The Index · A subject

Fire and fuel

The hearth and the oven, the stove and the kiln, and the wood that feeds them, from the coppice to the coal bed.

16 documents · 3 chapters · 2 dishes · 80 rows

In the chapters

Chapter 1 The Rhythm of the Hearth
The Story: What the fire made, The coal bed, The oven and the bakehouse, The Honest Broker's stove, The rocket
At the Bench: 1. The fire and the coal bed Safety, 2. A cob oven Safety, 3. A brick rocket stove for the pot Safety, 4. The woodlot year Safety
Chapter 2 The City Is a Mine
At the Bench: 4. Lighting and tending the charcoal fire Safety, 5. Charcoal for the smith Safety
Chapter 5 Making Ground
At the Bench: 2. Charcoal, made and charged Safety

Documents 16

On the Menu

Wood-fired wheat sourdough Hearth flatbread

Calculators

Firewood for the house

In the log 80

57 confirmed
14 amended
3 partly confirmed
6 unresolved
23 marked for safety

H1 amended Safety No fire is lit indoors without a chimney; wood smoke is fine particles and CO; three-stone kitchens kill through the lungs; a wood-burning house has twice the fine dust …
H2 amended Safety Creosote lays down when flue gas cools below about 120 °C; a chimney fire runs at about 1,000 °C, cracks the liner and fires the roof; cures: dry wood, hot fast fires, …
H3 confirmed Safety Chimney fire response: shut damper and stove door, get everyone out, call for help, do not open the flue; inspection before reuse
H4 amended Safety Bank a fire only when nothing flames; damper mostly closed; ash a finger thick over the heap; relights after eight hours
H5 amended Safety Never fire a wet cob oven hard: steam blows the dome apart; cement mortar fails above 300 °C
H6 amended Safety Rocket stove: never leave unattended; sticks no thicker than a thumb; pot 2 cm above the riser mouth on iron feet
H7 amended Safety Do not spread stove ash on the woodlot or garden: it carries metals from the city's air
H8 confirmed Safety Charcoal brazier in the yard for summer cooking, 25 % efficiency; no charcoal burned indoors at all because it makes CO without smoke to warn of it
I10 unresolved Safety Cast iron drum cracks when water hits it hot or the fire is built against one side; never quench in the drum
I3 amended Safety Carbon monoxide from the charcoal fire kills without smell in an hour at the levels a closed workshop reaches; 400 ppm kills within an hour; forge outdoors or in a shed …
I4 confirmed Safety Asbestos in every building before 1993 (German ban): floor tiles, pipe lagging, fire doors, corrugated roofs; kills thirty years after; wet down, leave lagging
I7 confirmed Safety Charcoal fines blown into the tuyere can flash; fresh charcoal spread thin in the open 24 to 48 h with water at hand or it can heat and ignite in a bin
W1 confirmed Safety Cu-ETP (wire, 200 to 400 ppm oxygen) blisters and crumbles above about 370 °C in a reducing fire; only Cu-DHP pipe goes in the charcoal forge
G9 confirmed Safety Microcystin from summer pond algae survives hours of boiling; a ripe schmutzdecke degrades it slowly and poorly under 4 °C; a charcoal layer is the second barrier
F1 amended Safety Ergot: alkaloids, gangrene/convulsions, St Anthony's fire; brine at ~1/6 salt (160 g/l) floats sclerotia, wash and dry at once; EU limit 0.5 mg/kg alkaloids in rye flour …
B10 amended Safety Specified risk material: cattle >12 months skull, brain, eyes, spinal cord, tonsils; >30 months vertebral column; intestines all ages; cord lifted out with a hooked …
B14 unresolved Safety Fat fire: tallow catches at ~200 °C and above, a wood fire under an unwatched kettle reaches it in minutes; lid or sand, never water (fireball); kettle never left, never …
E20 unresolved Safety Fire outside a wooden smokehouse: single point of failure; barrel smoker fire management; never resinous wood (turpentine, tar)
E8 confirmed Safety Household rule: hot-smoked fish 4–5 days in the cellar in open air, 2 on the summer table; never a sealed jar, bag or under oil; keep for months only as salt-dried fish …
D3 amended Safety Ethanol vapour ignites above a flame; a sealed still is a bomb; never seal a still; water bath or gentle fire, never a bare flame under a thin pot
T11 confirmed Safety Pit fire produces carbon monoxide and dense smoke: outdoors only, never in a shed or under a roof (implicit in Bench 2; make explicit in draft 2)
T48 unresolved Safety Pit fire under turf 650 to 850 °C; cross-draught kiln 28 h to temperature, 36 to 48 h cooling, opened only below 80 °C; quartz inversion 573 °C both ways and …
T54 amended Safety Bottle cutting: single score, oil-soaked string burnt about a minute, cold-water plunge, wet grinding, no fire polish without annealing; lead crystal rings 3 to 6 s, …
H10 confirmed Open hearth sends 80 to 90 % of heat up the chimney and drags cold air in
H12 confirmed Spider on three legs; Dutch oven with rimmed lid, twice the coals above as below; salamander as ancestor of the grill
H17 confirmed Pompeii buried 33 bakeries with domed ovens, bread in some
H18 confirmed Count Johann VI of Nassau-Dillenburg, mid-16th century, ordered communal bakehouses to save wood and prevent fires; the Backhaus rhythm
H19 confirmed About 0.9 kg wood per kg flour in a direct oven, 0.55 in an insulated one; a village that bakes together burns a third of the wood
H22 confirmed Coppice: stumps resprout, 20-year cycle, stools live centuries; Mittelwald with oak standards; 400,000 ha in 1927 to 5,000 now
H25 confirmed Stove efficiencies: masonry 85 %, steel 50 %, cookstove 75 %, brazier 25 %; charcoal a quarter of its wood; summer kWh costs sixteen times its weight in wood
H26 confirmed 7.7 t seasoned beech a year: 4.2 t stove wood plus 3.5 t for 870 kg charcoal; 480 kg per Ster; about 16 Ster
H28 confirmed Beech forest 10 to 11 m³/ha/a; coppice on sand 7; a hectare and a bit or a hectare and a half per family; 90 to 115 ha per village of 300
H30 amended A coppice takes twenty years to yield; a flat insulated to post-2009 standard needs a third of the heat; straw in the roof and felt in the frames cut wood from 16 Ster …
H31 confirmed Winiarski at Aprovecho in the 1980s; rocket stove named for its noise; 1:2:4 proportions; riser above 1,000 °C; 96 to 98 % combustion; three-stone fire 10 to 15 % to the …
H32 confirmed Rocket mass heater: drum over riser, duct in cob bench, two-hour fire charges a tonne of cob for a day, exhaust at 120 °C
H34 confirmed Schornsteinfeger: Prussian institution older than the fire brigade; inspects every flue on a fixed round; only a licensed sweep certifies a stove; dust limit in g/m³
H35 confirmed Gas in Berlin kitchens from the 1900s, electricity 1930s, last coal kitchen stoves out in the 1980s; Ofensetzer and Köhler a few hundred people
H36 confirmed Cob oven build: bottle-and-slurry or vermiculite base, firebrick floor with a finger's gap, sand form 60 to 90 cm by 40 cm, 1:3 clay to sand 8 to 10 cm, straw layer 10 …
H37 confirmed Rocket core: 15 cm square, firebrick in 1:1 clay-sand mortar, house brick spalls, riser insulated with ash or perlite, 8 mm skirt doubles heat to the pot, 1 kg sticks in …
H39 confirmed Seasoning: one summer for ash and birch, two for beech and oak; cracks, hollow knock, no hiss; 20 % water; a third of the felling weight lost
H40 confirmed Coppice for a village of 300: about 100 ha hornbeam and field maple, 1.5 ha per household, up to 100 oaks per ha, 20 parcels of 5 ha, fence 3 years
I21 confirmed Peitz ironworks founded by the margrave in the 16th century on bog ore and charcoal; cannon balls, stove plates, pots; closed 1856
I22 confirmed Bessemer 1856: air blown through molten pig iron, steel by the tonne in twenty minutes; Siemens-Martin open hearth a few years later
I34 confirmed JABOD: African and Asian ancestry three thousand years old; box 60 cm square, 18 to 23 cm deep; trench two fists, 20 cm by 10 cm by 10 to 13 cm; pipe 20 to 25 mm inside, …
I35 confirmed Agricola 1556 drew the forge's ancestor with water bellows; Moxon 1683 the London smith's hearth
I37 confirmed Coal wants a deep pot and bottom blast; charcoal in a deep pot blows out in sparks and burns the steel; charcoal wants a shallow side-blast trench
I39 confirmed Fire zones: oxidising at the mouth, reducing a hand's width above; the work buried under the mound, never on top; flame colours blue to yellow-white, welding when the …
I41 confirmed Charcoal walnut to small egg (25 to 50 mm); fines out; hardwood oak, beech, hornbeam, ash, hickory; birch, elm, maple good; pine and spruce poor; ring test like a cup
I42 confirmed Coal about 1 kg/h at light work; charcoal nearly the same value by weight, a tenth as dense; a day about 100 litres or 12 to 15 kg charcoal, 50 to 60 kg wood; a village …
K24 amended Scale and decarburisation: a thin edge can lose its carbon a millimetre deep; muffle pipe with charcoal inside; or grind the skin off after the quench
K39 confirmed A clay-graphite crucible in a lined drum blown from below melts 20 kg of iron in an hour or two and burns about its own weight in charcoal
K42 confirmed Handle: ash, beech or plum slabs, pinned with brass or mild rod, hide glue or epoxy
K48 confirmed A table of twelve (12 knives, forks, soup spoons, dessert forks, dessert spoons, 260 mm chargers, butter plates, goblets, 4 serving spoons, 2 carving sets, 2 ladles) …
W34 confirmed Species: apple, pear, cherry (antimicrobial, knife finish); birch the Scandinavian staple; sycamore the English treen wood (no taste); ash for handles; beech T/R 2.15 …
G34 confirmed Charcoal carbon persists in soil for centuries to millennia; Amazonian terra preta metres deep and fertile after a thousand years, made of char, potsherds and bone
O35 confirmed Fire blight kills M9/M26; bitter pit = Ca shortage, worse with N and hard pruning; CaCl2 3–4 % spray
O42 unresolved Beech mast: oil, fagin mildly toxic in quantity, lamp oil and hunger years
A66 confirmed Household of 4 does and 6 ewes: c. 2,800 l milk, 220 to 260 kg dressed meat, 18 to 24 kg wool, 6 to 8 kids and 8 to 10 lambs, c. 1,010 h a year, 4.5 ha (pasture 1.5 to …
A78 partly confirmed Tallow lamp 15 to 25 g fat per hour; 50 hens lit 4 h a night for 120 days burn 43 to 72 kg fat for 600 to 900 eggs (3 to 4 kg egg fat); fire risk in litter
B58 confirmed Bone meal: spent bones burned in a wood fire to white and crumbling (needs >600 °C; 62 gives calcination stages), pounded and sieved; bone ash ~a third P2O5 (62's "up to …
E57 confirmed Wood: alder (Baltic/Havel), beech, fruitwood; never pine, spruce, fir; barrel smoker layout; juniper twig at the end as Spreewald signature
E58 amended Salt fish: lean species only, split, dry salt ¼–⅓ of weight 7–10 days cold, air-dried 2–3 weeks in cold dry months to > 50 % weight loss, keeps a year in a dry loft, …
S13 confirmed Fuel arithmetic: Baltic about 9 t beech for 128 kg salt; sea about 2 t; near-saturated brine a few hundred kg
S17 confirmed Schönebeck (Bad Salzelmen) graduation wall about 1,837 m, longest in Europe; fuel saving two thirds or more
M40 confirmed Goat's cheese: 10 l, 150 ml whey, 90 min, 3 to 4 drops rennet (a scant teaspoon of home-made), 24 h, drain 24 h, 120 g, 2 % salt with beech ash, 10 days at 85 % RH
T24 confirmed Shrinkage: tangential 6–10 %, radial 2–5 %, T/R ratio ~2 (walnut 1.41, cherry 1.91, hard maple 2.06, red oak 2.15); quartersawn/radial blank for a flat plate; dry 4–6 …
T28 confirmed Brandenburg clay: glacial boulder clay; brickworks Glindow (Werder) and Zehdenick (Havel, museum) built 19th-c. Berlin; Velten stove tiles from the 1830s; stoneware from …
T31 partly confirmed Pit fire: 50 cm deep, straw and dried dung packing, brushwood, turf or sheet-iron cover, pine as fuel, a day to burn and cool; expect ~half losses for a first batch
T33 confirmed Salt glaze: Rhineland since late Middle Ages, needs ~1,200–1,250 °C, salt thrown into firebox, HCl gas; a village kiln, not a household fire (link to Ch 18's specialists)
T39 confirmed Wood ash ~⅓ potash by weight (variable; often 10–30 % K2CO3); hardwood far richer than softwood; pine/spruce ash gives weak tarry lye; beech ash ~1 % of wood weight; Ch …
T43 confirmed Household of four: 10–15 kg soap/yr, ~7–8 kg tallow, one winter's beech ash; hard water 14–25 °dH by Berlin district turns soap to scum; wash in rainwater or rinse with …
T46 confirmed A table of twelve in forged steel and pewter costs about 520 smith-hours and 340 kg charcoal
T52 confirmed Village potter's year for 300 people: 1,850 vessels, 4,360 kg clay, 12 firings, 44 to 48 stacked metres pine (3.5 to 4.5 a firing), 1 to 1.5 ha coppice, about 980 h; …
T55 confirmed Glass not made by the household: furnace 1,300 to 1,350 °C, 350 to 450 kg charcoal per 100 kg glass; a village glassworks about 24 Klafter and 2,400 h a year
J15 confirmed Reconciliation: 1.5 ha of the household's own (goats, pig, hens) feeds four; a cow needs 2.7 ha of Luch that is the village's (Ch 8's 3.2 ha); plus 1.5 ha coppice (Ch 1) …
J23 confirmed 120's 156.5 h/yr split: daily wipe/oil 65 (0.18 h/day), charcoal 30, forging 15, handles 7.5, canner 1, barrels 4, field honing 15, peening 10, saw filing 9; sharpening …
J32 unresolved A village well serves a dozen households; a village of 75 has 6–8; the Dorfteich waters the herd and fights fire and predates the well
J35 partly confirmed 131's village: 60 households, 300 people, ~3,450 acres, five specialist households (smith, miller/baker, cheesemaker/herdsman, wright, forester/collier); surplus ratio …
J37 confirmed Book's own village of 300 on sand with modern seed: 75 × 1.5 ha = 112 ha arable/clover; 75 × 1.5 ha coppice = 112 ha + smith's 10; 80 ha Luch; oxen 10 ha; green, pond, …
J45 confirmed Honest Broker's findings: 117 half-cited to library PDF 24, diet from fitness blogs, calories from a protein shop, pasture short for its goats at low yield; 131 from …