Fiddling with fire

These dear donkeys sunbathing

We've been having really cold wet and windy weather during February. I have been working on improving the fireplace in the studio, after having wwoofers smoke themselves to death and then the walls went yellow... :(

So I knocked most of it down and with 'The  Forgotten Art of Building a Good Fireplace' open on the right pages, tried to make sense of diagrams and figures (not my strong point, numbers...) and rebuild it using the same earth, just made wet again but with a larger open bit and a larger smoke box. I love doing stuff like this. Even more fun is the finishing bits. I used just earth sieved and sand, no straw, as it makes a smoother finish.

It still smoked!

I have decided that the main problem is the size of the chimney. It is 140cm diameter and should be much more.

Any way the long and the short of it is that I have put in the old cast iron stove we used to have up in the shack. Guess what? No smoke!!! Yes.