Sweeping for Homes That Really Heat With Wood in Wallsburg

Real heating loads mean real deposits

A suburban fireplace gets lit on holidays. A Wallsburg wood stove is often carrying a house through the coldest stretch of the year, and this valley gets genuinely cold, because it is a closed bowl with mountains on nearly every side. On still winter nights the cold air drains off those slopes and pools on the valley floor, and the low readings down here can be a good deal harsher than what Heber recorded a few miles away. People respond by burning more, and by burning through the night. Both of those load a flue.

So the honest interval is not a rule of thumb, it is a function of how many cords you go through. If you are burning through a couple of cords or more a winter, once a year before the season starts is the right rhythm, and midway through a heavy winter is not an unreasonable second look.

What comes off the property

Very little of the wood burned around here is bought seasoned and stacked two years ahead. It is scrub oak and whatever came out of the fencerows and the canyon bottoms, cut when there was time and burned when it got cold. Green wood is not dangerous in itself, it is just wet, and a fire spending its energy boiling water out of a split is a fire running cool. Cool fires deposit. That is the whole of the mechanism, and it is why the same stove behaves completely differently on dry wood.

The stove nobody mentions

Nearly every place out here has a second appliance. A shop stove, a barrel stove in a tack room, something feeding single-wall pipe out through a metal wall. Those get run hard, get fed whatever is at hand, and get swept roughly never, and they are usually the ones sitting closest to combustible storage. When we come out for the house, ask us to look at that one too. It is a short addition to the visit and it is regularly where the real problem was.

How we work

Opening sealed, filtered vacuum running the whole time, swept from below with rods matched to the flue, and photographs of the liner, the connector and the crown when we finish. Nothing gets tracked through the house. If what we find is glazed rather than flaky, we will tell you that a brush will not remove it and what actually will.