Lighting and Operating Antique Wood Cookstoves
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ม.ค. 2019
- Join me as I demonstrate how I operate my antique Crescent Classic wood cook stove. It's patterned after a Glenwood C made in Taunton, MA around the turn of the 19th century.
We'll touch on the various functions, features and observations. Apologies for the background noises. And the "ums".
Getting your non-airtight stove going is fairly straightforward:
1) Open your dampers up fully
2) Open your ashpan or lower air inlet fully (ensuring your wood grate is also open)
3) Keep your upper air inlets closed and your oven diversion set to "off" or "open" so smoke flows freely up the flue and out the chimney
4) Put a small amount of paper, birch bark or easily ignited material in the base of your wood grate. Alternatively, some folks do this in the ash pan.
5) Place the usual fire-building materials over the paper on the wood grate (pencil sized sticks or thin kindling).
6) Nurse your fire until it's strong, opening and closing inlets/dampers as needed. Once you've built up the fire with larger wood and your stovepipe surface temps are over 250°F (roughly 120°C) you can get your oven warming up by closing the diverter to push smoke around the oven box before it exits the flue.
Your upper air inlet is like a mixture control in that you can bypass the fire and flow air directly over top of it (underneath your cooktop surface). This can help slow your fire and also lower/even out the temp of your surface and to a lesser degree, oven. Even fully damped down, these stoves leak air which can lead to overfiring or other undesirable conditions. So take your time, have patience and keep practicing and before you know it you'll be pulling out pies that would make your great grandma do a double-take (and not because they're charred black and raw inside).
Thanks for watching and participating!
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Hello from our New Hampshire farm. I restored a 1930 Home Comfort kitchen wood stove and it works great!
We named her Matilda. She can heat our 1,000 square foot home easily. It originally belonged to my husband's great uncle. Took me a year to restore her after it was sitting in a cabin for some 30+ years, next to the dairy barn.
Matilda is like having another person in my kitchen. She can be a bit tricky, but I have learned her ways over the past eight years. Nothing like her reliability for cooking and heating during a New Hampshire blizzard, when the power is out. ~ Diane
I got up and checked my smoke alarm. LOL
Thanks so much! We're cooking with a Queen Atlantic and your video offered just the guidance we needed. It was. perfect balance of science and folksy wisdom.
I'm old...old enough to remember wood/coal cookstoves. The romantic revival of using them is interesting and, I have to say, a little amusing. Because one of the things I remember very well is how happy all the women in our family and the neighbors were to abandon them in favor of gas, electric or even kerosene ("coal oil") cooking stoves. This was especially true in the summer months when not only the usual cooking was done but also most of the canning. Huge pressure canners were radiating massive amounts of heat, too. Brutal.
I remember sitting by a neighbors kitchen coal stove having coffee in the winter. We'd go over in the summer and she'd have moved everything important into her "summer kitchen" which was basically a seasonal porch with a smaller cookstove and a set of propane burners. These things are absolutely less convenient. When you're fiddling with a stubborn fire so you can get the coffee going and it's 47 degrees in your house, the romance tends to fade - but for us, it's a tool that serves a very important purpose and does it well. I do warm weather canning outside because regardless of the stove, the cottage is too small and wet condensation covered walls aren't any good!
@@RunninBird Know what you mean. My grandparents had a summer kitchen, too. That's where the kerosene stove was. There were large windows on 3 sides for good air flow. There was a coal-fired hot air furnace in the basement to heat the house. Operating it was complicated. Neighbors had a very large, 3 story house and there was a chimney fire one day. What an amazing sight! Looked and sounded like a huge blow torch. "The good old days".
Because it was work and hot in the summer,grew up with mama and grandma using them
@@RunninBird do you have co2 alarms over there
RunningBird- Just came across this video- Yes, back in the day, a kitchen wood stove could be a drudge, however, we use ours in the cold NH months only. I have a state of the art propane kitchen range, so we have the best of both worlds. NH tends to lose power, so our Home Comfort is a Godsend. We are a working farm with an abundance of firewood, so we heat with wood and propane. We are living the best of our 1935 and the best of 2023. I like the security of being able to live off grid when the power fails during a snow storm. The house is so quiet then, except for the ticking of the fire box and the sound of coffee perking on the back, by the stove pipe.~ Diane
Thanks for keeping a tradition going. Some things are just timeless. I got to thinking about when I would visit my grandmother back in the 1950's and she would cook on her wood stove. The best food I ever tasted.
@Malcolm Kenzo Which looked promising? Instaplekt, or Xzavier's girlfriend?
RunninBird, your right! Not a whole lot of videos out there to teach/show us the basic principles of using one. THANK YOU! I go pick up my very first in 2 weeks for the new cabin. I cant wait just to make coffee on it. Saved your video in my HOUSE GILE!! Excellent!!!!!
I got my stove & am doing a few videos on youtube of the full restoration!
Awesome!
Everything tastes much better in them antique stoves! Maybe is the work that you put cooking and making the fire, whatever it is, it’s just amazing!!!
I just looked up a company that restores those Glenwood stoves and they charge nearly $8000 for your C model. What a beautiful stove.
excellent video i consider myself a wood cook stove specialist as i have rebuilt more than a dozen of different makes. Love to see a baking video with wood cook stove
Where do you find parts to rebuild. We just bought a Monarch Malleable; 526. We had no idea there's a piece missing on the right side. May be a warming box or a tray we don't know. Additionally, there's a lot of rust and damage on the back that that we didn't see until we got it home and carefully gave it a once over. I'm proud to have it, but I'm concerned it may leak like a sieve.
Please Please continue with these videos.
I have a Monarch 1826 we restored completely. Learning this way of baking without a manual is trying to say the least.
The part your opening to cool the stove is called a check draft. And that's exactly what it's for. It draws cooler room temp air across the top of the fire and cools it.
I recommend a book called Woodstove Cookery. It's available online. For east coast people there are 2 places to buy restored stoves that are very good. The stove hospital in RI is one I really recommend
Thank you!
Hi :-)! Wish I had time to fully watch this, now. Not enough hours in the day. Thanks for this vid. Reminds me of a gargantuan dinosaur iron oven that was in a circa-1900 inn's kitchen I stayed at. That thing was bigger than my car!
I have a Home Comfort Model AC (Just over 100 years old) You run yours differently than I run mine. I let the ashes build up on the grates which turn into a coal bed. This saves tons of wood which lets you feed the stove less often Mine will keep a fire all night with this method. (6- 8 hours). I prefer to keep the lower draft closed completely and just use the top draft to regulate the fire. I keep the flue damper open pretty much all the time except maybe when baking sometimes.
The only time my fire is out is when I want to clean the stove. Maybe as many as 4 time a winter season depending on how much soot has built up. These stove are all different. It makes a difference as to how good your chimney is and how many elbows you have. To be efficient you shouldn't have more than two elbows before the chimney.
You are right there is not a lot on youtube about these kinds of stoves. It's nice that you took the trouble to make this video, I'd make one too if I knew how, lol
I watched this video over 2 yrs ago researching the topic. I forgot about it and this fall I coincidentally purchased the IDENTICAL porcelain stove but a Glenwood C. I got the coal and wood option. (When burning wood I just drop in a cast iron plate that lays over my rollers. We’ve baked bread/pizza/pressure can meat beans and bake cookies. I absolutely love it. I’ve cleaned out the ash/credited in the underside and top of the oven but haven’t done the back and side wall. I’d love to see an instruction video on that if you could make one. So thankful for this one. Cheers.
A couple years ago we replaced our 100 year old-ish Bélanger Excellent that we had been using since 1976. My lighting trick was to use a few sticks of pine til it got going. That stove was all cast iron with, of course, porcelain and nickel decoration. It didn’t go to the dump but is happily chugging away in a friends lake house. The new one is a lot thriftier to operate being airtight and I must admit it does light way easier. Thanks for the video.
Would love to see a cooking one!
We have an old Monarch woodstove in our barn. Created a “barn kitchen” in there. Wish I could post a pic. I love it. Came here for a review of operation. We bought it several years ago from an elderly couple out in the Teanaway Valley who just couldn’t deal with firewood anymore. They’d had it for years. I did bake bread in it once!
Good evening Sir, great informative video !!! Cheers
I found this video very useful for someone like myself who has never seen a wood cook stove in operation. I am looking to buy one right now to set up outdoors at a camp site. I never realized the importance of the chimney dampener.
I would really like to see more videos on how to use it, just for basic heating, for baking something like a turkey or bread.
I'll likely make a few more this winter, which seems like it'll be here before we know it!
Hey, looking for more videos! Thanks for sharing this. Hope you’re still enjoying your old stove. Cooking videos, please!
I was soooo tickled to find you and this video. I, too, have much love and respect for these old stoves. Waiting for a new home with me, in my shop is a big old Majestic (robin egg blue with rusted chrome, but will clean up) which was free. sound and complete. Out there is also an Advance in cream and green. It is a mid-size cutie and cherry. I think in one of the truck dry boxes is an electric/wood combination too. Sadly, it's shelf unit is gone. It is always such a treat to find an old cook book that is of these old stoves eras. The recipes are interesting. If you keep at these videos, there is so much you could show and teach. Repairing, reconditioning, restoring, finding parts, what to look for, how to move, links, sources...gee, it just goes on and on! Very nice video and I happily subbed! Thanks!
Thank you for the information. We have a family cabin that has a cook drove. I learned to use it by watching my mom. I realized as I've gotten older that I really didn't know what the different fiddles on the stove were for. I thought the upper feed door was for putting food scraps in to dry before they got pushed into the fire and burned up. Which of course it works well for that also. I am going to try messing around with my dampers more.
Thanks, came across an old book that had a chapter on these ovens which made me curious enough to look for and find this informative video.
Thanks. I found your video very helpful.I just bought an antique wood stove and I'm trying to learn all I can.
Thanks for doing that video man, I'm a new stove man and need to learn - cheers.
Well done. Thank you. We lived in Brockton 85-95. Fond memories.
I HAIVE the same exact stove. I brought it from a retired Postmaster General in upstate, N.Y. Palatine Bridge, N.Y. I havn't used it yet but I hope to this fall - i.e., Winter.
That's my stomping grounds!!!
Thank you for this! I'm writing a mystery novel that features a cast-iron stove like this one and I wanted to see it in action before I rattled off about it!
How'd it go?
Sounds hot.
I’d love to have one of them beauties one day as my main source of cooking!! lol your parakeets have a lot to say!!
Thanks for posting this . You did a great job explaining things .
Thanks!! I'm refurbishing my monarch wood stove now, I learned a lot on the utensils it came with and how to use them from your video.
You're right it is a bit of an obscure topic in a way,
I'm trying to clean the built in water tank and reuse it with a boiler Chemical solution, and also this weird solution that removes rust so well and it's non toxic too.
I'm painting it with high temperature paint also and it looks fancy!
Thanks. Interesting to see these antique stoves. It's probably difficult for me to control the heat for the top and the bake, since I have no idea on how to control a bbq's temperature. But it's lovely to be able to see people using them. Once, I had a chance to visit someone in San Francisco that had an old range that is already gas powered, but that thing looked gorgeous!
Well this video made me very grateful for my electric stove.
I just bought an old Majestic cook stove, and I found this very informative. Thanks! There's not a lot of info out there about how to use them.
Hi! Mind telling us where you bought it and what you paid?
What a beauty! I hope one day I can own a wood stove.
Great information. So cool and beautiful. My aunt had one for most of my life. She had it removed in the last few years cuz I think it was just in the way and maybe animals got into it. Not sure why. Sad to hear it's gone.
Thanks for making this! I hope to have a cook stove in the future and how are you going to learn unless someone teaches you? You are helping many. Keep it up!
I think it looks great I’d love to own one of these, thanks for sharing.
Great video! Thank you for sharing!
I just was given one of these old cook stoves...thanks for the tutorial
Love those old stoves
What a beauty. 😊
Thank you, great presentation.
Really cool. Thank you!
Great review! Thank you for that.
New here. This is a great channel. Watching this does being memories. My grandma still cooked with a wood stove.
Great job
My grandma used one of these.
Thanks for the great info!!
Any more operating and cooking videos on the way?
Good luck with your channel. I wish we had one of these. 🙂
Thanks! You can usually grab some variation on one of these for under $1,000 US. How much under is a matter of how much work it needs. I got this one for a couple hundred, took it apart and cleaned it, and voila.
@@RunninBird That's awesome. 🙂
Great video. Now cooking on it!😋
Thank you-I need to learn to cook on a wood cookstove, we have put an offer on a home built for off grid options-that only has a wood burning cookstove.
thanks
Wow nice
Hi! Thank you for this video! We bought a house with a Portland Atlantic 121 Wood stove and I’m trying to sort out how it works for heating. For heating what settings do I have them on to keep heat in? Thanks for any help! 🙏
I just bought a 1922 Clare gem wood cook stove. Looking for more info and would really like to hear some more on general wood cook stove information
Thank you for the helpful video. I know these videos take some time and effort to produce, but I'd love to see some more tips on cooking with these and, as you mentioned, buying and restoration tips for stoves to be used practically.
Can't seem to figure out how to setup ours for a front load (inner insert is locked in somehow?). Any info there would be great to see, too. Thank you again
If folks want a few basic cooking vids I'll definitely put something together.
RunninBird I’d love some. We’ve got a simpler model than yours (no top air vent at firebox and no way to circulate through oven) so not quite as adjustable. No one around uses them anymore it seems so the “community knowledge” has pretty well disappeared, even here in rural Saskatchewan.
Great video! I have an Ideal Sunshine cookstove and was amazed that it is so similar to yours. Can send you a picture if you want. Only have trouble baking bread as I can't get the temperature to 400 degrees. Any help would be appreciated.
I bake my bread at 350 and less in a regular electric oven.
Just installed and fired up my wood/coal stove for the first time today. Its main purpose is for heating but would love to do some cooking on it from time to time.
Would love some more videos showing you cooking and baking on it.
great
Thanks. About to get a house with that type of stove. I don't even know what to call it to google
Will you be creating a playlist of the different stoves you use and gooking on them???
Thanks..
Have you seen how much old ones like this go for restored? It's insane, I'm in the wrong biz.
True, but there are enough out there still that you can do yourself if you have a few weekends and are up for the fairly grungy work. It won't be restored, it'll be usable (if you do it properly). I've restored some of these the thorough way and a lot more work goes into it than at first you might appreciate: transporting, storage, disassembly, sandblasting, enameling, blacking, assembly & cementing and usually a bit of brazing & other metalworking along the way. Each one of these has at least a couple pounds of nuts & bolts in them, and sourcing parts involves scavenging other old stoves, finding newly cast bits, casting bits yourself or at worst, repairing cracked & broken items. I figure with all that work and a fairly low turnover, a few thousand per unit isn't so much a greedy price after all. Later models from the 1920s onward aren't nearly as expensive as the more rare or early examples. Brand new units aren't much (if at all) cheaper.
Thx for the video
I have a wood stove sitting in my garage for years now not operating I need to do a chimney for it.
What is your stove venting into.
Is it an old chimney or a triple wall pipe thanks for posting
I'm hoping to set up a bit of an outdoor kitchen this summer and a friend of mine is selling an old rusty stove. I'm wondering how to tell if it will work for baking bread but I dont know what parts to make sure of.
Liked your video very informative what do you use for a grate in your fire box ?
Neat !
When I close the chimney damper on my cabin Leda stove, lots of smoke comes out from around the burner circles. Is that normal or am I doing something wrong? Great overview.
There aren't a lot of Ledas around here, that's a really cool manufacturer to have. I'm not terribly familiar with their models, but if it operates on a similar principle to the one in my video, there are a few things that could be going wrong. The first thing to get out of the way is to ensure your chimney drafts well (sucks air outside nice and strong). A poor chimney will make even the best stoves run badly. So make sure it's not restricted with creosote or other debris, is well above any nearby obstructions, and so forth. If it's a brick & mortar chimney, I've heard of liner tile failing on the inside and partially blocking things up.
Assuming your chimney is good, you might be running your stove too cold (either from operator error, wet wood, chimney issue, whatever) or damping it down too early. If that's not it and everything is nice and hot, try closing your inlet air first, and then closing the damper afterward. This might allow your fire to slow down and produce less smoke, so you aren't backing up the stove when you do eventually damp it down. If your chimney has a weak draft or isn't up to temperature, and your stove damper is shut but the inlet air is open too far, you'll find that the smoke just looks for the next nearest exit. Hopefully that wasn't too much to take in, and good luck!
@@RunninBird Thanks for the detailed response. I'll try making sure I reach a good temp then restrict inflow before I damper next time and then go from there.
My Leda isn't a cook stove like yours, it's a little woodstove. It's not all together very tight, there are a number of tiny gaps but it sure can heat up my little cabin.
No problem. If it's one of those "box stoves" with the single or double lids on top, they don't really damper down all the way very well because they tend to have a lot of air leakage and typically run a little too big in the firebox for the stove pipe diameter they take. They get nice and toasty though, perfect for what you're doing.
Thanks for the video. I had restored a grey Glenwood K and cooked with it everyday for 20 years but never figured out when I should use the air vent on the top left side... so it was always left closed. What do you think it's for? The Bengal I restored and have used since 2010 has the same set up... never use that top air vent, only the ash vent and pipe damper for control.
The top left vent is opened when the top gets too hot or red...Let's cool air go on the top of the fire
This video is of great help! Currently writing a book set in the late 1880s and this is helping with the understandings of that time haha
❤👍
Great wood stove! Do you find that stuff gets clogged up in the bend of the chimney?
Thanks! Typically I don't have any issues, since most of the year it's burning hot enough to keep things clean. Occasionally you'll get ash buildup underneath the oven and that's the thing to keep an eye on.
@@RunninBird that's good then. I had a longer section of bent pipe and had lot of buildup so replaced for straight pipe all way up and no buildup now
Do you have videos more on wood cook stove ?
How do you keep it from smoking up the house?
Do you have birds in your house or do you need to change the batteries for the smoke alarm?
It's been a few years...have you gotten around to changing the batteries in the smoke detector?
Change the battery.
We have an old george washington we are hooking up, it doesn't have any fire brick in it, or any space for it in the firebox
How do you know if the top damper is open or closed and what is it’s purpose? Thanks.
Hi! How long can you have a fire in the stove until you have to let it burn down? Could a long time of firing the oven damage it? Or is it possible to use the oven for heating in the winter?
I run it continuously all winter long, more or less. I'm using furnace refractory clay as a fire brick, which is rated for something like 2,000°F (about 1100°C). The fire burns down to coals overnight if I don't really load it, but that's OK because it retains a lot of thermal mass and keeps the house well above freezing for the few hours we're asleep. We also take a day in the middle of the heating season to clean it out.
Looks like a coal grate .Is that correct?
How do you clean the stove pipe?
Wondering if there is a group or perhaps you I have a few questions about a similar stove I own
Ive been wanting one since i was like 19. im 27 now and i bet these are so hard to find! :(
Replace the battery 🔋
Are these stoves just for cooking. Can they also be used up heat a small house
Where is the video on what to look for when sourcing a wood cook stove?
have you ever thought of adding some soapstone in your oven to help retain the heat longer?
It's such a small oven that it would render it hard to bake, and we use the oven a lot. It's usually comfortable inside in the morning even though the fire dies. These stoves have a lot of mass.
@@RunninBird ok hope to see more and I also wanted to know are the extra covers to help clean the inside of the stove
How can you tell if the damper is opened or closed?
How can they still have olden time stuff
This is the old modell wood Cook stove
My parents live in Connecticut in a house that was built in 1707 and they have a fireplace big enough to park a car in. I don't think the families used this kind of stove.
Those fireplaces pre-dated wood stoves entirely. Colonial homes were built around a chimney stack and a summer beam, with at least one fireplace that was big enough to hold the cooking apparatus for an entire household. Then came the "Franklin stove" in terms of commercially available units, and after a lot of evolution, stoves such as this began to be introduced in the mid-late 19th century. I've seen these stoves physically placed inside of those old colonial fireplaces! A great bonus to stoves was that housewives no longer got burned alive from a skirt hem catching a flame. (Franklin stoves were basically metal fireplaces, but they reflected considerably more heat - you wouldn't necessarily call it a stove by modern standards.)
How I can get this one in india
What sq ft room do you think a stove like this could keep warm?
I have a queen Atlantic and it would keep a 20x20 easily. When we lose power it keeps my house 2400 square foot house warm.
the lids are ment to be removed for a pot or a pan to be seated in place
Replace the smoke alarm battery it's chirp
¿No es más fácil usar gas?
What is the temp to never exceed?
It depends on the stove, but I keep the flue temp around 275-300°F with the stove set to bake. It would be a lot hotter if it were venting straight into the flue. Too hot and you'll start warping the top over time among other things.
I heard the bird, the other chirp, fix the damn smoke detector.