It took me two whole days, but I finally figured out how to work our new house’s old-timey stove.
It’s the first time I’ve fired it since we bought the house this summer. This thing is a lot more complicated than it seems. It has a main damper and a bypass damper, a separate air intake and it hadn’t been fired up for 6 months so the flue was full of cold air and humidity.
But crucially, it sits inside a northern house that’s so well insulated it’s airtight enough for the fire to pull a vacuum inside the house, snuff itself out and create enough of a backdraft to smoke up the entire house in seconds when all the windows are closed.
It took me a while to figure out how to adjust the dampers, stop the air extractor and crack a window open when I add a fresh log to avoid turning the whole family into smoked meat 🙂 But now the flue is warm, the draft is going good and the house is sitting at a balmy 82 degrees while it’s freezing outside.
Nice!
Wood fires generally do not produce co. Co comes from coal and natural gas and propane. I support redundancy of having a co detector, but not for your reasons.
Edit: Thanks for the correction. I added the word “generally”. The primary reason for me saying that is that there were basically no deaths from CO while Korea had wood as their heat source then when coal was introduced, they suddenly had a huge spike in CO related deaths, and this warning came while I was doing some bushcrafting research for making charcoal. I thought it applied generally to all heating wood fires that are not first turned to charcoal.
This is incorrect. Anything that produces CO2 when burned, will instead produce CO when not provided with enough O, including wood.
People regularly die from CO poisoning from smouldering wood fires.
Thanks for the correction. I updated my post.
This is an amazing post. Why would chemistry care where the carbon you are burning is coming from? Why would fossil sources be bad, but renewables not? I am actually interested in your rationale.
First, i had enough pushback to get me to update the original post. I needed to say “generally doesn’t make CO”. This is based on wood definitely can emit CO when burning “charcoal” e.g. wood without enough O2 or fresh wood.
Regarding my rationale, I thought it had to do with the spacing or timing of the burn through each grain/fibre. Wood contains water/sap and would therefore have catalysts or contaminants that would change CO into something that would be easier to detect and remove (e.g. irritating ash) than any of the fossil fuels.
I would expect the higher temperature of a coal fire to be conducive to co formation. Maybe wood produces more of a draft. Anecdotally there actually does seem to be a perceived difference, but I can’t find a reputable source. I am not sure if an oxygen starved organic fire would, for example, produce more fancy carbon and hydrogen containing compounds as opposed to CO which is the only compound produced by a starved coal fire. Those carbohydrogens would probably have a strong aroma preventing co from sneaking up on you.
Hence I would conclude that you are actually right that there is a much greater risk from burning pure carbon. The kind of coal you are using may have a strong impact on this, but I would expect you to use coal whose impurities have been removed.