Fire Musings

This week I've tried an alternative to loading up the fire before hitting the sack, now the fire is given a bowl of coal and a couple of pallet chunks about an hour before bedtime, that way the temperature has peaked and is on a gradual decline by bedtime. The upside is that the 3am sweatfest whereby the front door has to be opened to let the heat out is now over. The downside is that the temperature inside the yurt drops to about 6c by the morning. Now that sounds a bit on the chilly side, but it's not so cold as to give you a numb nose or cause any obvious discomfort, it's just a bit fresh and to be honest, once the duvet releases it's python-like hold, you're pretty much wide awake in .001 seconds. Although the compressed woodchip logs performed very well indeed, they still proved to be a little on the pricey side, so for now the yurt is heated using hardwood offcuts from a local beehive maker, much cheaper and it's nice to support people who care for bees, bees are nice.

The butane tank was swapped for propane this weekend, butane being the poor winter performer and propane being good for temperatures down to -30 or something. This means that the menu at cafe yurt has now grown from things that can be roasted (which was starting to get a bit tedious), into things that can be boiled like pasta, noodles, peas, tea, coffee and so on. In addition to that, it serves as a handy source of instant heat until the woodburner is warmed up nicely.

As a footnote to anyone planning on using a yurt at weekends though winter, bring your own water from home! mine was frozen solid from a week of sub-zero temperatures, there's a bodywarmer over the container now, but whether it can fend off the expected -6c this week is to be confirmed. Unfortunately it's now too late to deepen the cool box hole outside to below the frost line, it's frozen solid, meh.

Compressed Wood Blocks Conclusion

In glorious iPhoneColour!

I've Got the Flue

Saturday was flue extension day, various bits were sawn off new spiral duct, the crown cover was untied and the flue was disconnected from the fire and with a push-tilt, cleared the crown and flopped onto the roof of the (dust sheeted) yurt. The filth that was sitting in the flue was spectacular, oily black soot, just longing to find a pristine white shirt or something really expensive to soil. All in there must have been a good ice cream container full. So, long story short everything was stuck together with rivets and hoisted back into position, whereupon it was discovered to have developed a bizarre ability to look crooked from every angle. No matter.

The effect of the flue extension on the woodburner has been a bit odd, getting a fire going is a little harder than previously, and to stop it going into full on furnace mode, the flue damper needs closing off. In addition to this, the nasty stick goo that was previously lining the inside of the flue is now melting and seeping between the joins on the spiral. It's not all bad though, now that the damper can be closed without smoke leaking from every gap in the fire, the fuel inside is burnt more slowly and completely, logs are lasting twice as long.

Conclusion: There is an optimum length for flues, a meeting point between maximum draw and minimum restriction. Obviously I need to know what it is!!!

Yurtcon.

Ok so not strictly speaking, but I was getting a bit sick of waking up at 2am in order to open the door to let heat out of the yurt in order to breathe again, sooooo, being a bit of a Maplins nerd, I popped in and purchased a thermostat kit and a silent PC fan, and the result is what you see in the video. The idea is that when it gets above a pre-set temperature, the fan (which will be mounted in the perspex window to one side of the door) kicks in and introduces cool air into the yurt. Once it gets comfortably cool again, the fan cuts out, leaving the yurt at a nice temperature again. Clever eh?

Might make these as kits if there are any other yurt dwellers interested.

-6c

That's how cold it was Saturday night, well more to the point it was -6c OUTSIDE, inside it was anywhere between 20c and 37c. The lack of a proper length flue is making the loading of the woodburner a bit of a chore, every time the door is opened, smoke pours into the yurt and I have to dump the wood or coal into it and slam the door shut. Usually this is more inconvenient than unpleasant, but with the newly purchased cheapo house coal, the smoke is actually rather nasty. Needless to say, until the flue is extended and has a better draw on it, the house coal will stay in it's bag. The Taybrite smokes much less, well it is classified as smokeless so hardly surprising. The flue extension will be taking primo, number 1 precedence over everything next weekend, it's the one thing that is proving to be rather pesky and unpleasant.

Sunday morning was rather special, we had about 4 inches of snow outside :o)

Problem is that the snow now makes the canvas cover look particularly grubby because of the soot and smoke that the too short flue has deposited on the roof. Look and learn kiddies, if you have a yurt, get a good long flue on it. A standard canvas cleaner should get most of the grot off, that will be done (assuming temperatures go above freezing) once the flue is sorted, no point doing it before.

Chestnut Catastrophe.

It's the chestnut season n'est pas? so I thought it would be nice to buy a bag from the local chestnut shop and try them in the woodburner oven. So far so good. In they go while I toddle off and help a friend with some screeding. Half an hour later the oven looks like a chestnut apocalypse, not a single chestnut survived, they looked like each one had been seeded by Alien and exploded violently before spraying the inside of the oven with it's mushy guts. The smoke filled the yurt from crown to floor and didn't smell very nice at all. Still, all it took was a good clean out of the oven, a quick hoover and a fistful of joss sticks and it was acceptable, if a not entirely pristinely fragranced place to be.

Maybe chestnuts are roasted within the confines of iron roasters for a reason, maybe for the same reason that popcorn is best cooked in a pan with a lid and not thrown into a chip pan full of boiling oil (don't ask).

Stove Fuels.

For anyone who may be interested, here are my thoughts on the three types of heating fuel I'm using at the moment.

1) Old pallets.
Two large pallet sized boxes of these (chopped up into handy sized bits) cost me £30 locally and have proven to be essential for getting things started on a Friday night when it's freezing cold. They have the advantage of lighting up very easily and providing a shedload of heat in very little time. Unfortunately that is also their weakness, their fast and very hot burn makes them unsuitable for use through the day or night, but I wouldn't be without a big pile of them next to the fire.

2) "Seasoned" logs.
Note "Seasoned" logs, mainly because different people have different opinions on whether a log is ready for burning or not. Three large builders bags of big chunky "seasoned" logs were purchased locally for £140. In retrospect this may have been a little steep, mostly this was due to me not knowing the difference between a one tonne builders bag full of logs, and one tonne of logs. Many logs are delivered in those big cubic hessian bags that did indeed hold one tonne of SAND at some point, this does not mean that "tonne bags" of logs weigh one tonne. My mistake.
It transpired that despite there not being the classic signs of a well seasoned log, light weight, cracks radiating from the centre etc, that they do burn rather well, the split logs being fine to burn on their own once the coal has faded, and the larger logs do perfectly well when combined with split logs or on a bed of coal. They do need more air than coal so the bottom vent is cracked open a tad to help them along. One good thing is that the logs and pallets leave very little in the way of ash, the combustion is almost total.

3) Coal.
The least environmentally sound of all three fuels is annoyingly, the one that is most coveted, predominantly because it's the coal that keeps me from freezing solid through the night and is responsible for keeping things going till morning. I don't feel overly guilty about it's use though, a bag of Taybrite will last three weekends, possibly more if logs are used through the day and for cooking. Down side is that even though it lights quite easily, it takes a fair while to release it's glowy goodness so it's off the list of quick hit fuels. Maybe the cheaper house coal in little nuggets will prove a little more willing to heat up faster. As the owner of the Tyrell Corporation said, "The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long Roy..." so like the logs and pallets, the coal has an essential part to play in the well regulated heating of my yurt. Coal does tend to leave rather a lot of ash though, can't be helped and I suspect it's the ash covering that keeps the little beauties glowing till morning, and I can't complain about that.

I'll be giving compressed waste wood briquettes a go in the near future, but reports suggest a fast burn with high heat output, not really something suited to the situation. Time will tell.