One of the best ways to warm up your home in winter is with a wood stove, but you might wonder how hot it can get and whether or not it will heat your home sufficiently. Whether you’re adding a wood stove to your home or renting a home with a wood stove, you need to be familiar with some operational basics.
Wood stove internal temperatures, on average, range between 350-750°F. This variability is dependent on many factors. The external temperature of a wood stove will reflect the internal temperature, making it too hot to touch. While pets will generally be wary of hot objects, take appropriate precautions if you have kids.
Wood stoves don’t require electricity and power to operate, making them an economical heating solution. They not only keep homes warm but they do so without adding more to your winter utility bills.
In this post, we’ll dive into some of the basic things you should know about wood stoves, including what types of wood to burn, how hot they get and what factors affect the temperature.
First, the pros and cons of choosing a wood stove for heating are outlined below.
Basics of Wood-Burning Stoves
Wood stoves are a traditional way to keep homes and families warm and cozy through harsh winter seasons, and have been for years now.
Modern wood stoves have been designed to work more efficiently and provide effective heat more than ever.
The way a wood burner works is simple – place some logs into the wood, start a fire, close the stove door, and wait for the stove to do its job to burn the logs. The smoke from burning the wood gets ejected through a pipe leading outdoors.
A wood stove for heating purposes poses a variety of good points along with some bad points to keep in mind as well.
Pros
Wood stoves don’t require electricity to run and operate. This means using one can help households save money on bills in the long run. This also allows households with wood-burning stoves to be able to keep their home warm and cozy even with a power outage.
A good wood stove is a great way to heat and warm up your home and family if you have an abundant source of wood and logs right outside your home.
Lastly, wood-burning stoves give off a very warm and cozy vibe that’s perfect for winter seasons. It feels home-y, relaxing, and laidback to have a wood-burning stove right in your home.
Cons
If you don’t have a natural source of fire logs, you would have to buy them to feed into your wood stove. And for places with scarce resources of wood, this can be expensive.
If you do have a source of fire logs yourself, it takes time and effort to work on trees, saw them, and split them into the perfect-sized logs you need.
Not everyone has the patience to start manual fires in the stove and regularly tend to it so wood stoves definitely aren’t for everyone. Before you decide to buy a wood stove, know what you’re getting into.
Types of Wood to Burn in Wood Stoves
A variety of types of woods can be used in wood-burning stoves. Different wood types also mean different heat intensities and heat duration during the winter season.
Hardwood is often more ideal to use for wood stoves than softwood because they burn longer and give off a more intense heat than the latter.
Dry and seasoned wood is also better to feed on wood stoves for the winter. Wood that has been properly dried and ‘seasoned’ provides more useful and intense heat than freshly-cut wood that has a lot of moisture content. If you use freshly-cut wood, you’ll be spending more time evaporating the water in the wood, effectively wasting time.
If you gather your own wood, the best practice would be to let them dry – for a minimum of six months to even a full year or two – before burning them. Do this with stacked wood off of the ground to let the sun and air draw off the moisture. You can place them under a roof as well.
How Hot Does a Wood Stove Get?
So you’ve decided to buy your home a wood stove. Now you’re wondering how a wood stove gets.
The answer to this would vary according to different factors like the type of wood you’re burning, environmental factors, and what heat you’re measuring.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how hot a wood stove gets because, again, a lot of other factors are in play. But generally, we can say that a wood-burning stove has a temperature of anywhere between 350-750°F.
Again, the exact temperature your stove reaches would depend on other factors and this temperature range is on a general gauge. What we can say is this is the optimal temperature range to burn fire logs effectively and will also prevent creosote buildup.
And if you don’t already know, creosote is a byproduct of burning wood. If you don’t burn wood properly, it forms and sticks on your chimney or flue until it’s removed.
How Hot is Too Hot?
Believe it or not, a wood stove can get too hot as well. So how much heat is too much? Anything above 800°F is already too hot. This temperature can potentially damage your wood stove and flue.
How Cold is Too Cold?
While wood stoves can get too hot, they can be not hot enough. A temperature of anything under 250°F isn’t enough heat and will cause creosote to form and stick on the stove and on the flue. And if temperature reaches below 150ºF, the creosote will be very thick and sticky.
On top of being damaging to your flue overtime, creosote is highly-flammable. Having a thick layer of it in your stove and flue is a huge danger and just a disaster waiting to happen. If not cleaned out properly, it can catch fire and start a chimney fire. Regularly cleaning the wood stoves, flue, and stove pipes is an effective way of preventing chimney fires and other accidents.
What About the Outside of a Wood-Burning Stove?
Wood stoves produce heat to warm up homes and families during the dread of a winter’s night. If you own any type of heater, it’s important to know that it’s not only the inside of the unit and the inside of your home that gets warm and toasty.
Much like the inside, the outside of a wood stove, including the stove pipe, also gets hot. When your wood stove gets on a too-hot-temperature, the outside also gets too hot. The outside of a wood stove can turn reddish when it gets too hot.
With a wood stove, you need to be careful not to touch it anywhere as its heat output warms up your home. This can lead to blisters and burns once it touches the skin. Also make sure to keep anything combustible away from the stove’s way to avoid accidents and igniting anything in fire.
You need to be extra careful if you have kids and pets around, as they’re more prone to touching the stove. You can look into installing a heat shield to prevent them from getting near a hot wood stove.
Conclusion
As the cold winter season approaches, many households are looking into installing and upgrading their home heating systems. After all, no one wants to go through winter cold and shaking even in their own homes.
A great and popular way many turn to are wood stoves. Wood stoves provide efficient and effective heat even without power or electricity. Simply feed some logs into the stove, start a fire, and allow it to do its job. And contrary to what many might expect, wood stoves don’t make houses smell of burning wood.
If you have an abundant source of firewood logs and you have what it takes to use one in your home, this is a great option to consider.
Now, many wonder how hot a wood stove gets. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how hot it gets but generally, a wood stove has a temperature of anywhere between 350-750 degrees Fahrenheit .
This temperature range is the optimal range for that warmth and coziness. Wood stove temperatures can also be too hot or too cold. Anything above 800°F is already too hot. And anything below 250°F isn’t hot enough and could cause creosote to form on the flue.
And that has been our guide on everything wood stoves, including how hot one gets!
