Top-Down Fires for Heating

If you use a wood stove to keep your family warm in the winter – particularly if you have a small wood stove with a low ceiling – you may well have gotten used to waking up out of bed during the night to keep the fire going. It’s not as big a deal to wake up to a cold house once the children are older, but babies are less tolerant of extreme temperature changes which means, yes, another source of sleep deprivation for you.

A top-down – sometimes called front-back – fire is a new-ish (depending on who you ask) technique for building fires. The idea is to burn the fire from the top of the pile down to the bottom; rather than burning all of your wood at the same time, this method will burn a single log which will crumble away as the next starts to burn. With a large enough stove and proper home insulation, this can keep your house comfortably warm all night while you stay in bed.

The way I was shown to build fires goes something like this:

1. Place two large logs next to each other with space in the middle for newsprint
2. Crumple as much newsprint as will comfortably fit between the two logs
3. Lay 4-5 pieces of small wood strips across like a grill in order to catch the heat from the newsprint while at allowing for good airflow
4. Place 2-3 smaller logs on top of the whole apparatus to collect heat from the kindling as it warms up; again allowing lots of space all around for airflow so the fire won’t smother
5. Light the newsprint in a few places and watch the whole thing take off; as long as you’ve left a nice amount of room for air to flow around, you can’t miss. The fire will take off quickly
6. Watch everything fall into a smoldering mess – poke and position the embers and put more wood on top – fire will not die until all fuel is extinguished

I still use this method during the day because it keeps the house nice and hot. The only downside is it requires a lot of maintenance with a small wood stove such as mine, and will smoke badly if not given enough air so constant attention to the airflow and flue is needed. At night, I prefer to use the top-down method:

1. Start at the back of the stove and stack large logs in a tight cluster with as little space between as possible
2. Place 2-3 pieces of dry kindling/wood scraps on top
3. Take 3-4 pieces of newsprint, roll each tightly and tie in a knot, place on top of the kindling
4. Light the newsprint, close the door and walk away

The fire will burn steadily all night. I like to tie the newsprint as if I were tying a shoelace, because there is no kindling to hold it down and this technique will prevent it from blowing away or falling off the wood pile.

The most amazing part of top-down fires is the lack of smoke. Most people are accustomed to the idea of bottom-up fires because as the heat from the flame rises it warms up the larger wood and increases the temperature of the fire. The problem is the air around the wood is not heated as quickly, so when the wood catches it will smoke at first. Top-down flames are pure heat and do not smoke; they won’t leave as much creosote in your chimney and they burn the wood much more completely.

The best part about owning a wood stove is the sense of connectivity you experience with the heating in your home. It’s one thing to flip a switch and have a furnace come on; it’s quite another to gain some level of mastery over the ability to make fire for your own comfort. Everyone who burns wood ultimately figures out their own method for best results; with so many different approaches and models of stoves you can literally spend your whole life improving your technique.

Back to Driving School

If it weren’t for other drivers, the roads would be a pleasant place to drive. Winter conditions don’t frighten me as much as the inept motorists I seem to be sharing the road with – maybe it’s just the time of day I drive to and from work that brings out the worst in people. We’re always told we shouldn’t be afraid of air travel because we’re more likely to be injured or killed in the car on the way to the airport; it is very telling when the police refuse to use the term ‘accident’ because ‘collision’ is more apt – it implies human error and responsibility.

Over the May long weekend here in Ontario, the OPP issued 468 charges for seatbelt offenses. Maybe we could use a physics refresher to remind ourselves that taking two seconds to affix that thin strip of fabric to ourselves when we get in the car will prevent us from flying through the windshield at 40km/h when the car stops suddenly in a crash.

This is important: 7% of Canadians do not use their seatbelts; 40% of collision fatalities did not use their seatbelt.

I can’t help but wonder if more seatbelt use would have improved chances in the deadly crash that killed eight people in Bathurst this May as they returned from basketball tournament in Moncton. Six of the eight victims weren’t wearing their seatbelts when the vehicle crossed the path of a tractor-trailer on an icy road.

Accidents happen fast (I’ll call them that only because ‘collision’ sounds a bit stuffy in this context). The speed in which cars can go from 60 to 0 is incredible and devastating. With so much power beneath us, it only makes sense to stop and think about what we’re doing. Let’s be careful, courteous, and stay alive out there.

Need, Desire and Cash

Need is a relative thing these days
It’s bordered on desire
The high-tech world is full of bright shiny things
We think that we really require
-Jimmy Buffett, “Tonight I Just Need My Guitar”

Many of us place great value on material “things” whether we are fully aware or not. This is a decade of debt, while people stretch their credit to the limit trying to buy a bigger house, a fancier TV, a faster computer, a new car – the list goes on. Having been caught up in all of that myself, these days I am pushing a message of living within one’s own means.

I found an article on CreditShout that talks about some interesting survey results regarding people who spend on credit: on average, respondents considered their cell phones, televisions and personal computers to be “necessities” in their lives.

I tell anyone who will listen (which is basically no one) that there are three necessities in day-to-day finances:

1. Shelter
2. Food
3. Transportation

Let me list them again: the only necessary expenses are shelter, food, and transportation – that’s all. Everything else is a luxury and not strictly required to survive and advance. Cell phones may be useful in emergencies, but their absence is unlikely to cause serious harm.

When my wife was unable to work because of her health and need for surgery, we had to tighten our proverbial belts to make sure we could meet expenses with just one paycheque. Although we both enjoyed watching television, we realized right away that dropping cable would save us almost $1000 every year.

Three years later we still don’t have cable even though we can afford to have it again. By cutting out that unneeded luxury we not only saved a lot of money, we found our lives more enriched because we were spending more time together.

How a Thermos Makes Bottle Time Easier

When we found out we weren’t able to breastfeed our newborn son, it wasn’t a big deal to switch to bottle. But because of his temporary health issue, we had to prepare a meal for him every 1.5 – 2 hours. We realized that if we didn’t find a way to make bottle time as fast as possible, we were going to sink fast.

One of my wife’s aunts had a brilliant suggestion. At the beginning of every day, boil a kettle and put the hot water inside a thermos. The water stays hot overnight, and is always ready for the bottle.

Let me say that cooling down a hot bottle is a lot faster than warming up a cold bottle. All we have to do is run cold water into a glass, and put the bottle in for a few minutes while we perform the ritualistic diaper change. By the time we’re done, the bottle is almost always at the correct temperature.

Nighttime feedings are the hardest but this method makes them take 10-15 minutes rather than 20-30, which makes for a smoother sleep cycle for everybody.