To keep a wood stove burning all night, use seasoned hardwood, control airflow with the damper, and add large logs before bed. Ensure safety with detectors and proper maintenance.
If you really must get your stove to burn through the night, the best way appears to be to load the firebox nearly full with logs, open the air vents to get the fire roaring away to burn off the volatiles and then back off the air controls when all the logs are well charred.
Generally speaking, it's safe to leave your wood burning stove on overnight, as long as you take the necessary steps to ensure it is properly maintained and monitored. That said, there's always a risk of a chimney fire, so common sense with your wood burner is important.
To do so, start closing the vents off once you add your logs (without completely shutting them down) and, as a result, your fire will burn slower and last longer. Don't be stingy - using fewer logs does not mean they'll last longer. You'll soon realise that by only adding one log, your fire will go out much faster.
Airflow is a critical factor in controlling how long your wood stove burns. Once the fire is established, close the damper partially to reduce the oxygen supply. This slows down the burn rate while maintaining enough airflow to keep the fire alive.
When you're building a fire that will last through the night, however, you don't want to have to rise from your sleep to manually add the logs yourself; you want to be able to fix it and forget it by building a structure that ignites the logs “automatically.” You do that by making your biggest logs the base of the lay, ...
Oxygen, fuel, and heat are the three components of a fire – increasing one of these will increase the intensity of a fire. When your stove has too much wood or an excessive amount of airflow, it can cause it to overfire as these factors increase the amount of fuel and oxygen, respectively.
You're not using your air vents properly
If you leave them wide open, the flames will eat your fuel too fast, but shutting the vents too much or too soon can put your fire out entirely.
If you're leaving the home or retiring for the evening, always close the glass doors but leave the flue open.
If you add lots of wood, especially when the stove is already heated up, the temperature in the chimney will rise and lots of heat will go to waste. High emissions of unburnt volatile compounds mean also a correspondingly high level of wasted energy – the same goes for having lots of unburnt charcoal in the ashes.
In order to burn all night, you will need to make sure there is enough oxygen in your wood burning heater. Open the air inlets on your wood burning heater, to the maximum intake, for 10 - 30 minutes. Once your large logs have formed a black ash around the bark, slowly begin to close the air inlet.
What do you do to put the fireplace to bed at night? If the fire is still producing heat, the damper has to be left open. And if the damper is open, the heat inside the house finds a fast exit to the outside.
This overfiring can overheat and damage the stove itself as well as stovepipe parts and adjacent structures in your house, which could cause a house fire. If the wood stove is too large and you reduce its output by restricting the air supply with the damper, then underfiring occurs.
Before heading inside, you'll want to make sure that you successfully extinguish the flames in your pit. It's not safe to let a fire burn overnight because you could wake up to a dangerous house fire. In 2020, nearly 357,000 house fires ravaged homes across the nation — that's one every 89 seconds.
Regularly add more kindling or tinder to help keep your flames burning longer and hotter. Leaning logs against each other in a criss-cross pattern can help keep them upright while creating an efficient airflow through which oxygen can reach deeper into the pile and create a larger flame.
To create fires that produce more heat, open the damper as wide as possible when lighting a fire. A wide-open damper will increase the amount of air reaching the fire and improve combustion. As a result, the fire will burn hotter.
yes! You can leave your wood burning stove on overnight, and in most cases, this is actually safer than trying to extinguish the flames manually.
Don't shut off the air vents completely but close them right down as this will limit the amount of air that gets into the chamber so the fire will slowly die out. Once the embers in the fire start to go orange then you then it will start to die and you can sleep without worrying.
Splitting Firewood Produces More Heat
The greater surface area of split wood (when compared to that same log before it was split) also results in greater heat, this is because more oxygen can reach more of the wood and support combustion.
The type of wood you use can make all the difference to how long it takes the wood to burn out. Softwoods like pine, cedar, and spruce burn quicker than hardwoods. If you are looking for a log that burns slowly, you will want to use hardwood options, such as oak, maple, or hickory logs.
On average, a single log can burn for about 2-4 hours, depending on its size and type of wood. To ensure a consistent warmth throughout the day, aim for a minimum of 4-6 logs in a 24-hour period. This conservative estimate will guarantee that your home stays comfortably heated without the fire burning out prematurely.