ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602120063
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: Dispatches from Rye Hollow
It's been colder than a fish's belly in Rye Hollow. With the freezing temperatures and all, our cast-iron wood stove has suddenly become the center of our little household.
Our two dogs and three cats encircle its comforting fire, orbiting ever closer as the temperature drops.
Since the stove is in the basement, Koko, the retriever, sprawls across a vent in the kitchen floor. Earlier in the day, she lost her ball in the snow. A walking definition of hangdog, she came in and headed straight for her spot over the vent.
The others have their places as well. Lucy, our less-materialistic German shepherd, prefers the insulated solace of the library and spends much of her time there. The cats sleep at the top of the basement steps - where heat tends to collect - stirring only when I step over them to check on the fire, something I do fairly often.
This small task offers a welcome diversion from writing when words and sentences don't arrange themselves as they should.
Checking the fire releases me, however briefly, from the gentle persecutions of my word processor.
I open the double doors, and the initial blast of hot air sets me back on my heels. Before long, though, the heat cast by the glowing coals warms and soothes me, inside and out. I stuff a log or two into the stove, pull up another as a seat, and sit and gaze awhile at the fire.
I've always been a campfire man myself, but a blaze in a wood stove will do in a pinch. The glowing coals have a hypnotic effect on me. It's a wonder I get anything done at all, because I'd much rather sit and watch the fire than struggle with the unruly sentences waiting for me upstairs.
As is often the case, I strike a happy medium and head for the bookcase.
A wood stove, I discover, heats in two ways: convection and radiation. Convective heating is the result of moving heated air from one place to another. In our house, this means that hot air from the stove rises and passes through the vent, flows around Koko, and is transferred to the rest of the house.
Radiant heating, on the other hand, works in much the same way as the sun heats the Earth. The sun's radiant energy travels in waves - it is radiated - through the cold emptiness of space.
Unlike convective heating, no actual heat is transferred.
Instead, radiant energy is converted into heat when it strikes a surface - the Earth, for instance, or your face when you stand in direct sunlight. Even on very cold days, you can feel how this energy is converted into heat as it warms your face. (On cloudy days, some of this energy is absorbed by the clouds.) Like the sun, a hot wood stove emits radiant energy, too.
Because it heats so efficiently, the wood stove warms the house more completely than would ever be possible with our electric baseboard heaters alone. It takes the edge off any lingering chill and lasts hours after the fire has burned down.
There is, however, a downside: Wood stoves do need wood.
And since this has been such a cold winter, we've gone through an awful lot of it. Where the woodpile was 6 feet high and four stacks deep two months ago, it's down to only 3 feet and a single remaining stack. I'll have to buy a load or cut one myself.
Anyway, getting it in is another matter. Unless we have a spell of warmer weather, the driveway is too icy to get the wood up to the house. And if the weather trends toward warming, maybe we won't really need the wood in the first place.
One thing is certain: I can't wait till the hammock is once again the center of this little household.
It couldn't happen soon enough to suit me.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB