Prepping the wood cookstove for winter

As we prepare for winter, one vital task was to clean out the wood cookstove. As our primary heat source, it's essential to make sure it's operating at peak efficiency and peak safety. (We don't want any chimney fires!)

So this morning, we detached the pipe from the stove inside the house. Then Don gathered up the chimney brush and handle pieces...

...and climbed onto the roof. He removed the pipe cap and scrubbed the inside of the pipe, while I held a plastic bag at the bottom of the pipe inside the house to catch falling ash.

(Before climbing down from the roof, Don also went around and cleaned out all the gutters.)

After reconnecting the pipe to the stove, I got busy cleaning out the stove. Ash tends to build up on the various surfaces inside the unit, so that's what I was removing.

The stove comes with a cleanout hatch under the oven, secured by wingnuts.

The stove manufacturers include a custom-made long-handled tool to scrape the ash from the farthest corners of the stove guts and pull it out the hatch.

I catch the ash in a metal bucket. I'm operating blind during this procedure, groping around the interior of the stove with the scraper, so periodically I stop, shine a flashlight into the depths, and see what pockets of ash I might have missed. After about 20 minutes of scraping, however, I've removed about 95 percent.

Then I turn my attention to the wood box, where the actual firewood is placed when the stove is lit.

It's through the wood box that I can access the top of the oven box, and scrape off the ash.

Once that's done, I clean out the wood box, which all falls into the ash bucket in the compartment below. I carefully pour the ash into the metal bucket (carefully, so fine ash doesn't poof up and coat everything around me). Once that's done, I clean out the compartment that holds the ash bucket.

Dirty work!

Then I gave everything around the stove a good vacuuming, and used a damp cloth to wipe down the stove itself (top and sides). All pretty!

I ended up dumping the ash into one of our 30-gallon tubs for easier transport to the compost pile. You can see how much ash I cleaned out. (It goes without saying that I would never dump hot ash into a plastic tub. This ash is left over from last spring, so obviously it's stone-cold.)

Now the stove is all set for cold weather, though we'll repeat this cleaning process a few more times over the course of the winter.

I absolutely stinkin' love this wood cookstove. After some mid-winter power outages during the early days in our new home, when we were forced to huddle around a propane heater, we knew installing a non-electric heat source was a priority.

Besides, the wood cookstove bakes a mean pie.