Work on this article began in July last summer. The National Weather Service said the heat index was going to be around 100 degrees, so I knew it was time to soak some beans and get out the solar cooker box. Winter is now here, so the solar cooker does not work any more. When we want soup we throw the ingredients into the bake oven in our masonry stove.

Work on this article had to stop for a while because something more important needed doing. There were 10 cords of wood we had split last fall still sitting on the ground and starting to rot, so all my available time went into stacking it off the ground. Processing the wood that heats my favorite bun warmer is one of the problems with owning a wood burner. If you want a Tulikivi masonry stove there are two other problems you need to deal with: pronouncing the name of the company, and paying for the stove. But overall, the money and effort have been worth it for us on cold winter days and nights.

Masonry stoves, such as this Tulikivi brand, store and radiate more heat than most woodburning stoves.

First, if you want to talk about something it helps to be able to pronounce the name. It took me a while to get it right but if you can say too-lick-KEE-vee, you've got it. Next is paying for one of these things, since they are much more expensive than other indoor wood stoves. When we built our house in 2003 our stove ran around $20,000, plus the chimney. This is not something for someone starting out young in the country with few assets. It may take some frugal living in the city, saving your money before you can pull this off. We hoped to save enough money over time by not buying propane to pay for the stove, but more on that later.

It has been over six years since COUNTRYSIDE published my original article on the masonry stove (still available on the COUNTRYSIDE web site). In that time many people visiting our house have said how beautiful the stove was, but only one guy who came to install a stair lift actually knew what a Tulikivi was.

In case you are not familiar with masonry stoves (the Tulikivi company calls their masonry stoves fireplaces by the way) they are like other wood burners since they burn wood, but they do it better. Masonry stoves use stone to store energy from hot fires. Particles and the gases travel through a series of channels where they have a better chance of burning and heating the soapstone rather than being lost up the chimney. The soapstone radiates the saved heat into the room between firings.

We did not learn much new since the last article about the inside of the house. We did that right as far as the stove goes. You can see our stove from any room on the first floor. The house is a 34' x 40' house with a walkout basement, but no second story. The sun gives us a few degrees or so of warmth when it decides to shine in the winter, and the LP furnace sharing the work with the masonry stove will run once in the morning and once at night on typical winter days. We fire the stove twice a day with about 32 pounds of oak wood. Wood is dirty so we put tile by the stove. That has worked well. We put an 8' x 8' unheated storage room off the main house near the stove to store about five days' worth of wood. We also brought up a hand-operated wood splitter from the city and keep it in the wood room. It helps when the wood is wet to split it up a little more. And finally there is the naughty corner. The stove has a heated bench over the flue going to the chimney. One visitor called it the naughty corner, and the name stuck. It works great for warming up on a cold day.

While the inside design of the house worked pretty well, things did not go quite as well on the outside layout. Wood falls down hill, but otherwise it is work to move it. The last glacier left a narrow peninsula sticking out on the land with hills on three sides and we put our house on it. The house location is beautiful but we shortchanged ourselves with space for a garden (our first garden in the valley below froze in August our first year up here) and also space to dry firewood to avoid moving it several times.

Things went fairly well for a while. We cut and split the wood near where it was dropped off and then moved it by the garage to dry on its way to the house. It was about as efficient as we could get. Then we had a guy from the state Department of Natural Resources do a survey of our woodland. He was on the firefighting crews during the fire season and was real concerned when he saw four cords of wood sitting up against the garage. He said our garage would be a sure goner if there were ever a forest fire. Wood should be stored at least 30 feet from buildings unless there is snow on the ground. That combined with the shape of our hill, and the only other place to store wood was being blocked by snowbanks in winter meant more moving of the wood off of the shortest path to the house and then moving it back again.

Sometimes it pays to be naughty… The seat in the “naughty corner” is one of the warmest in the house.

Hindsight says I should have had more knowledge about permaculture before we sited the garage and house. Bill Mollison in his book Permaculture: A Designers Manual talks about zones and sectors.

In zones are a series of concentric circles around the main house on the site. The idea is to put the places where you spend the most time closest to the house and areas like a woodlot further away.

Sectors are like the spokes of a wheel. I don't take the spokes part literally but they are like arrows of energy flowing through the site. There are inputs, processes and outputs. Where the output from one process is not the input to another process it is a pollutant and requires work to handle it. The outputs from a masonry stove are what goes up the chimney and the ashes. You need to dump the ashes but that is not that hard.

Wood processing is a somewhat different story. Sectors talk about a series of steps where it sounds like the output from one process becomes the input to another process it does not mean work. This is not quite true with firewood processing. It is work. Having a DR Power Wagon has lessened the work involved with moving the wood around. It is smaller hence cheaper than a tractor so you take more trips but it also fits in tighter spaces.

Even with help from the DR it is easy not to work smart and do more work than needed. I finally learned this year if you put rows of wood two feet apart you have a better angle for loading the DR wagon (less twisting). If you can drop wood down to the DR it helps. Lifting is more work. Unloading from the DR to a higher stack is better than lifting wood off the ground. Dumping the load and working close to the ground is easier.

Almost everything requires some maintenance. The Tulikivi manual says to have a chimney sweep inspect and clean the chimney yearly. I have filled cracks in the main firebox in the stove a few times but that has been it for maintenance. The chimney sweep's report every year says something like "system brushed out nicely—fine dust." The sweeps also vacuum the fine ashes out of the bottom channels and the flue under the heated bench by removing the stone plugs in the stove.

One of the biggest lessons I learned in the six years since the last article is how hard it is to figure out a payback on burning both wood and propane versus propane alone. The original hope was the extra cost of the masonry stove versus a wood stove would be offset by saving money burning wood. Basically once you spend the money it may not be worth trying to figure out if you will ever get a good payback. Also, calculating how much money we might save does not consider heating when the power is out after a winter storm. The stove is priceless on those days.

It is also handy for cooking with the bake oven. The bake oven is not like a gas oven. It is better than an LP stove oven since it does not put fumes in the air. We have used it to bake pizzas with success. I got interested in making desem bread for a while and ran into an interesting problem. I could never get the temperature of the stove right compared to the time it takes to raise the bread. I look at that as my skill level, not the stove design. The best use of the oven has proved to be using it as a slow cooker in winter. The Tulikivi dealer in Minneapolis mentioned he used the bake oven in his stove as a slow cooker, and that has proved to be good advice.

There is one thing we should have done differently in deciding what type of features to order on the stove. The bench on the front of the stove is sometimes used by guests, but it cools off quicker than the little side bench heated by gasses on their way to the chimney. The glass door is so hot when a fire burns it is sometimes not safe to sit near it. The side bench warms slower and stays warm longer. It is a great way to warm up your body if you get cold between firings. We should have made the bench large enough so two people could sit on it. As I understand it, you can order benches covering the vent to the chimney, perhaps five feet long or more, but it depends on the draft of the chimney. Even if the current bench only sits one person it is still our favorite bun warmer.