The rural life is idyllic and peaceful, until it goes to shit. Here’s the story:
I had a great day but was too busy to maintain a fire in the woodstove. No worries. I’m not entirely a caveman, I just let the furnace handle things while I took care of other matters. (I have more than one source of heat. Two is one and one is none!)
Then I ran to town to handle some errands. As the sun set, the temperature dropped like a rock. Driving home, the local radio station gave a weather report that said evening temps might go as low as -5. My truck’s external temp reading was -8 and dropping. The DJ, while introducing the next song, said it was -10. The weather report was fake news! Nothing infuriates me more than a weather report that contradicts the conditions you can see out the damn window.
Back at home the furnace was stoically burning through money (or the fossil fuel equivalent) and everyone was asleep. Grumbling something Dad-like and Curmudgeonly about not being made of money I set out to light the cold stove.
Woodstoves are pretty reliable once you get used to them. When I’m paying attention and the wood supply is high quality I’ll keep it going 24/7 for weeks at a time without too much fuss. I was foolish to get lazy and let it go out because starting from cold is a minor (not large) hassle.
Woodstoves aren’t like modern appliances. They’re finicky. You have to get used to babysitting them. It’s not their fault. They have more uncertainty in their world. Chunks of dead tree are not a calibrated condition like natural gas. As an analogy, most of us are used to modern, fuel injected dullmobiles with automatic transmission, anti-lock brakes, and (the horrors!) backup collision avoidance alarms. You can be damn near dead and drive a minivan. Old school vehicles with clutches and carburetors require the operator know the car’s idiosyncrasies. As you get used to it you run them with greater situational awareness. They’re perfectly adequate but not mindless.
So there I was, transitioning from modern life’s cocooned world to my trusty woodstove. I raked the ash into the ash pan and put down a wad of crumpled up newspaper. (Given the state of what was once called journalism, this is the only remaining legitimate value of a newspaper.) Then I added a couple sticks of fatwood. (A needless luxury, but one I recommend to all woodstove owners.) Then some kindling. Then some medium limbwood to fill the box.
(My stove likes to operate with a full firebox so I loaded it to the brim.)
Most of the time I don’t have to do all this. There’s usually a few warm embers in the ash and it’s a bit faster to build a fire. But it was definitely cold, dead, out. Reaching into the firebox I could actually feel cold air flowing down from the chimney into the firebox. I glanced at the outdoor thermometer. -12 and still dropping.
I opened all the stove’s air vents (it’s an “airtight” woodstove”) and lit a match.
The launch sequence is predictable and happens 99.999% of the time: The match lights the newspaper which first smokes a bit (filling the woodbox with smoke) and then bursts into flame; thus clearing the view through the window and blowing the smoke up the chimney. This is always a cheery scene and never fails to brighten my outlook. The paper burns hot and heats the kindling and small wood on top of it. The small wood smokes considerably, you can see smoke building and churning through the glass window, and then it too catches fire. The fire builds and within five to ten minutes it’s burning clean as a whistle and pretty as a postcard.
If you were so inclined you could watch my chimney during this process. You’d see a bunch of darkish smoke as the fire starts, and then, almost as if by magic, 80% of it dissipates, from then on the chimney will mostly have a wispy trail of cheery white smoke… such a small amount that even eco-weenies would be happy. (So long as they don’t notice the 10 minute start up phase.) I’ll add that in very cold conditions with no wind the warm exhaust of a good hot stove will meet the cold air and produce big poofy white clouds of condensation. I find them quite charming. Don’t get your EPA in a bundle, this is mostly condensation. The same thing you’d see from your own breath.
Instead of the predictable startup cycle (which has been the case every damn startup all winter) things went to hell! The cold outer air from the chimney sunk down into the firebox with enough volume to overpower the weak pulse of warm air from the fledgling fire. The smoke, since it couldn’t go up the chimney, poured out of the stove into MY HOUSE!
I went apeshit and started tinkering with vents and poking kindling to coax the fire to light faster.
There was no risk to the house. It was just annoying. But it was REALLY annoying. I had the choice of extinguishing the fire (which oddly will make even more smoke) or trying to build the fire hotter to create enough hot exhaust (a process which obviously will make even more smoke). I added heat to the situation by swearing at it.
After a panicky half hour shitfest, the situation was under control. The stove was burning clean and the draft was in the proper (up the chimney) direction. I was slumped in my chair, beer in hand and miserable.
My face was ruddy red from a blast of snow, my eyes were watering from smoke, and my hands were practically frostbit. I was on my last beer and had a headache.
I’d closed off the woodstove room from the rest of the house and opened a window. I had my auxiliary backup fan venting the room. It was maybe 50 degrees indoors and about -14 outdoors.
It had been a hectic half hour. My big heavy duty metal fan (which I use for “projects” like evacuating hot attics before I re-insulate or dusty barns when I’m shoveling) had fallen in battle. It had been blasting a zillion cubic feet per minute of smoky air out of my house when it fell off the window ledge. It landed in a snowdrift and when I reached to retrieve it it shifted and sunk into the fluff. It was like being attacked by a snowblower! A truckload of snow blasted into my face before the blades hit some ice and the fan self destructed with a clang. The spirit of the fan is now venting smoke in Valhalla.
Behind me, in the closed off part of the house I heard the furnace kick on; as if to say “give up Curmudgeon. Quit living quasi-selfreliantly in the hinterlands. Move to a condo in a city and put your balls back into the vice of debt. You’ll have natural gas magically arriving in a pipe and Chinese food delivered by Uber. Join the crowd, pay half your income in taxes and watch sportsball on cable until you die.” I gripped my beer in chilled hands and felt sorry for myself.
I nursed that one last beer in a 50 degree room for an hour; alternately baking half of my body while freezing the other half. The woodstove was burning with plenty of heat to keep the chimney exhaust going up (like God intended!) but it couldn’t heat a room with an open window on a -14 night. Meanwhile the fan and open window made the air crystal clear but I felt miserable.
Eventually, I called it good, closed up the windows, opened the doors to send the woodstove’s heat (but not smoke!) to the rest of the house, and collapsed in bed. What a cold, smoky, miserable night.