7
OPERATING TIPS
By taking time to get to know your cooker, following our maintenance guidelines and using good quality
fire-wood you should enjoy trouble free operation of your Woodfired cooker but it is also worth bearing
in mind these useful operating tips:
• Don’t leave the cooker lit for long periods in slumbered down mode (as you would for overnight
burning), open the air control and bank up the fire periodically to heat up the cooker and flue
to prevent soot build up.
The resulting residue that sticks to the inner walls of the chimney is called creosote. Creosote is formed
by unburned, flammable particulates present in the smoke. It is black or brown in appearance. It can be
crusty and flaky, tar-like, drippy and sticky or shiny and hardened. Quite often, all forms will occur in one
chimney system.
If the wood you are using is water logged, or green, the fire will tend to smoulder and not warm the
chimney sufficiently. Wet wood causes the whole system to be cool, and inefficient. In contrast: dry
wood means a hot fire, which results in a hot flue, and a hot flue means much less creosote clogging up
your chimney.
Charcoal
When most of the tar and gasses have burned the remaining substance is charcoal (ash in it’s finer
form). A hot bed of charcoals and ash can enhance the combustion process when burning larger
pieces of wood. Start with a small fire to develop a bed of glowing embers. As the charcoal bed
develops and the cooker heats up, slowly add larger and larger pieces of wood. It takes time to build
a good charcoal bed, but it is well worth the effort. only empty excess ash periodically and always
leave a bed of ash on which to light the next fire.
WHAT TYPE OF WOOD IS BEST
The difference between 'hard' and 'soft' woods is the density of their cells or fibres.
As a general rule, the deciduous trees (those that lose their leaves in the autumn) are usually thought of
as hardwoods and the evergreen trees (such as pines, firs and larches) as the softwoods. But
generalisations are of course always subject to many exceptions. Some evergreens may well be harder
than some deciduous trees. Birch, for example, is not very hard at all. So we should understand that
there is a whole range of densi-ties amongst our tree species, including medium dense woods, which
cannot be satisfactorily classed as hard or soft.
Firewood tends to be sold by volume rather than weight. Assuming that the wood is reasonably dry, the
weight of a square foot of good hardwood may be double of that of a square foot of softwood. This
means that the same volume of hardwood will provide you with more fuel to burn than an equal
amount of softwood, simply because it contains more substance.
(N.B. The price of hardwood will normally not be double that of softwood, because it took the same
amount of labour to prepare. So, if a trailer full of hardwood costs more than the same size trailer full of
softwood, the more expensive option may well be the most economical.)
The other advantage of good hard firewoods are that the cooker does not need to be fed as often and
the charcoal-beds made by the glowing wood may burn more easily overnight.
However, the ideal situation would be to have a store of both hard and soft woods, because the softer
woods also have distinct advantages. They light more easily than the slower burning hardwoods and if
the softwoods are dry, they create a hotter, more intense fire. The draught created by the hotter fire
moves the air up the chimney faster.
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