms, nut shells, roots, branches,. sappy wood, resinous pine, etc.
and because of unlimited oxygen to the fire, it burns so completely that there
is almost no residue in the flue. The big airtight boxes of modern
cookstoves will keep heat longer and heat more of the house, but you have to use the
best of the best of the best wood to achieve those goals or else you will
percipitate all manner of things on the inside of the flue (and the stove).

As with a great number of other things, the solution we found to resolving
the disadvantages is to use the cookstove as it is, and then if we need more
heat, there is a separate stove (a Franklin stove) to add more heat and keep a
fire overnight. We paid nothing for either stove, but I notice the equivalent
of both for sale all the time for a couple hundred dollars. New cookstoves of
modern design are on the order of $2000 to $7000 or so.

If I had no cookstove, I'd still consider a new one. Sounds like a very good
use of (the first) stimulus check to me. But having used an old one, I can
say that most of the disadvantages are minor, if not trifles.

But having a wood buring cookstove of any type is a huge advantage to the
homestead. Along with our crops of hard corn and shell beans which require
absolutely no input from outside to grow (not for seed, fertilizer, or power) and
the abilty to cook them from random wood from the forest, we have a line drawn
if ever we need it .... we could lock the front gate and survive until better
times.

It's beginning to look like that's going to come in handy.
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