There’s a lot of work that goes into heating your home with wood, though it’s right proper tradeoff nowadays with the cost of heating with gas or electricity. (Point in fact, those gas bills at the House of Irony [St.Catharines Branch] were murderous, and that was five years ago.) Karissa’s dad Darrell has a saying, “Wood heats you three times, once cutting it down, twice moving it and three times when you finally light it.”
On top of procuring the fuel, a wood stove requires constant nurturing and prodding, you’ve got to be dedicated to the flames. It especially interesting, then, to hear about a type of stove popular in Eastern Europe, the Masonry Heater, which has a number of characteristics that, at first glace, seem like heaven sent. To understand how it works needs a graphic, this one from russianstove.com:
The heat from the fire has to take a long way through the flues of the russian stove before it gets to the chimney, which give the surrounding dense bricks to absorb the heat. And because brick takes an awfully long time to cool down, the stove radiates a constant warmth, and only requires refueling twice a day to maintain, which is much better than the perpetual checking and usual hot/cold of a North American stove.
We were totally ready to throw down the gauntlet and look up some detailed plans until I read this total buzzkill:
For one thing, you don’t want a masonry heater if you are into instant gratification the way most of us in North America are. It takes hours for a masonry heater to start making heat, which might be fine in the damp but steady maritime climate of Northern Europe, but not so good in North America where we go through wild temperature swings…unlike heating with a regular stove in which rekindling involves raking charcoal and loading more wood, every fire in a masonry heater has to be started from scratch, which is fine as long as you are keen to light a fire once or twice a day.
Having a stove that takes hours to heat up would be a real drawback with the increasingly crazy weather of Southern Ontario, where it could be snowing one day and melting the next. A stove needs to be able to react quickly. More importantly, building a masony heater is not recommended by amateurs, and requires someone especially trained, which drives the cost up significantly.
And there’s another wild scheme killed by the Internet.
Who ever thought that the most metrosexual among us would eventually become Grizzly Adams of the new millennium?
Let me assure you, no one’s more surprised than me.