I don't have a wood stove, make wood fires, etc, but it looks fun and I want a go. I've watched a lot of youtube about it. There is a thing that puzzles me.
Most fire building starts with tinder, gets it going, puts slightly bigger wood on top, then bigger still, and so on until it's time to add the pot. Then as the fire burns down you periodically slide wood under the pot and try not to burn yourself.
In the youtube videos of a few years back, there was a wave of "top lit updraft" (TLUD) stoves, burning "batches". You put a tight-ish pile ("batch") of your big sticks in a stove with a vented bottom, then built a small starter fire on top of it. With the right bottom-to-top airflow, smoke and woodgas rose through the fire at the top and got burned. It was low on smoke, and you didn't need to stick around feeding the fire.
These days the TLUDs seem to be out of fashion, all the attention is on dual chamber stoves like the Bushbuddy and Caldera inferno and the Four Dog Nights. People seem to use dual chambers the non-batch way, i.e. start a fire with small stuff then keep throwing bigger twigs on top. They're efficient, but they're not getting the "load and go" aspect.
So I wonder, can you use dual chambers as batch stoves, i.e. put all your bigger wood in then light a starter fire on top?
