The wood stove

Its cold up here in the North.  We heat with wood.  It took us some days to get it hooked up so we were cold for a little while but now we are HOT. It really heats up the house.  I would say the loft area is like a sauna.  We have to keep the windows open even with a little fire.  We have a little French wood burning stove.  This is a "Mirus" stove.  It is iron with a porcelain finish.  It is a sea foam green color.  There is a company in England that is refurbishing them so they have a website.  They are not cheep but they are soooo cool and I love mine.  I found mine on ebay and had the steel fire box inside rebuilt so it ended up being about the same price as what they charge.  We use it for every thing right now heating water, cooking our food and heating our house.  The wood stove had issues originally and I would urge anyone putting one in a tiny house to be sure they have taken as many safety precautions as possible with them.  Very Very glad I put heat shielding around the stove because the clearance has to be less for smaller spaces.  18" regular 9" with shielding but it's still hot and crazy to know that if the heat shielding was not there the house would catch on fire....no joke.  We had an issue with the stove in that it didn't come with a baffle so the flames were shooting through the T-flue and turning it bright red.  That heat shielding probably saved our house.  So we fit a baffle in the flue collar.  Now the flames have to work to get around it but we still have good draft.  Also we initially didn't have wood to burn so we had to find wood around.  The problem with little stuff is that it burns to fast and too hot.  

Lately we have been having issues with the creosote.  We are burning hard wood but sometimes in the beginning we were burning douglas fir scraps.  Not good because its pine. Secondly sometimes our wood is wet and thirdly we can't really burn it that hot to burn the creosote off because its too hot and we are afraid of starting a chimney fire.  We were using a creosote remover and cleaning it with a pellet stove brush at least once a week but that didn't seam to really be doing anything because one day my partner took the chimney apart and there was only a one inch hole for the smoke to go up! This was only after a months time!  That explains why it was not drafting and backing up tons of smoke.  We are so lucky that nothing has happened.  

There is another manufacturer that I think I would recommend for wood stoves for tiny spaces and that is Kimberly stoves.  They seam really safe for a wood stove and the clearance required for tiny spaces in minimal.  

My boyfriend/partner has lived in small spaces before with them.  Actually there are some funny stories and some not so funny stories that I want to tell.  I'll tell the bad one first to get that out of the way but it is important I share it with you so you understand the potential danger with wood stoves and tiny spaces.  He had a wood stove outside but somewhat close to a refrigerator truck that he refurbished the inside of and lived in. He somehow pumped the hot air inside.  It had a metal finish on the exterior. One of those white delivery truck things.  The wood stove heated the metal and the polyiso insulation up and caught the thing on fire.  His dog beat the door down and made it out the door alive but he lost everything else.  He said it raged and they are lucky it didn't catch the woods on fire.  I guess the fire burnt for days.

Ok the funny ones. There was a time that he lived in a pickup truck.  A regular one.  Well not really that regular.  He had extended the truck where the gate was and had a cab over the bed of the truck and somehow enclosed the gate too.  He lived in it with his big german shepherd and somehow he had put two solar panels on the roof.  I guess he painted it white so it looked like a space ship.  He lived in parking lots and wherever he could. He would watch a movie but sometimes he didn't have enough battery power and he would have to stop the movie before it ended.  He would try to save up enough battery all day to watch a movie and would pray that he would get to watch an entire movie from start to end in one sitting.  So a few funny things about the wood stove situations were that he had the wood stove in the passenger seat and it melted the dashboard.  Sometimes when he was driving down the street the wind  would rekindle the flames so you would see smoke coming out the stack.  Another funny thing was that people would come up to the window on really cold days when it was below zero and ask him if he was ok and he would open the window and he would be wearing a T-shirt practically slathering on the suntan lotion because it was so hot inside.

I realize I am probably turning you off from having a wood stove in a tiny house but I would still do it and I think its a necessity where I live though the propane one for the tumbleweed houses might work but it would have to run all the time.  I think it is safe if you take enough precautions and install and maintain the wood stove safely.