Not really. You don't want to simply burn wood in a ceramic cooker. You are asking for creosote deposits on the inside of the cooker. Also, you may find it very hard to regulate the temperature because the wood may choose to ignite and burn with a flame, sending the temperature sky high. If you cut down on the airflow, the flames may go out and the wood will smolder producing clouds of smoke.

Layout - My husband is having trouble with the layout/cuts in the ceramic tile for our tub/shower area. There is an uncentered window in the primary wall. He keeps saying "no matter how I figure it, I still end up with 1/2" gap at the top of wall". Is there any way you can tell him what he's doing wrong? Thanks SOOO MUCH! Exterior Chimney - Do you have any information on tiling the exterior of a stucco chimney? Below freezing in winter.

When plants grow they use carbon dioxide from the air to make their wood. If you burn the wood the carbon is released back to the atmosphere. As long as you grow another plant/tree then a stable carbon cycle is set up. So ,the use of sustainably produced wood as a fuel does not increase the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

It's hard to have too much, but you don't want to have too little. The minimum amount of charcoal you should probably ever use (except perhaps for ultra-low temperature smoking like cheese), is enough to just about fill the fire box. For high temperature cooking like steaks, you need to fill the fire box to the top. For long overnight low and slow cooking, you may want to load it up to about halfway up the fire ring so you are sure to have enough to last the entire cook.

If you are having trouble controlling the temperature on your cooker, you may wish to read our page on Temperature Control. In general, it is harder to cool the cooker than to heat the cooker, so you should strive not to get into a position where you do have to cool the cooker. However, if you want to cool the cooker down, all you can do close the vents and wait. Whatever you do, don't douse the whole cooker with a flood of water.

Oh happy day! The answer to this one is that you generally don't have to clean the cooker out! Obviously, you will want to clean the grid and occasionally clean out excess ash, but the walls of the cooker itself will turn black with use. They will build up a layer of smoke, fat, ash, whatever. This is ok! The cooker isn't supposed to stay white inside. You may find that this layer of build up will flake off from the inside of the dome over time.

Ah, here's another topic to which we have devoted an entire page. Click here to read our Brisket Hints and Tips page.

You may be tempted to put something like a Lodge dutch oven in your cooker, heat it up to frying temperatures and then deep fry some catfish or something like that. BAD IDEA!! If you spill the oil, or if the oil bubbles over the edges of the pot into the fire, you will have quite a firebomb to contend with. Do not use your cooker as a fryer! You can sautee using small amounts of oil (see our page on Paella for details), but do not deep fry!

Well, there are so many different possibilities here that perhaps you need to see some examples and then design your own. Most of the plans we have seen are for Big Green Egg cookers, but they should be adaptable to most brands of cookers. Click here to read possibly the most bizarre account of building a table ever written. My starting point was the Big Green Egg table plans which you can link to below.

In wetter climates, you may find that mold will grow in your cooker if you don't use it that often. First, how to get rid of it? Light up a hot fire in the cooker and let it just burn all the mold away. Second, how to prevent it? Well, any technique that can be used to prevent moisture from getting into the cooker will help: If it is a real problem, try this: After you are done cooking, let the cooker heat up for about 20 minutes after you remove the food.

You can make minor repairs to broken ceramic cookers using a product called JB Weld. Here's a link to our webpage where we show step by step how we repaired a broken cooker: How To Repair A Ceramic Cooker

This depends on the brand of cooker you are using. The Kamado company cookers with tiles must be broken in with a certain number of hours of low temperature cooking. This is to cure the grout and adhesive holding the tiles and failure to do so can result in tile failure. On the other hand, the Komodo Kamaodo tiled cookers require no break-in whatsoever because they are "pre-broken in" at the factory. Simpler ceramic cookers like Big Green Egg and Primo do not require a break-in.

This is another topic for which we have separate pages. First of all, the seminal work on this topic was written by Elder Ward in the Big Green Egg Forum. Click here for Elder Ward's writeup. He includes instructions for building and maintaining the fire, preparing and cooking the meat, as well as recipes and tips for serving the meat. We also have a page about the topic from the perspective of a first time cook, recounting our very first overnight pulled pork cook.

In a word, NO. PT wood is used for it's resistance to insects and decay, but it gets these properties through the use of modern science. It contains arsenic as well as insecticides, fungicides and solvents. When burned these are released into the air in the smoke. It is not fit for man nor beast!

Wood such as oak, cherry, ash and other dense types are good to burn. Their moisture content is much lower than the softer types such as pine and cottonwood.

We cannot say exactly. 4 to 6 cords should heat most any 3-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot home in Northern Minnesota, where the temperature can drop to 40 below zero. 2 to 3 cords of wood in milder regions of the country. Many people can purchase a full year's supply of quality firewood for a Charmaster Furnace for the price of one month's normal heating bill using oil, gas or electric heat. We would burn mostly unsplit wood if the diameter is 10 inches or less.

No. Acucraft Fireplace Systems have a firebrick lining that lines the inside of the fire box. We recommend building a fire directly on the firebrick, which will continue to radiate heat after the fire has dwindled. Also, by burning directly on the firebrick, the fire burns the logs more efficiently by burning the entire log which eliminates unburned log chunks.

Wood can be burned in a smokeless zone if the appliance (i.e. the stove or boiler) has an Exemption Certificate. Companies which manufacture stoves with Exemption Certificates include Clearview, Vermont Castings, Dovre, Dunsley Yorkshire Stoves, Morso and Jotul. A full list can be found at http://www.uksmokecontrolareas.co.uk/appliances.php?country=e. Obtaining an Exemption Certificate is an expensive and lengthy process.

No. Gas fireplaces are designed to burn gas only. Burning wood would damage the fireplace and could be very dangerous.