We have battled a smoke problem in our cabin for a while. Recently, it reached a head, and Michelle discovered a simple, easy solution.
Occasionally, we seemed to get too much smoke from the wood stove or the old water heater. Once or twice, it got so bad that a freshly lit fire retained all the smoke it produced in the wood stove, where it leaked out of every crack, filling the cabin with eye-watering smoke. We had to open windows everywhere, often letting in more cold that we could dispel with the fire! We wore filter masks until breakfast to prevent breathing the smoke.
We noticed this more often after I installed the new water heater (search term “Iron Giant” in window above). Naturally, since we had to reconfigure the wood stove chimney to vent the water heater, we assumed that we had messed up the draw in the process.
Homestead smoke behaving properly (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
