furnace wood. and stovewood

[Al_Smith]

Now that old horse mane plaster is pretty tough stuff .The house my mother still has was built in 1919 and a majorty of that plaster is the original .It looks like it was finished with a shop broom though ,rough as a cob .It's about like trying to paint a rock .It too is worth about 30-40 times what they paid for it but so are the taxes .

That thing had a big old gravity furnace converted to stocker feed coal ,"iron fireman " .It looked large enough to heat a school house .You could not stand over a register very long because it would burn the hide off of you .My sisters would dry their hair over the blast furnace air discharge .I do believe you could probabley bake a cake over them .

They changed to gas sometime when I was in the navy .My dad said the cast iron heat exchanger must have weighed 7-800 pounds and had a crack  in it .It's a miracle we didn't all die from carbon monoxide poisoning .

[SwampDonkey]

Didn't have to worry because of one of the fine features of a drafty house you had new air coming in. :D ;)

[thecfarm]

Gravity furnace? One with no blower?
Blower would not of worked anyways. No electricity here until '86.

[SwampDonkey]

Power here after the war in the 40's. But there wasn't the load we have these days. The local village had the earliest power around these parts, had a dam.

[woodswalker]

My dads first cousin once had a wood furnace that looked like a culvert pipe appropiately called a "long wood " That thing could take a 5 foot piece .How'd you like to split that stuff ? Kind of like Abe Lincoln ,the rail splitter .

I have one of these  : I bought it at a lions charity sale. They were getting ready to close it down when I came in. They had a picture of it on the wall. I offered them $40.00 dollars for it , If they load it in my truck ;D. About 6 of the lions met at the place to load it  8)  : I of course helped them load it.  I plan on putting in my pole , well its in my pole barn just not hooked up yet ;)

[r.man]

I grew up in a house with a 5 ft firebox, heat exchanger above that and only 1 large heat grate although it did pull the cold air from both ends of the house. My father liked a bit of variety in the size and length of his wood so he had more control over the heat. In normal weather he put one row of wood in but if it was particularly cold he shoved all the coals back and put two rows in. On cold mornings I would take my clothes out, there would be ice on the inside of the single pane bedroom windows, throw them on the grate for a bit to warm them up and get dressed in the living room. My father would be gone to work most mornings but the furnace would be putting out lots of heat by then.