Wood burning methods from ’70s as important as ever

This whole high-cost energy thing happened before, back in the 1970s when my wife and I rented a home in Stockton Springs after I got out of college. Oil was skyrocketing to 28 cents a gallon and we were all frantic.

Back then, there was one voice that was the official voice of reason. That voice was Dick Hill. He did something that was really significant that is still as relevant today was it was then. He defined the right way to burn wood. That might seem like a trivial consideration for us technological sophisticates in 2008, but it was a big deal in 1974.

Wood stoves were bad actors back then. So were wood boilers and furnaces. They all were inefficient and were great at creosoting up chimneys and burning houses down. Dick, with a cadre of students, sorted through the history and lore of wood burning and defined with scientific accuracy how to build a device to burn wood cleanly, efficiently and do it every day you needed to.

No one that I am aware of had done that before for residential heating. Hill’s work was published in 1974. That was, and still is, the seminal document for anyone who is serious about burning wood. If you go online and talk with wood-burning aficionados, they invoke his name with great reverence. Any of us in the wood-burning business stand on the shoulders of that work. Anyone who wants to design a proper wood boiler has to read his work.

At that same time, Norm Smith was developing a similar wood chip-burning technology for residential use.

When I first met Dick, he was working on a slimmed-down version of his wood boiler, to be used as a hot water heater. I made tanks and heat exchangers for solar systems that matched up well with his devices. We hit it off right away. Although I am not an engineer, he treated my work with interest and respect. I will always appreciate that.

So what is the great secret of wood burning? The fire needs to be well carbureted. It needs to be mixed well with air. After all, wood comes in solid chunks, not as a gas or liquid. The fire needs to pass through a refractory zone. Once we start burning wood, there are a lot of unburned hydrocarbons mixed in with the exhaust. Oil burner manufacturers know this and usually work out a scheme where the oil flame sees refractory that burns off these unburned materials. Wood burners did not pay much attention to this fact before then.

Burn the first hot and fast and shunt all the heat into storage. Do not dampen the fire by starving it for air. If you starve a wood fire for air, or any fire for that matter, the fire burns incompletely. Dick moved all that heat into storage tanks for later use. That made the wood-burning scheme work like a central heating system.

In 2008, if you are thinking about inventing the next big thing in wood-burning technology, you will be well served to check out Dick Hill’s work from 1974. It stands tall in the annals of Maine technology for being relevant to so many people and is a great asset to our environment.

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