These WOODSTOVE MISTAKES Are Costing You Time & Money!

In the fall of 1977 a man named Roy Dilley paid three hundred and forty dollars for a new airtight stove. It was a better stove than the one it replaced. By January he was hauling wood twice as often as he ever had, sitting in a house that never got warm past the middle of the front room. In February the chimney went up like a freight train in the wall and he stood in the yard in his union suit watching sparks come off his own roof. There was nothing wrong with that stove. Roy lost that winter doing exactly what the man at the store told him to do. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Seventy-one years old, fifth generation on Sawyer Ridge in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I went in the woods at fourteen, in 1969, and came out in 2011. Near everything here my grandfather Enoch wrote down in a scaler's tally book he carried in his coat from 1931 until the winter he died. Six mistakes. Five of them you'll recognize the second I say them and you'll fix them Saturday. The sixth is the one that does the real work, and nobody tells you about it because it looks like laziness and it looks like dirt. Fifty dollars in tools, total. Against two hundred and fifty a cord for wood you're burning a third of to make fog. Tell me down below — did your people have a name for the night fire? Banking, holding, keeping? And were you raised shoveling the ash out like I was, or did somebody in your house know to leave it? Every holler did this a little different, and the story that gets the most comments down there is the one I go deep on next. SAFETY, PLAIN I'm not your fire marshal. Get your chimney inspected every year by somebody who does it for a living. Keep a working carbon monoxide alarm on every floor — a stove that isn't drawing right is the exact condition that puts CO in a house, and you cannot smell it. Never burn treated lumber, painted wood, plywood or trash in a woodstove. Ashes go in a steel pail with a metal lid, set outside on dirt or concrete and nowhere near the porch boards — coals live in ash for days. And if your appliance came with instructions, follow those too. This isn't either-or. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps.