Building Fires and Consultation

Another physical process that reflects on "consultation" is building a decent fire in a wood-stove,  something that most people today no longer know how to do!

My wife and I lived in a small apartment on an organic farm for a few years, in the Detroit Michigan area which "does winter."  The only heat was from a small wood stove.

So I got pretty good at building a fire, and there is a science to it.

For those who are truly young,  actual wood mostly does not burn if you hold a match to it, the way that artificial logs sold in the supermarket do. It takes some design effort to get  fire going.

Bonfires are one kind of fire, where you typically build a teepee shape, starting with crumpled balls of newspaper or very dry tinder,  covering that with a larger teepee of tiny sticks, covering that with a teepee of medium size sticks,  covering that with a teepee of small logs, covering that with a teepee of large logs.  When you're done it looks like this:

And maybe a lesson we can take away from that is that sometimes you need to get a small conversation going and get things warmed up before you can move on to a larger, deeper conversation.

But let's look at the science of making a blazing fire in a wood-stove, at least the way I did it.

To get the fire going,  I'd split two large logs in half and make a tunnel out of the pieces, with the flat sides pointing inwards, like this:

 

The tunnel should go from the front of the woodstove,  where the vent is which lets in air, and run to nearly the back of the stove, with enough room for heat and smoke to get out the back of it and go up the chimney.

Chimneys it turns out not just decorative,  or there to let the smoke out,  but are essential to the operation of the stove.   The chimney itself needs to become hot, or at least warm,  so that it warms the column of air running from down at the stove up to the very top of the chimney outside.

The reason for this is that "hot air rises", for reasons covered in some other blog. If the air is not hot, it doesn't rise.  Duh.

Once the fire is going, the hot air keeps the chimney hot, so smoke in the room isn't a problem, as the chimney actually sucks air from the woodstove into it.   More precisely the rising column of air makes a partial vacuum that sucks new fresh air in the vent in the front of the woodstove, through the wood-sided tunnel you just made,  and then up the chimney and then out to the outside.

To start that whole process its enough to just crumple up a sheet or two of newspaper, put it in the wood tunnel and light it.  

Then you can proceed to make a small campfire inside the wood tunnel -- a sheet of crumpled paper on the bottom, covered with some criss-crossed small sticks, and maybe topped with a few larger sticks or split pieces of wood maybe 1 inch ( 2.5 cm) on a side.  Light that with a match at the bottom and it should catch and start burning, which will further get the chimney working.

Now you have the chimney drawing air across the fire, so you don't need to blow on it or wave a fan at it or otherwise add more air -- the fire heats the chimney and the chimney draws in air across the fire, making it burn brighter, which draws in more air, which makes the fire burn brighter,which draws in more air, etc.

What you have made there is a "feedback loop".   The action of the loop saves you a lot of effort and makes a tiny fire grow into a larger one by something akin to "compound interest".   The more fire you have, the easier it is to make more fire, which is also true of the campfire.

But we're not done.  Remember the wood tunnel that surrounds this tiny campfire?  All the time the fire is burning inside it, the wood surfaces are getting hotter and hotter until finally they will burst into flames -- below, above, and on both sides of the fire.

So, why is this important?  Why not just stack smaller to larger pieces of wood , like this:

The reason you want a tunnel is that you are building a closed space  (well,with open ends) in which the heat is trapped and starts literally bouncing off the walls.

The result goes way beyond simply having any log that is lit heating up and causing other logs to light, in a cascade effect, although that's a good thing too.

 It turns out there is a simple way to make a blazing fire rapidly,  called a "Swedish Torch"

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_torch ) 

It looks like this:  You take a big chunk of a tree and instead of cutting  it into pieces you just cut slits in it.

 Video of making a Swedish torch:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d617KVXfifs

What this creates is four slits.  In each slit, two large flat faces of wood surface face each other a short distance apart. It helps if you can drill out the center a little bit.  You also drill a hole from the outside into the middle, near the bottom of the slits.  Then, you just drop some wood shavings or tinder down the center hole and drop a match in it.

It should start burning easily. And keep burning even in subzero temperatures and high winds.

After a few minutes you can use it as a stove.  If it's burning too hot, you can just plug up the bottom hole a little bit.

The secret here, and a moral for life, is that "two logs burn brighter than one!" A pair of people, working together, has much more strength than two people working separately, and the "fire" is way less likely to "go out' in your mission.

Psych studies also show that when two people walk together up a hill, each of them perceives the hill to be less steep.     In fact,  orienting your efforts around love for another person can make any task easier, as the famous theme for Boys Town illustrates:

On the importance of "spaces"

It's worth taking a second to consider the fact that the key thing, in my understanding, in building a fire is the empty space,  not the logs.

Whether you are looking at a fire or Cosmology,  it turns out that there are many different kinds and qualities of "empty space". 

Some religious guidance mentions that we should attend to "building spaces" in which certain kinds of constructive conversation or activity can occur.  There is more content to that phrase than just an accidental choice of words.

Looking at the example of the wood stove,  part of what drives a blazing fire is the part you tend to ignore, namely, the chimney, and a way for some of the heated air to flow out to the outside world.   You might at first think you would be better off "keeping all the heat", and closing the chimney.    In fact,  sharing the heat drives a small fire into a blazing fire. 

Also,  as scientists looked into the properties of spaces, they realized that there is a type of "magic" , or actually quantum mechanics, happening that is not obvious.   Two logs facing each other burn "brighter than they should."    An extreme example can be seen in a block of metal that is hollow inside and has a small hole allowing you to look inside it.   If you heat the block,  while the outside is still relatively cool, the inside gets much "hotter than it should" and in fact starts glowing white hot.

It's not quite a laser, but it's another example of the surprising power that a swarm of radiators, even two, can tap into if they are set up to work together.

Two other examples of fascinating "spaces" :

1) Vortex Tube

This is a hollow tube of metal, somewhat like a flute, with one hole on the side and one on each end. It has no moving parts. You inject compressed air in the side, and the tube separates it into hot air which comes out one end and cold air which comes out the other. The hot can be boiling hot, and the cold can be so cold there is frost. There are no moving parts other than the air.  

These are used in industrial settings for cooling where electricity might be dangerous.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube
http://www.gyroscope.com/d.asp?product=VORTEXTUBE
also known as "Ranque-Hilsch vortex tubes"

2) the Cavity Magnetron

This is one Western civilization has grown to love, and you probably own one even though you've never seen it.

The "cavity magnetron" is basically a block of metal with a fancy hole cut through it, a wire stuck down the middle,the air sucked out of the hole, a battery attached between wire and the sides, and the whole thing stuck between the poles of a magnet.

Turn it on and microwaves come out the end. It's used for radar and home microwave ovens. There are no amplifiers, electronics, vacuum tubes, or other moving parts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetron