Wood Heaters, page-162

Just discovered your interesting thread.
We have a few acres with enough fallen and dead wood to heat our home. We have gone to the next step and built a small dwelling from the ground up. We installed hydronic heating in a slab and use solar collectors and a small heater style boiler to heat a water storage which we then circulate through the floor as required. This system has halved the wood we need for the year.
We have learned a lot about fires with this boiler. Because the fire takes a few minutes longer than a normal heater to get up to full temp because of the envelope of water, we need to get it going as quickly as possible to minimise the smoke. Of course it is also warmer than a normal heater to start with because of the water.
I am paranoid about chimney smoke even though we are out of town.
Most of the time we burn sticks or a bit bigger. The smaller the fuel the less smoke you get on start up and in fact anytime, so, most times we adjust the size of the wood instead of the air controls as we need to minimise the size of the fire because we don't need the fire to actually heat the space because the floor is constantly at 18-22 degrees.
It took a bit of getting our head around the fact that we don't actually need the fire going to be warm!
Hydronic heating is by far the best heating I have ever lived with. You can leave an out side door open in the middle of winter for 5 or 10 minutes and within 2 minutes of closing the door the place is back up to temp as every part of the construction is already up to temp.
We don't actually fall trees just for heating, so our fuel supply is 100% renewable.
We havn't needed to clean our flue so far in 6 years but I hate the chinamans cap that was fitted originally. The resistance to flow is obvious just watching it work.... or not work.
Im going to go looking for the venturi type spoken of here. Are they a mass produced article? Are they open to the weather at the top? I assume not?
Sorry for the long post. Its good to find those with a common interest.