Green Options

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the final one in an eight-part series. If you are thinking about installing a wood-burning mass heater, this article should help you.

Operating a Mass Heater
Mass heaters are a different approach to burning wood. If you don’t don’t understand this, you won’t just be disappointed — you’ll fill your house with smoke or, worse, poison your family in their sleep! Getting proper performance from a mass heater requires a little planning, and some involvement, on your part.  The tradeoff for this extra effort is safety and tremendous energy efficiency.

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the seventh in an eight-part series. If adding thermal mass to your house isn’t realistic, another approach is to install a massive heater. That is to say, the heater contains the thermal mass your house may lack.

Clean and Super-Efficient Wood Heating
Super-efficient wood burning heaters with lots of mass are called by many names: masonry stoves, russian stoves, finnish stoves or finnish fireplaces, mass heaters. Though mass heaters may look like traditional fireplaces, they’re actually very sophisticated heating devices.

Burning wood in a mass heater doesn’t involve feeding in wood a few pieces at a time. The wood is added all at once, lit, and burned as quickly and as hotly as possible. Because of the high combustion temperature, there’s virtually no smoke. Combustion is so complete that, with the exception of a bit of smoke released when the fire is first started, most of what comes out of the chimney is carbon dioxide and water vapor.