Well, we’ve spoken a lot about the best way to get your lovely wood fire lit, be it open fire or in a stove, now just a few thoughts on how best to keep it tended in a stove.
The best advice we can give is to use kiln-dried logs (of course) or else seasoned logs and to give generously at first and then to taper off supply once your fire is firmly established. Nothing worse than the miserable sight of a mean little fire struggling to maintain life let alone heat up your room. You’ll be kept warm only by running back and forth nursing it along. No, the primary aim here is to be efficient and effective, that is, to get the maximum amount of heat from your stove with the minimum expense from your wood supply. So, in the early stage of your fire, once you’ve followed all the right tips for getting your fire going (see our other blogs), you want everything to heat up evenly: stove, firebricks, pipe above, till your fire is comfortably established. This will take up to an hour. This is the time to be generous, keep adding in more logs, as thriftiness at this stage will only serve to produce a weakling of a fire.
Once the fire is nicely established with logs now burning to hot red embers and radiating a delicious even heat there is little need to further disturb proceedings. You can relax, simply add in another log or two as the previous logs burn down to nothing. It’s a good time to add in your bigger logs – if everything is really hot then one of these could burn for well over an hour. Adjust your air vents as your fire proceeds: open at first to get things going and gradually closing off once it’s established, though personally I always leave ours a little open to produce flames. Happy burning! Martin