Fire wood and wood stoves

Summer before last I got a new, Mansfield Soapstone woodstove. I just love it. All my research said that it would be more efficient, not as hot on the outside as a metal stove, but hold the heat longer, giving a nice, gentle heat over a longer period of time. I didn't get it from the place with the link, I got it from a local distributor, but they don't do much over the internet, so that link has more information if you're interested.

We have found that with this stove we can keep it at a low burn even when it is up to 50 F without it being so hot we're driven out of the house. That was not possible with our cast iron woodstove. It would run us out of the house with the heat if the outside temperature was over40 or 45!

We have been running this stove almost continuously since cold weather came last fall. It has been our primary source of heat in the home during that time. Needless to say, this means we must have wood to feed it. Some of the wood we have used this year has been from the many trees that were blown down during the big storms. Some from Hurricaine Ike, some from the damage after a huge snow/ice storm followed a week later by thawing and then very high winds again. Lots of cutting and splitting of wood around here, mainly done by my husband, with a little help by my younger son and myself.

Sunday afternoon I went out in the cold, windy yet sunny day and restacked and recovered part of the woodpile. As we have been bringing wood into the house to burn the wood pile has gone down of course. To get the wood that was actually on the ground back up into stacks I reorganize the pile every now and again. We have a couple of sections in the pile that we are not using to burn since they are too green (from Ike), but as we remove the dry, seasoned wood I want to get the pile moved around so that everything that is getting seasoned is under cover so it will finish drying. Except for the new stuff, of course, as that will need some more time to season before it's ready for stacking and final drying.

It is a peaceful, rewarding, activity, to work on the wood pile, whether splitting or restacking.