upside down fire building for wood heat.

[Organics North]

I tried it a few times the upside down thing.. It works... But old habits are hard to break, and I never have a shortage of dry scraps from the shop for starting fires... Soooo I am going back to the "old way". I start the fire on one side of the box and have bigger pieces on the other side, let the small fire burn into the bigger wood... Sort of like the upside down thing but not quite...

Happy wood heating everyone!

(Yesterday the frost did not leave shaded areas..Our permafrost is starting)..

Katy, how many cords do you burn a year?..

We burn maybe 12 or so firewood cords a year (1 row 4x8 or 4 full cords 4x4x8) in our small well insulated house with our high efficiency Hearthstone Mansfield Soapstone stove. We heat 100% with wood, only on the rare occasion that we leave home overnight for a holiday or something does the furnace kick in.
ON

 

[Katy]

Quote:
I have no idea how many cords we burn!! We cut it all ourselves from our land...usually a year or two ahead so we really don't keep track. We always have a giant stack out there.....never have figured out how much it is tho. We're 100% wood too. The cattle are home all winter so we never are even gone overnight. When the kids were small we'd once in a while on a very cold morning run the furnace thru one cycle just to take the chill off. Every year we say we should at least turn it on to make sure it still works but then we never do.

 

[redhen]

Good info..thanks!

 

[DuckLady]

Ok, Skeptical Me went to light the fire yesterday morning, just like you said.

I figured if it didn't work, I would just go whining to my husband when the fire didn't start (as usual) and he would fix it and get it going (as usual) while shaking his head and rolling his eyes at me at my fire starting ineptitude (as usual).

It WORKED!

What a GREAT method!!

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Orchid]

We have an outdoor wood boiler that is lit sometime in October and we let it go out sometime in April usually. I could tell my hubby to try this the one time a year he lights it I suppose.

We cut our own wood off our 20 acres and my parents' 160 acres and DH splits it all by hand. My hero.

I would miss and break my leg first try, guaranteed.

 

[Moabite]

Quote:
It feels good to help someone out, and thanks for fixing my link earlier

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

I'm not convinced this will be better than my current system, but I'll do a controlled experiment and report back.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Ok, tonight I built a fire with the exact same materials and quantity that I usually use, but now using the "upside down" configuration. This will allow me to do apples to apples comparison.

Here is the order (from bottom up):

Two large splits
Two medium sized, super old / dry 4x4 lumber pieces
A bunch of old redwood 1 x 12 pieces split to about 1x2
A bunch of the same, but split about 1/2 x 2
Some corrugated cardboard
Misc. newspaper etc.

I lit the fire about 10 minutes ago and it is about down to the two 4x4's and seems to be doing great! I'm

but also

If this works, I'll start tweaking things a bit see if I can get by with less kindling, cardboard, paper, etc.

Here's a picture of the setup:

 

[DuckLady]

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Ok, I'm a total convert!!!

http://www.nifty-stuff.com/upside-down-top-down-fire.php