While wood burning is not an ideal heating solution, it does have a number of advantages over modern heating equipment. It is a renewable resource, does not add carbon to the atmosphere on geological time scales like fossil fuels, can be harvested locally with simple tools, and does not require modern infrastructure to support it. However, wood stoves are not high-tech items and as a result, are not very amenable to automation, At least except the wood stove it’s from [jotulf45v2].
While this doesn’t automate the loading or direct control of a modern pellet stove, it does help [jotulf45v2] Know the best time to put more wood in the stove and help keep the stove in the right temperature range to avoid dangerous creosote formation in the chimney due to low temperature burns. Two temperature sensors, one in the burner and one in the burner tube, monitor burner exhaust temperature. They feed data to the Node-RED system running on the Raspberry Pi which automatically notifies the user via text message when a certain burner temperature is reached.
For anyone who heats wood, a tool like this is indispensable to help avoid spending a lot of time starting a fire quickly without extending the burner. Modern pellet stoves have some of the more modern conveniences that come with them, but many of the advantages of using wired wood are lost with these appliances. There are many other ways to heat with wood too; Check out the special wood boilers that double as hot water heaters.
