Fairbanks snowmageddon

[Richard Flanders]

Yep, that's really all we have besides poplar/aspen, which is like burning balsa wood. The lesser BTU woods are ok in spring and fall though when you only need a smallish fire in the morning, but the aspen generates 2x the ash that birch or spruce makes, which is a royal PITA. There's some tamarack around here but very little. Spruce is not to be discounted if you can find trees that are a bit stunted and have zillions of branches and lots of sap, especially near the butt area. Put a 10"dia round into the stove on a bed of split spruce or birch and they will burn like coal and last 30hrs and sometimes more in the stove. I can actually make my old Riteway stove burn 4 days unattended if I load it properly, using a bed of coals then split birch topped with a 10" birch round with small split pcs packed in around it. I've been burning this model of Riteway stove for 40yrs now(I'm on my second one and have a spare on my front deck that just needs door seals)so have it pretty well figured out. It's an incredible stove for something that was built in the 60's and 70's. My firebox runs at 3x the temperature of the chimney which means I'm only losing 25% of my heat up the chimney, and without a catalytic converter. You have to pay at least $4K - $5K for a modern stove to get performance anywhere near that, and especially for one that will burn more than 6-8hrs on a load. This old Riteway will take 24" wood(26" at door level) and will take up to 10-1/2" rounds through the door. The bigger mod 37, which is what I have on the deck, is about 6" taller than mine and has a fire bricked lining and rotating grates and is made to burn coal or wood and, if you can find one, they made a plenum with a fan that will drop over the whole stove and allow you to install standard house heating ducting, turning it into a forced air furnace. They even made two styles of stainless steel "cans" that could be installed inside the firebox after drilling two 1/1/4" holes for the feed pipes so you could generate self-circulating hot water in a tank beside the stove. I'll spare you the stories on the two systems I've set up like that over the past 45 years. Both involved gold rush-era cast iron wood cook stoves and worked incredibly well. Both systems produced more hot water than we could use.