Wood chopping and woodburning stoves
Winter is some way off yet, we hope, but there are a few things to be done in advance. The main job to do before it gets cold is to make sure we have a big stock of wood to burn, since it’s the cheapest most environmentally way to heat a house, and also it looks groovy to have a fire burning.
Usually I leave it until November to sort out the wood, typically when it is already raining and blowing a gale, but last week we had a cold day, and when Mrs B asked for the fire to be lit I started to panic and thought I’d make a start on the woodpile.
We don’t have open fires – they are inefficient and hard work. Instead, like almost everyone we know around here, we have woodburning stoves (one in each property). Efficient and beautiful, they extract about 90% of the maximum possible heat from the burning wood, and get hot enough to burn the smoke as well – so there is very little pollution.
These woodstoves can also burn without intervention for about 12 hours, unlike a real fire which you have to poke and prod every 20 minutes to be sure you are sending plenty of heat straight up the chimney. But woodstoves do get through a lot of wood.
This year we haven’t bought any wood for burning, but plan to use up the wood we already have, along with a few trees we have lying around. So this means I need to come up with about five cubic metres of timber, which is a lot. So I’ve been busy cutting and chopping.
This is a job that every single person in south-west France is familiar with, and not a single person in south-east England, where we used to live. If you are planning to move to rural France I recommend you start practicing your wood-chopping. I doubt that a round of golf is adequate preparation.
Someone came around to show me how to sharpen my chainsaw properly, so that is now whooshing through great logs like the proverbial knife through butter, but that still leaves the problem of splitting the logs – since a 50cm lump of tree trunk is too big to go directly in the woodstove, it needs to be split lengthways.
This involves quite a lot of hard work – work which tapping on my keyboard all day has hardly prepared me for – and is mostly done with a tool that is a type of cross between an axe and a sledgehammer – heavy, and pointed but not sharp. It also involves a lot of dangerous near-misses, as I am rather un-coordinated and often miss the log altogether and hit my foot instead.
The neighbours are too polite to actually stand there laughing at my efforts, so they presumably amuse each other with tales of my feebleness later on in the bar, while I am lying comatose in bed and Mrs B is calling me a big baby and refusing to rub soothing ointments onto my aching muscles.
This sounds oh so familiar! For my husband though rather than me of course!
The first year here, he too took ‘lessons’ from a neighbour and sharpened the chainsaw himself.
It was not until the next year that he found out just how cheap it is to get it done down the road at Bricomarché!
It ruined his winter…..
Jacqui
Oh I know, 8 euros last time I saw (and a couple of files to do it myself will probably cost 20 euros), but it’s the principle – if the locals are doing their own then I feel as if I should as well. Or at least, I should give the impression that I am interested!
Although I don’t have the same principle when it comes to mending cars or much else.
But thinking about it I could easily take it to a store a few kilometres away where no-one will recognise me and get it done there in secret…
globus lives in the north and has a wood burner which spews smoke into the room each time he fills it. do all stoves do that?
Err no!
We have three stoves (one in our own barn conversion and others in our two gites) and they all manage not to fill the room with smoke.
Perhaps you have a faulty seal?
Or if its only when you open the door perhaps the wood isn’t dry enough so the stove isn’t getting hot enough?
Globus the trick is to prepare the fire then shut the door.
That normally works.
No seriously what I mean is prepare the wood and tinder then shut the door for about 30 mins. This means that the backdraft which you had created when laying out your wood and paper isn’t still pouring down the chimney into your room. By leaving it for 30 mins, you allow the chimney flow to head back up.
The rough science behind this is that the heavy cold air fell out of your chimney and created a form of convection. This gets worse and worse the longer you leave the door open. Even after you start the fire, the cold air still pushes the fire backwards generally blowing out all but the most determined paper fire and pushing the smoke backwards down the air inlets. There is nothing wrong with your woodburner, and the only solution is to open some windows (which you probably want to do anyway) and stabalise the temperature, also by stuffing large amounts of crinkled up newspaper you can get the fire burning fast and force the air to change direction. When lighting the fire in some cold places, I have seen lots of people just light a whole wood burner stuffed with nothing but balls of paper, Full to the brim so that you can hardly close the door. This heats the chimney and makes lighting the rest of the fire much easier.