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.

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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.

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Metal woodstoves are a significant improvement over open fireplaces from the standpoint of producing more usable heat. They limit incoming air, thus avoiding heating air not needed for combustion. Another improvement: they use a lengthened heat exchange pathway to improve heat transfer from the heated combustion gases before they exit the chimney.

Unfortunately, metal woodstoves must operate at low, inefficient, and polluting combustion temperatures. Why? Because wood combustion requires high temperatures to be clean and efficient. Wood burns starts to burn cleanly at around 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, with continuous improvement up to about 2000 degrees. Cast iron begins to glow red and fail at about 1200 degrees. See the problem?

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According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heating and cooling amounts to 46% of all energy consumed by our homes. Water heating uses another 14%. In coastal California, where extreme heat is rare and winters are mild, a properly sited, well designed passive solar home can generate its own heat and hot water, and do without air conditioning.

Historically, few homes are so well sited or built. Since our area has more heating days than cooling days, most homeowners need a heating system. What few know is that many indoor air quality problems can be by-products of forced air heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems installed in their homes.

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