The good news is --- I'm pretty sure we defeated the smoky wood stove. I don't actually know if the problem was ashes building up on the baffle causing draft problems or smoke leaking out the gap in the stove pipe. But we dealt with both potential problems at once and one or the other (or both) did the trick.

The bad news is --- that awful scent you get when you fire up a brand new wood stove for the first time? It must come from the heat-resistant sealant. When we stoked up the fire Monday evening after Mark sealed the pipe for me, the trailer filled with such an awful odor that I opened the door and windows even though it was below freezing outside.

It took about twenty-four hours for the scent to burn off, but now we seem to have a tight, smoke-free wood stove once again. Moral of the story --- if your stove begins to smoke when you fire it up the first time in October...don't put off the problem until the weather is so bitter cold you can't keep the windows open for more than half an hour at a time. Instead, learn from our mistakes and seal your stove in warm weather so you can off-gas in safety.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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