Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Masonry Heater is up and running

Good to have you back, JP. I should've recognized that as a "Grouchoism."

>>When I returned to finally dive into that tasty beef enchillada dinner, It was gone! The dish was licked totally clean by none other than our trusty spaniel "Scooby".

Have some sympathy for the poor dog. She probably burned her mouth eating "the food you left for her"

I don't know about her mouth, but I do know that it didn't agree with her GI tract! What a mess...

Yeah, apparently there was more than a bit of "excess flatulence" after Kingston sucked up the bowl of sourdough starter ;(


Heater update -- still running tiny little fires while the masonry curing completes, but right now it's 37F outside and 67F inside, running two small fires a day. Once the masonry is dried out I can go back to running one larger fire a day.

A typical fire right now is 4 typical pieces of firewood, albeit 12" long rather than the more common 16", with each piece split in two, plus a bit of newspaper and kindling, so I'm using about 8 pieces of firewood a day to heat the house.

The measured temperature around the corner from the heater was 72 degrees with the furnace fan turned off and just the ceiling fan going, but I found some of the most distant rooms and the basement were getting chilly. When I ran the furnace fan for a while the measured temperature dropped to 68, ie that was the average temperature of the house once the variations were evened out.

Once everything is dried out and operating normally the heater will be able to take maybe 4-5 times as much wood as I am burning now in a single firing, so I'm still hopeful that I should be able to heat the house with one fire a day for most of the winter.

>>Or, would you have to walk around in your boxers for three days because the place is too hot?

Well, it happened. I'm running a series of ever-larger "curing fires" to dry out the heater core and stonework. I'm at the point where the curing protocal calls for 4 small fires a day with some cooling off time in between. The cooling off is for the inner surface of the flame channels, but the masonry mass keeps storing up the heat and getting a bit hotter with each fire -- the result is like running a fairly large fire each day.

As a result, it's too damn hot in the house. I have a bunch of windows open (it's high 40s outside) trying to get down to a liveable temperature inside.

Sounds as though the Masonry Heater is getting the job done John, as hot as it may be now with 40 degree weather think about how effective that baby is going to be whenever things really start to cool down outside ... which, by the way in my neck of the woods 40 degrees is dead middle of the winter freezing.

Now if we could somehow get a 'Masonry Air Conditioner' to help alleviate some of our cooling cost!

So... I didn't get a chance to post during the coldest part of February, and I wasn't around the house much in the evenings anyways, but we did get a few weeks where the outside temperature was around -15F (say -22C) at night.

When I ran two medium sized fires a day the outside of the heater stayed a lot warmer and seemed to keep the house around 60F when the outside temp was -15. I think if I had been around enough to split more firewood and get 40-50 pounds of wood in each fire (vs. the 25-30 pounds I normally burn) it *probably* would have kept the house comfortable on two fires a day.

It's warming up now so I guess I won't know for sure until next winter.