tiny house wood stove

The stove is in. It has been in for weeks and the chimney is up and the house is warm and well life is good. Having not written consistently for weeks it is now time to play a little catch up.
We installed the stove at the tiny house. It heats the place much better than it attempted to heat the old house. Possibly because this house is more its size though I choose to believe it heats better because it is more comfortable in a woodland home. I have note had the time to create the heat shield around the stove so for now the floor has some  tiles scooting around at the base of the stove and the walls are protected with metal roofing panels bent around the stove. It is not the most beautiful thing we have ever done but it is warm and when Spring arrives we will have time to tinker and arrange and aesthetically create the stove corner.

 side note: we used mountain stone to create a wide heavy base

side note: we will stucco the outside of the chimney come warmer weather. Probably about the time we side the house.

Fire wood

Warmth. This is a picture of future warmth. This is a pile of yet to be cut and split fire wood. The stack in the background is a hickory tree that feel in a storm mid Summer. The small upper branches we cut into excellent mid day logs. We have a small stove for the tiny house and as such we cut our firewood to short lengths. The foreground of the picture is littered with locus and black cherry logs. These logs were either too twisted to be made into planks or to thin in diameter to be milled. All of these trees were standing dead which has made them hard and dry, excellent to burn. 

Last Winter we urned a lot of poplar, as it was what we had from timbering dead trees. When I say a lot of poplar, I mean it takes a lot of poplar to be warm. The wood burns fast and does not put out a sizable amount of heat. This was news to me. I thought fire is hot wood burning is wood burning but it turns out variety matters. Hickory, locus, cherry, and oak are all good burning woods because they put out high levels of heat. Poplar not so much. The logs that I found most difficult to move due to weight and density. Those are the ones that I will be using for fire fuel from now on. High weight means either too wet to burn or heavy and full of burning potential.