Today, Monday 1/6/2025, is a snow day.
From the sound of it, at 7:45 AM, we’re getting wintry mix here in Vienna.
It’s our favorite form of winter precipitation.
Can you keep yourself warm by burning sticks in your wood stove?
Yes. Give me enough sticks, and I will stay warm indefinitely. Proven.
But no, I’m never going to do this again.
Above left, note wheelbarrow full of (dry) sticks. I started this winter with several such, along with a few trash cans and plastic totes full of similar material. That, courtesy of taking down a couple of small trees in my yard this past summer.
Above right, is the modern wood stove insert, with blazing fire made out of sticks. Sticks, obviously, broken small enough to fit into the firebox.
Above, between, are the almost-empty firewood racks. So there’s no doubt that it’s the sticks I’m burning. And note the two fire extinguishers. Because nothing says fun-at-home like a blazing fire right next to a big, loose pile of kindling.
I have no problem bringing my wood stove (insert) up to a good operating temperature by burning loads of sticks, instead of nice chunks of firewood. In fact, dry sticks burn too well, so some of the work is keeping the fire down to a reasonable size. No problem keeping it that hot for hours, with the circulating fan pumping hot air out into the room.
It’s just a real pain in the butt to maintain that fire. Not quite a full-time job, but hardly a relaxing fire. I have to toss in another handful of sticks every 15 minutes or so. And it’s fiddly, with a handful of sticks being a less stable fuel source than a solid chunk of firewood. Keeping a fire going with nothing but sticks is nothing at all like putting a couple of logs in the firebox once an hour.
I’m going to burn through the rest of my stock of sticks in the next couple of nights. Then I’m never going do to this again. This, being, burn up a large amount of small branches in my wood stove. Not worth the effort, the indoor air pollution, and so on.
But, if I had to stay warm, and had no firewood, it’s good to know that a wheelbarrow of sticks will get me two, maybe three, hours of usable fire. Burning it an open handful — call it a 5-inch bundle — at a time.
Conclusion
My wife and I were both reminded of that part of Little House on the Prairie, The Long Winter, where the Ingalls family stays alive by constantly feeding sticks of twisted straw into their wood stove.
I absolutely can produce a fine quantity of heat by feeding a steady stream of bundles of sticks to a modern (air-tight) wood stove.
Or, I could just turn up the heat pumps.
In any case, as a way to get rid of nuisance wood, to some good purpose, this is fine. Or, if it were an emergency, likewise fine.
But doing this on purpose, now that I’ve done it once? Nah. Too much work, too much indoor air pollution.
I’ve thought about buying in more firewood, but for a lot of reasons, I’ve decided not to use my wood stove as a serious source of heat any more. Not here in the ‘burbs of DC.
Maybe it was the Canadian forest fire smoke of (now) two summers ago, maybe it’s that I have a much-reduced need to “balance” heating and cooling from my ground-source heat pumps.
I will still burn wood occasionally, I guess. And it’s nice to have as an ultimate back-up heat source. But I’m no longer going to do what I used to do, which is burn through a couple of cords of wood over a winter.
But now I know I can keep my house from freezing, by burning sticks in my wood stove.
Yay? I hope I never need to know that, practically speaking.
