ideas for firewood chute

[macdad]

We are having a house built and I was hoping to get some input regarding design of a firewood chute. We will rely on firewood as our primary heat source. We use a QuadraFire fireplace insert now which has been great, except for the mess of bringing wood through the living room.

Our new house will have a wood furnace (with LP backup) in a full basement. I was wondering if anyone has ideas for a chute -- my tentative plan has been to have a window well type access to a shortened exterior door below. Then the wood could be dropped down into the well and easily accessed from below. Any pitfalls seen or improvements on this plan would be appreciated.

Thanks,

macdad

[TimSullivan]

We had the same idea when we built our home. Designed a seven foot wide openning in the rear wall of the garage that allowed the FEL to dump the wood into a chute to the basement. The plan was vetoed by the code enforcement officer because it would allow fire from the garage to enter the house.

Added a set of six foot wide double doors on the rear of the house at basement level and use the forks on the FEL slide large four feet square boxes into the basement. Works well and the wood gets stacked once in the boxes. That way I only have to pick up the box and move it to the house.

Your idea sounds like a good one to me. Our neighbor drops wood into his basement through a window into a big crate. I've seen firewood "closets" also where one has a closet built in on the outside of the house with an outside access door for placing the wood in from the outside & and inside door to acccess the wood from the inside. I probably should have done something like that. This would seem to keep the weather out.
We built our house with a "walk out" basement with double doors. I can set one of my firewood pallets (about 1/3 to 1/2 cord) in through the double doors or bring in a smaller wagon load. When I open both doors, alot of cold air can come in... [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img]
You could look at things like this also. Woodwaiter
Do a google search for "firewood handling or storage" or something similar & see what WWW comes up with...
Good luck & let us know which direction you end up going.

[Pat]

Never had a wood chute but we had a coal chute and the same basic idea of ease of handling the fuel is at work. There are all sorts of good things to do but what will match your process? Will a tractor and FEL be involved, a lawn tractor with a trailer, hand carry from a truck, or what? How will the chute be fed?

I would think that if you have a duel fuel furnace in the basement tht you would want the wood to come close to but not hit the furnace when dumped in. Cordwood will "log jam" pretty easily so attention to the details of chute design are important.

I would think the best chute arrangement would be the least chute at the closest to vertical with the bottom of the chute as high off the floor as practical. This wouldn't "back up" on you so quickly and more wood should be able to be unloaded withought having to fuss with the pile. Ideally you might have the space to allow just dumping the wood in and letting it fall where it may. If you have tighter space considerations then you need a space for the wood to be dumped in and then you stack it to conserve storage volume such that the stacks don't interfere with a subsequent load being dumped. All this and the stacks need to be convenient to the furnace or permit a "little red wagon" to negotiate the connecting space to cart the wood to the furnace. Hopefully there is a short direct path to dispose of ashes that isn't through a nice finished space.

I would be inclined to "engineer" an ash handling system to get the ash out easily. There are arangements that use a small metal drum (ash canister) in conjunction with a shop vac to vacuum up the ashes and not make a mess. The ashes go into the drum for disposal and even live embers are safe to suck up as the canister protects the vacuum.

Extrapolating that system/product, I think I would place a metal drum at ground level where I could easily access it (in a shed or in the side of the wood closet or wood chute airlock) and use a shopvac to suck ashes up a small diameter metal duct to the barrel. (small diameter about the size of the vac hose yields high velocity, a good thing in this case) This would allow vacuuming the ashes up along with any small debris and general untidy "smutz" that seems to go with messing about with wood fires and the associated paraphenalia. With a system like this the metal drum of ash is "topside" and ready for convenient disposal and nary an opening of the reqular door, chilling the basement and any occupants to cart out ash.

Using a metal drum to catch the ashes isn't "Rocket Surgery" as you could just put a drum with a compression ring style removable end up stream of the store bought metal canister made to work with a shop vac. The upstream drum would have two vacuum hose connectons in the removable lid, one in and one out. Incoming stuff would tend to fill up the drum with only a small fraction of the lighter dusty stuff making it to the store bought canister.

You could put handles on the drum to make it easy to deal with to empty it.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]