Lighting and Operating Antique Wood Cookstoves

Join me as I demonstrate how I operate my antique Crescent Classic wood cook stove. It's patterned after a Glenwood C made in Taunton, MA around the turn of the 19th century.

We'll touch on the various functions, features and observations. Apologies for the background noises. And the "ums".

Getting your non-airtight stove going is fairly straightforward:

1) Open your dampers up fully
2) Open your ashpan or lower air inlet fully (ensuring your wood grate is also open)
3) Keep your upper air inlets closed and your oven diversion set to "off" or "open" so smoke flows freely up the flue and out the chimney
4) Put a small amount of paper, birch bark or easily ignited material in the base of your wood grate. Alternatively, some folks do this in the ash pan.
5) Place the usual fire-building materials over the paper on the wood grate (pencil sized sticks or thin kindling).
6) Nurse your fire until it's strong, opening and closing inlets/dampers as needed. Once you've built up the fire with larger wood and your stovepipe surface temps are over 250°F (roughly 120°C) you can get your oven warming up by closing the diverter to push smoke around the oven box before it exits the flue.

Your upper air inlet is like a mixture control in that you can bypass the fire and flow air directly over top of it (underneath your cooktop surface). This can help slow your fire and also lower/even out the temp of your surface and to a lesser degree, oven. Even fully damped down, these stoves leak air which can lead to overfiring or other undesirable conditions. So take your time, have patience and keep practicing and before you know it you'll be pulling out pies that would make your great grandma do a double-take (and not because they're charred black and raw inside).

Thanks for watching and participating!