Funny the things we can get attached to. I too almost hate burning some of our logs. How about a shot of your wood burner?
I once helped moderate a web forum on wood burning and have had a more than passing interest in wood burning stoves and inserts. I prefer the catalytic types over the newer top mounted burn tube secondary combustion types. Guess I'm a solid fuel geek, or I once was, which is somewhat rare here in America. Too much time and energy (no pun intended ;o). Fascinating devices in their modern forms with extremely low small particle emissions.
It's also interesting to see people's wood storage, sometimes. I should post a shot of our creative endeavor, a holz hausen. It's a way of stacking wood in a round shape with a make-shift roof.
I like this shot of the wood , I am currently wintering in Arizona, U.S.A. , and this shot reminds me of the mountainous red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. really a nice shot!.....tony
@heidi yes, will upload a shot of the wood burner sometime. When we moved in this house, it was already there. It's my first experience with one and I love it. The fiddling about with logs and keeping it going without it dying out at night etc. It's a Yeoman woodburner.
Didn't know a Holz Hausen. Fantastic way of stacking wood! I saw some very beautiful images on the internet.
Mark made a fake log out of waste vegetable oil, shavings and cardboard. That burnt well too!
There are lots of helpful people there (and a few crackpots of course).
1. Don't forget to sweep your chimney. We sweep ours once a year, but we know our stove well and have learned to burn it very cleanly. Some people sweep more often if they burn more than us, but for most of us part-time burners, once a year is enough.
2. Generally speaking, you should burn only natural cord wood in a modern wood stove with secondary combustion. Burning vegetable oil can leave a sticky glycerin residue in the flue and chimney, maybe in the stove itself, although it gets pretty hot in there, which can result in accelerated creosote and tar accumulations, potentially reducing the margin of safety regarding chimney fires or leading to more frequent chimney cleaning.
I tried mixing used vegetable oil with my usual lamp oil in my starter pot that I use instead of kindling and was surprised at the sticky residue it left behind.
I looked up a Yeoman Bosca since I didn't know your exact model and glanced at a couple other models. It looks like they are use top-mounted secondary combustion baffles (sometimes called burn tubes) mounted inside at the top of the stove, but it's hard to tell from the info they provide online. If you had a catalytic type stove as we do, burning anything except wood could poison the catalyst. This is a consideration for us so we burn only cord wood.
If your stove has these burn tubes, burning homemade logs can potentially cause over firing. In extreme cases this can damage the stove. That's why manufactures usually say to use only cord wood since its burn rate and heat output is fairly predictable. There are some newer compressed logs and bricks that are ok to burn because they are from wood chips held together by the natural lignin of the wood. I like to burn these sometimes, but they are somewhat expensive.
I hope none of this sounds negative or fanatical. I love wood stoves and burning them, but safety is important with them and over the years on the web site listed above, I've heard and seen photos of some fairly incredible and in some cases horrific things. So I tend look at these things from a different angle than most.
I once helped moderate a web forum on wood burning and have had a more than passing interest in wood burning stoves and inserts. I prefer the catalytic types over the newer top mounted burn tube secondary combustion types. Guess I'm a solid fuel geek, or I once was, which is somewhat rare here in America. Too much time and energy (no pun intended ;o). Fascinating devices in their modern forms with extremely low small particle emissions.
It's also interesting to see people's wood storage, sometimes. I should post a shot of our creative endeavor, a holz hausen. It's a way of stacking wood in a round shape with a make-shift roof.
Didn't know a Holz Hausen. Fantastic way of stacking wood! I saw some very beautiful images on the internet.
Mark made a fake log out of waste vegetable oil, shavings and cardboard. That burnt well too!
We're still burning from this one: http://365project.org/heidi/365/2011-12-31
There are lots of things new wood burners should know for general safety. It would be difficult to list them all, but here are a couple I think are important. For more information you can visit this site's forums: http://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/
Here's the main page: http://www.hearth.com/
There are lots of helpful people there (and a few crackpots of course).
1. Don't forget to sweep your chimney. We sweep ours once a year, but we know our stove well and have learned to burn it very cleanly. Some people sweep more often if they burn more than us, but for most of us part-time burners, once a year is enough.
2. Generally speaking, you should burn only natural cord wood in a modern wood stove with secondary combustion. Burning vegetable oil can leave a sticky glycerin residue in the flue and chimney, maybe in the stove itself, although it gets pretty hot in there, which can result in accelerated creosote and tar accumulations, potentially reducing the margin of safety regarding chimney fires or leading to more frequent chimney cleaning.
I tried mixing used vegetable oil with my usual lamp oil in my starter pot that I use instead of kindling and was surprised at the sticky residue it left behind.
I looked up a Yeoman Bosca since I didn't know your exact model and glanced at a couple other models. It looks like they are use top-mounted secondary combustion baffles (sometimes called burn tubes) mounted inside at the top of the stove, but it's hard to tell from the info they provide online. If you had a catalytic type stove as we do, burning anything except wood could poison the catalyst. This is a consideration for us so we burn only cord wood.
If your stove has these burn tubes, burning homemade logs can potentially cause over firing. In extreme cases this can damage the stove. That's why manufactures usually say to use only cord wood since its burn rate and heat output is fairly predictable. There are some newer compressed logs and bricks that are ok to burn because they are from wood chips held together by the natural lignin of the wood. I like to burn these sometimes, but they are somewhat expensive.
I hope none of this sounds negative or fanatical. I love wood stoves and burning them, but safety is important with them and over the years on the web site listed above, I've heard and seen photos of some fairly incredible and in some cases horrific things. So I tend look at these things from a different angle than most.
Best wishes.