Timeline for Given limited space and weight what should I carry to get a fire going with damp wood?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
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| Dec 4, 2018 at 21:11 | comment | added | Johnny | @Whelkaholism - while true, if you put your hand a few inches to the side of a fire and then put it a few inches over the fire, I think you'll see that the hot air carries more heat away from the fire than radiation, so you're losing quite a bit of heat (that would otherwise help dry the big wet logs) by putting the kindling on top. | |
| Dec 4, 2018 at 15:58 | comment | added | Chris H | This lifts the base of the fire off wet ground as well. Once the top of a log is smouldering, heat will conduct further into the log and dry it out. I've used this aproach years ago to dry out more wood when starting with a small amount of dry stuff. You can also use wet logs to form the walls of a fire pit, pushing them in when necessary (assuming suitable ground) | |
| Dec 4, 2018 at 13:53 | comment | added | Whelkaholism | Anecdotal evidence: I have used this technique on garden bonfires with wet and green material and it was extremely effective. | |
| Dec 4, 2018 at 13:51 | comment | added | Whelkaholism | I would like to add that "heat" doesn't rise; hot AIR rises. Radiative heat will go down from the top to the wet wood just fine. Put your hand on the ground near but not above a red hot glowing fire core to see how much heat that can be :) | |
| Dec 4, 2018 at 13:33 | comment | added | Ilmari Karonen | @JamesJenkins: Heat does indeed rise, but embers fall down. Having some larger pieces of wood at the bottom of the fire helps retain the heat from those embers where it's useful, since even damp wood is still a better insulator than wet ground. The embers in contact with the wood at the bottom will also char it and release flammable pyrolysis gases. Even if those gases aren't initially hot enough to sustain a flame by themselves, the airflow will pull them up into the main fire above them, where they help sustain it. | |
| Dec 4, 2018 at 11:23 | comment | added | AdamV | I suspect it is not just the heat from above that dries the wood (as pointed out this will be minimal because most of the heat goes up from a fire, although it must be a factor), but the convection current caused by the fire creates enough draught to help the wood to evaporate the moisture it has | |
| Dec 3, 2018 at 20:57 | comment | added | Noah Goodrich | @JamesJenkins Fair enough. As I stated in my answer, I haven't tested this in wet conditions so I only know what is claimed on the internet. Also - "wet" depending on where you are from is very different. I'm from Utah so two days of rain is a monsoon. In Western Washington that's Thursday. | |
| Dec 3, 2018 at 18:42 | comment | added | James Jenkins | I like the format of your answer in that you have example videos and summeries. I disagree with your hypothesis though, I used to live in Western Washington (USA) and it was always wet, The problems is that heat rises, so very little heat transfers to the wet wood underneath. You need to have the wet wood next to or above the fire for the fire to dry it out. | |
| Dec 3, 2018 at 17:30 | review | First posts | |||
| Dec 3, 2018 at 18:42 | |||||
| Dec 3, 2018 at 17:28 | history | answered | Noah Goodrich | CC BY-SA 4.0 |