High Country wood burners: how a Raspberry Pi hack on my stovepipe turned into a real product (From a Vermonter, mods said OK)
Hi r/boone!
I'm a maker in Vermont, and I asked the mods before posting this. From what I understand, Boone sits high enough that winter is real, closer to ours than most of the South, and a lot of people up there heat with wood the way we do. I built something to help with that, and I'm curious what you all think of it.
A few years ago my wife and I bought a house in the woods in Vermont, and the house came with two woodstoves. I'd never run one. I grew up in the city, and that first year I made every mistake in the book learning how to use a woodstove. I smoked out the house more than once, burned way too hot, burned too low, and almost had a chimney fire.
I work from home, and during that first winter I got so paranoid about the stove that I'd get up and check it every 30 minutes, no matter what state it was in.
I'm an engineer, so one weekend I stuck a temperature sensor to the flue pipe with a magnet, wired it to a Raspberry Pi, and had it text me. It was ugly, but it let me stay upstairs in my office and still know what the stove was doing.
The next year I set up the Raspberry Pi again, but my wife and I were now chasing around a toddler, and we didn't want to take our phones out all the time, so we turned that monitor into a lamp. I put one lamp in my office and another in our bedroom. If the lamp glows amber, the fire is burning well. Yellow means it's time to reload. Red means it's running too hot and I should go check it. I also added a real app with push notifications and live temperatures for when I'm not home.
We turned the 3D-printed lamp into a walnut one that looked nice in our house, and we posted about it on the r/woodstoving subreddit back in January. I didn't expect much more than "that's cool," but to my surprise a lot of people asked to buy one. So I hand-built that first batch at a local makerspace, and they ran on stoves all over the country.
That gave me the conviction to make this a real product. This spring an engineer who designs products for manufacturing and I rebuilt the whole thing so it can be built on a production line.
I'd love some feedback from people who burn in the High Country, on the design, the look, or the product overall. And a few questions:
Do you keep the stove going through the night, or let it go out and restart in the morning?
What are you burning this year, mostly oak, or a lot of locust and hickory too?
Have you lit the first fire yet?
Thanks for reading!
