I brought the smoke monster back to life over the weekend.

I’ve written before about my mixed feelings over this device.  On one level, it simply feels wrong to heat a New Hampshire house with any fuel but wood, and this is my wood-burning apparatus, so I make fires in it.  By its nature, it’s hard to start up and shut down, so I tend to run it around the clock from some time in the late fall until it starts to warm up in the spring.  During the earlier autumn and later spring, I use my oil boiler to keep the chill off, but its fuel consumption is absolutely proportional to the temperature in the house, so I cleave toward self-destructively frugality.  But since the wood boiler is always going, it’s easier to justify keeping my house tolerably warm — the incremental difference in wood consumed between a thermostat setting of 58º and 64º seems negligible, so I don’t shiver inside when it’s running.

The flip sides of the warm house and the lovely smell of burning wood are many.  My smoke monster is barely more sophisticated than a trash fire in an oil drum, so its combustion efficiency (how much of the wood gets burned completely) and thermal efficiency (how much of the heat from burning wood ends up in my house) are both shockingly low.  The net result is that I fill my little valley with smoke if the air is still, and I burn an outrageous amount of wood each winter.  I was cutting wood just ahead of burning it last year, so I’m not really sure how much I went through, but I’ve heard that the previous owners burned 26 cords a year.  And thus the other down side:   I wake up and fall asleep every day of the year thinking that I should be cutting, splitting, and stacking more firewood.  I’m ahead of last year, but I probably only have about 6 weeks’ supply put up so far.

While I miss having a glowing wood stove in my living room, I’ve really come to appreciate having an outdoor boiler.  There’s something very comforting about knowing that the fire is several hundred feet outside my house.  And the rhythm of maintaining the fire fits well will the rhythm of dogs — I’m going out with them first thing in the morning and last thing at night anyway, so it’s no great bother adding wood to the fire.  If I weren’t so involved in getting a farm up and running, I’d be saving my pennies for one of the fancy new high-efficiency outdoor boilers.  I’d make less smoke and cut less firewood, but it’ll have to wait at least a while longer.  In the meantime, apologies to the air of the Otter Brook Valley.