I have a large 9.6kw stove in the living room.
The top obviously gets hot when in use but nowhere near what the 5kw did in our previous house.
With the smaller stove if I put a log on top it would start smoulder after a while.
With this one, logs placed on top do not get so hot as to smoulder but do get warm so can be safely left there to dry out further.
Is it efficient to absorb some of the heat from the stove in order to further dry the logs for future use?
Drying logs around the stove - fine
Drying logs on top of the stove - not very clever
Drying logs on top of the stove – not very clever
Why? Like I posted they don't get hot enough to come close to ignition, even with the fire roaring.
Probably not as that heat could be heating the room. Can't you just bring in a load or 2 of logs the day before and house temps will deal with any surface moisture.
If they are properly seasoned logs, no further drying should be required. If they are not seasoned logs, they have no business being near the fire.
But how bloody big is your living room if it needs a 9.6kw fire?????
But how bloody big is your living room if it needs a 9.6kw fire?????
7 x 5.5m
no further drying should be required.
Surely the dryer the better?
Why? Like I posted they don’t get hot enough to come close to ignition, even with the fire roaring
Hmmm. As that intensely irritating phrase goes...." Until They Do"
When I were a lad we had a ( pretty rubbish by today's standards) stove in our living room which we were wont to stack logs by the side and on top of , which was fine...
One evening I was ( very luckily) in the living room watching telly when the logs on top caught fire. I rushed into the kitchen to get the fire extinguisher, informing my parents of the predicament on the way past. My dad ( who for a vastly intelligent person wasn't really) ran in the opposite direction.
When I got back in the living room with the extinguisher he grabbed it off me and put out the fire.
We were immensely lucky and I look back in amazement that anyone would have been so stupid as to put logs on top of a hot stove. I'm somewhat molified by your post to realise that actually my dad wasn't the only person stupid enough to deem this a good idea.
Out of interest, is your house detached?
My concern would be you might get distracted or forget about them and leave them there too long. They might not appear to get that hot in a short period, but they would eventually. I know someone who lost their house because their log basket next to their log burner got hot enough to catch fire. I used to keep damp logs next to ours to dry out, but stopped after that!
Edit: Beaten to it by the post above. Even if you think it isn't, it's a fire risk and best avoided imo.
If you are happy that it is safe to do so then go for it.
My main concern would be that if the logs are wet then that moisture will then be in your house. This means more heat energy is needed to heat the room and you may get problems with damp etc.
Personally I wouldn't do it for those reasons but I have space to store wood for three years in the dry before I use it so don't have this issue.
Big then! But still, it must be an older house/ not well insulated room then for that output to be needed.
It's very old, 200 years or so but is very well insulated after a massive refurb about 10 years ago by the previous owners.
It has a large open plan kitchen and diner attached as well.
We have wet under floor heating on in the kitchen in the winter, it's set at 19C. Uses very little oil.
Between the stove and the UF, the whole house is heated. It has be around -3 or -5C for any bedroom radiator to be switched on.
TBH, due to the size of the fireplace, anything smaller would look a bit silly.
Regarding the fire risk, even if the logs caught fire, there is nothing else combustible in the vicinity.
Mmm “nothing else combustible in the vicinity” …?
I would be worried about the logs prior to combustion too. I know you said they get nowhere near combustion temp on the stove top, but left long enough they will eventually be smouldering with CO/ smoke risk etc. Maybe focus the effort on improving the covered outdoor log storage?
Just pop them in your air fryer for 10 minutes.
I just checked - my air fryer doesn't have a 'dry logs' setting. Do I need to upgrade to a Ninja?
Your stove top should be getting up to 200c really otherwise it's sub-optimal. Is that not hot enough to get dry logs smouldering?
If it's not getting that hot it's too big a stove for the room. (We run a 5kW stove in a bigger room!)
Anything on top of the stove is going to effect the heat circulation.
If it’s not getting that hot it’s too big a stove for the room
Many modern defra approved stoves with indirect air flow/secondary gas burn don't actually get all that hot on top.
Which is a pisser as I did not realise this when I replaced my old charnwood
Bringing cold wet logs into the room will make the room colder and wetter. This means you will need to burn more fuel to maintain the temperature within the room. Your asthmatic neighbours will not thank you for further poisoning them.
However, all hot air that goes up the chimney is by definition waste heat. Therefore any heat that is consumed within the chimney is recovered. Therefore the only sensible solution is to build a rack for drying out logs within the chimney - a bit like those storage and dispenser plastic racks you used to get for beer cans in the fridge, but vertical. And more flammable.
No - uses heat to dry them, which increases moisture in the air , making the air harder to heat. Put them somewhere appropriate outside to dry and use them next winter
or just put them on the fire , pour a load of petrol on them and problem solved 🙂
There’s a reason that the stove has clearances to combustible materials……
A lot of our legislation comes about from disaster.
If the stove box isn't getting hot then maybe insulating it with an external layer of something with low thermal conductivity might improve matters. Wood is a pretty good insulator, maybe the OP is on the right lines 🙂
9.6 KW sounds very big , my 6.5 KW Morso heats a room 6x3 m how I want as in lots of dancing flames so never smouldering away and means I can leave the living room door open to warm up the rest of the house a bit
It's an inset so heats the brick walls tracing the flue, 500mm lengths of wood and can make pallet wood last for a while giving out loads of heat. Logs do get used but lots of free timber being in the building trade
If the logs contain too much moisture then it can cause a chemical reaction with the lining of some chimneys as well as not being ignited under optimal conditions. More steam than heat.
Where do they get hot then?
Front, back ,sides , flue and chimney breasts.
My old stove and my frontier will both boil a kettle on top no bother.
New main stove at 8kw the water will look at you all day. A best itll get tepidly warm even with the stove in full flight.
Room still gets plenty warm plenty quick.
Anything on top of the stove is going to effect the heat circulation.
I don't think it is, but I know what you were trying to say 😉
There is a lot wrong with this thread. I suggest the purchase and reading of Norwegian Wood.
Our new mendip Churchill is a bit like that, the top is effectively a convection, with an air gap to the body. So doesn’t get that hot. It gets hot enough to run the stove fan, but don’t think it gets it up to full speed.
purchase and reading of Norwegian Wood
Doesn't sound very environmentally friendly to be importing your wood from Norway 😉
Is this an April fool hoax type post?
If you are serious you need to find someone in your cycling club who works in the fire service and ask them your question.
TBH, my logs come in from the woodshed damp to the touch, mostly condensation/blown rain/snow. They dry out/warm up in a few minutes just left inside the front door. Moisture levels are good when they go in the fire though!
There's nothing wrong with the woodshed, just a lot of moisture about at the time of year i'm likely to use the fire...
Also, the top of the fire might not get hot enough to smoulder, but the bits of sawdust/splinters/bark that get knocked dropped down the back of the fire might (depending on what your layout is) and adding insulation to the top of the fire might make it a lot hotter...
If i have to get wood in and use it straight away, i just put a few logs under the fire, between the legs. The circulation of warm air drys them out pretty quickly. This then becomes the next load to go in the fire, so they're rarely there for more than an hour.
(6 or 7 kW stove heating a 8x5m room and enough spare heat to get the whole upper storey of the house warmed up (100 sqm, give or take).
Why are you using a (huge) wood stove when you've a centrally heated house, or have I missed something?
‘Energy efficient’? If the heat is otherwise superfluous then yes. Sensible? Not so much. See ‘conservation of energy’. And, as others have said, the moisture released from the logs will end up in the room. Not good.
My stove has secondary burn air inlet and baffle arrangements and it certainly gets hot enough to make a big bit of wood smoke. Once I found this out I stopped putting anything on the top.
I suspect you are either burning small bits of crap wood that flare quickly hence the dancing flames but lack density to provide a bed of red orange coals that are very hot.
Bringing cold wet logs into the room will make the room colder and wetter. This means you will need to burn more fuel to maintain the temperature within the room. Your asthmatic neighbours will not thank you for further poisoning them.
Whilst I agree with the general consensus that storing wood around the stove is silly.
One of the big benefits of a fire is the ventilation. You "waste" so much hot air up the chimney and draw so much air into the house (via vents and just general leaks) that the house is inherently dry. It's not like central heating where you're sat in stale air until someone opens a door/window.
It's why our Victorian and older housing stock with single skins of stone /brick is so rubbish in the modern day. It always relied on a fire in the middle of the house to provide a constant source of heat and airflow so that the moisture transferring through the walls evaporated quicker than it could accumulate and the house was dry.
Surely any heat going into the damp log is no longer heating the room? So no, not efficient.
Surely any heat going into the damp log is no longer heating the room? So no, not efficient.
It's an impossible question to answer (at least in practice) without doing some precise heat calculations on the room in question.
"Not efficient because some heat goes into the log instead of the room" is a vague way of saying it's never efficient... it's also not efficient to just leave them somewhere dry for the same reason... define "efficient"?
If the room is plenty warm enough with or without the logs on top then it makes no effective difference and is plenty efficient enough. Depends how fast you need them dried.
Here's some food for thought: if the logs absorb enough heat that the temperature of the room drops, but then catch fire from said heat and the room temp *ahem* increases dramatically, is that efficient or not? :p
to evaporate a kg of water takes 2200kJ energy ...
thats heat going into your room in the form of moisture.
YAY damp air. - now trying to condense on any cold surface.
Deleted....can't be bothered........this thread is a lost cause.....
Here’s some food for thought: if the logs absorb enough heat that the temperature of the room drops, but then catch fire from said heat and the room temp *ahem* increases dramatically, is that efficient or not? :p
Yes, but are the logs on a conveyor belt?
Deleted….can’t be bothered……..this thread is a lost cause…..
No explanation? Grade C level flounce at best.
just adding something substantial when a thread has this much [s]wiffle[/s] hot air probably requires a post citing academic papers etc.
FTFY 😉
