I made an early escape from my desk today. One of the projects I’m working on is at a stage where I’m trying to balance a number of elements to compile a master list from some data in order to facilitate the next stage and I was getting altogether too many distractions, so I retreated home and have made some worthwhile progress.

However, since I now had the luxury of being at home and since it was a little chilly in the house I decided to use my belated lunch break to try an experiment with our wood burning stove. We used it on Sunday afternoon, which was cosy but the glass quickly got dirty. I cleaned the cold glass using the newspaper, wood ash and water combination I’ve mentioned before and then set a small fire. I used a couple of medium sized logs at the bottom building up a tower on top of them with smaller sticks. As I went up I filled the tower with newspaper and progressively heavier grades of kindling, topping off with a bit more paper and a few odd offcuts of dry wood.

With a fairly breezy day outdoors, it caught well but I didn’t shut the stove door too soon. If you do, you have to put up with a few minutes of smoke rolling round inside the box and, although it might eventually get to burning, it is partially obscured by soot on the door. Instead, I let the blaze get underway, even topping with a bit more fuel. The smoke was being drawn up the chimney and the firebox was getting nice and warm. Only once it was established did I shut the door and, although knocked back briefly, the circulating hot air soon restablished the blaze. After a while I could start to tamp down the vents but the result was a clean burning fire which, even now it has died down to a few glowing embers, hasn’t significantly dirtied the glass.

So, two jobs well done for the price of one!