Note 02 · The stove
Three hours to first steam: heating a cold lakeside pirtis
A cold log pirtis in November takes three hours to bring up, and for the first two of them almost nothing appears to be happening. Most of the mistakes I made in my first winter came from trying to hurry the middle hour.
- Written at the pirtis
- 27 October 2024
- Typed up
- 19 January 2025
- Reading
- 8 minutes
- Where
- Ignalina, Utena County
Alder, birch, and what the woodshed actually holds
Alder is what everyone around here says you should burn, and for once everyone is right. It lights easily, burns hot without spitting, leaves little soot on the glass and throws no sparks when the door stands open. Birch gives more heat per armful but tars the flue if it goes in damp, and the bark burns so fiercely that it is better used a split at a time to get things moving. Pine and spruce stay out of the stove: they spit, they soot, and the resin smell sits in the room for a week.
Dryness matters more than species. Wood cut in March, split in April and stacked open to the south under a roof is ready by the following autumn; the same wood stacked against a wall in shade is never ready at all. Two pieces knocked together should ring rather than thud. A full heating takes about two armfuls of split alder with a third of birch for the last hour, which is less than it sounds and far less than I burned in my first winter, when I fed the stove out of pure anxiety.
From the card by the stove
- Alder for the body of the fire, birch for the last hour
- Split in April, burned no sooner than the next autumn
- Knock two pieces together: a ring, not a thud
- No pine or spruce: spitting, soot, a week of resin
The first hour heats the room, not the stones
The first hour goes into warming logs, benches and the metre of floor by the door, and the thermometer barely moves through it. I light small and keep the stove door nearly closed, because a roaring fire in a cold room sends most of its heat straight up the flue. The room climbs from three degrees to about twenty-five in that hour and smells of damp wood and old smoke, which is how I know the walls are giving up their winter. Opening a window for five minutes in the middle of it is not madness.
Ventilation is the part I had wrong for a whole year. The lower vent under the stove stays open throughout, and the small hatch above the door stays shut until the final half hour. Left open, it pulls the hot layer straight out and the top bench never passes sixty. Left shut at the end, the room turns stuffy in a way that no amount of water on the stones will fix. Both of those were real evenings, one of them with four people sitting politely in a sauna that was not hot.
The stones at two hours
Stones take heat long after the room has stopped changing. Mine are grey field stones the size of a fist, the kind the tractors turn up at the edge of the potato ground, with a few darker ones from a river bank that a neighbour swore by and I have never had reason to doubt. They sit directly over the firebox in a loose pile with gaps wide enough to lose a finger in, because heat has to travel through the pile rather than around it. Packed tight, the bottom stones glow and the top ones stay merely warm.
A stone is finished when it begins to shed. Flakes on top of the pile, fine grey dust in the corners, a face gone from rough to smooth and slightly glassy: each of those means the stone has had enough cycles and should come out before it splits. I turn the whole pile every May, take out anything cracked, anything layered like slate, anything that sounds dull when tapped, and fill the gaps with stones that have been drying in the woodshed since autumn.
The last half hour, and the first throw
The final half hour decides the evening. I stop adding wood, open the hatch above the door and let what is in the firebox burn down to embers with the ash door cracked. The room settles at about eighty degrees on the top bench, and the stones stop being merely hot and become ready, which you can hear rather than read: a ladle of water at two hours hisses and lies there, while the same ladle at three hours cracks and is gone before the sound has finished.
The first throw is small on purpose. Half a ladle across the top of the pile, never into the middle, then half a minute of waiting to feel where the steam has gone. A full ladle poured straight down on stones that are not ready gives a wet, heavy room that needs twenty minutes to recover. The water lives in a wooden bucket beside the door and never in a metal one left standing on the bench, a lesson best delivered by somebody else's hand than your own.
From the card by the stove
- Stop feeding the stove half an hour before anyone sits down
- Hatch above the door open, lower vent still open
- Half a ladle across the top of the pile, then wait
- Wooden bucket by the door, never metal off the bench