Review: Avalon Olympic
Reviewed November 23, 2014 by
wildwoodsgirl
Overall Performance:
Efficiency:
Ease of Use:
Avalon Olympic
Burn time is often about wood, not the stove.
If you're only getting 2 hours burn time, are you using soft wood, like willow, eastern pine varieties, cottonwood? Those burn quickly. Get some hardwood and use the soft for kindling or in warmer months. Seasoning wood, cut to length, split and stacked for air flow for a year for soft woods, and 2-3 yrs for hardwood, matters, too. If you season it well, pine will still burn fast. Gives heat more quickly, but takes a lot more wood (2 or 3 times as much) to heat for the same length of time as hardwood. People out west burn lodgepole pine bc it's what they have. It is nowhere near as sticky as white, or red pine, the yellow pine woods. So, bear that in mind if you search burning pine. There are big differences in how they burn. Out west it is a much denser wood, closer to hardwood in quality.
Smoke can be about the flue size (too big causes problems) as well as the damper, variety of wood, and heat of the fire. If you let it burn down to a smolder before adding more wood, with pine especially, you'll get a lot more smoke in the room. Heat creates the updraft that carries smoke up and out. Maybe add wood sooner. A lot of smoke in the firebox also means you're coating your system with creosote (gooey flammable deposits), meaning you have to clean the chimney or stovepipe more often for safety. You want the fire to heat the house, not burn the house.
Hope that's of use to someone. Peace.