How to keep a stove in overnight.

Almost every guest who writes to us afterwards mentions the stove, and about half of them mention waking at three in the morning to a cold room. It is the one piece of the house that expects something from you, so it is worth ten minutes of explanation.

Banking is not feeding

The instinct, last thing at night, is to open the door and put another log on a bright fire. That gives you twenty good minutes and then nothing. What you want instead is a bed of embers, one large unsplit log laid on top, and the air almost closed. The fire should look like it is going out. It is not going out.

Unsplit is the part people skip. A split log presents four dry faces to the air and burns the way kindling does. A round one has bark on most of its surface, which is the tree’s own answer to burning, and it will sit there giving off heat for five or six hours.

The air is the control, not the wood

A stove has one useful dial and it is the air intake. Wide open, you are making light and losing heat up the flue. Almost shut, you are making heat and very little else. The room will be four degrees cooler at seven in the morning than it was at midnight, which is comfortable, and the embers will still take a fresh log without paper.

There is a note about this on the shelf above the wood basket, in Marte’s handwriting, which several people have told us they photographed and took home. That is a better endorsement than anything we could write here.