Haha, I hear the same and with respect to the old remedies that are often true, burning wood is not that hard. Just make it freaking hot and everything will burn. We had the chimney sweeped after eight years by some expert. Just for insurance reasons. He spend more time opening and after that the conclusion was: it is all clean. Well close it quickly and I dont have to pay you 
With the Atmos the same, make it hot and it will do ok. Chimney is just a galvanised pipe from my work. It wont last forever but for the moment there is only dust inside. Other people here in the village just had their third chimney fire… We burn wood for 35 years, we know, it is this or that, not my fault… I just dont even bother to vent my opinion. Old rules dont apply if you dont know the basics anymore like they used to.
Each bucket weighs about 12 pounds which means each bucket is worth almost a gallon of gasoline .
Have Wood Will Travel
You better get it while you can, last time i checked, at the used steel place, it went from 40 Cents a pound too 140 a pound, crazy high around here.
Them must be gold in them there buckets, I caint hardly wait too get my dakota wood truck finished, befor gas goes up even higher again, if they steel the election again, in a couple years.
yep picked up 400’. kind wishing i would have picked up more now.
Spent several weekend hours “woodpicking”. Only with hand tools branch saw and machette. Made three such loads. Mostly birch and oak.
“Just make it freaking hot and everything will burn.” Good use wisdom there JoepK.
This year in three airtight wood stove in three house I/we burn three different woods.
Old English walnut by my older sister in the one house.
Cottonwood over long weekends up in our retirement house.
Doulas Fir down here 5 days out of seven in our main house.
It ALL works. These houses stay warm. The commonality is to first establish a deep hot charcoal bed. Then limited fuel adds onto that. Let that cycle through the initial flaring up, flaming pyrolysis, making a thick surface forming charring. Then the heat driven gassing thru that surface char lazy pretty colors flames. Then once all of the volatiles are used up settling into to an evolved charcoal burn. My favorite part in a glass fronted in-room woodstove. Red glow infrared heating. Bones warming.
The walnut cutting/splitting walnut makes me sneeze a lot. Need to ash clean religiously, once a day to keep the air jets unburied. And it ash fuses and slag clinkers.
Worst . . . needs two full summers years drying for us here. Otherwise, surface molds in the wood shed.
The cottonwood makes both my sister and wife sinuses stuff up. handling and buring it. I’m fine with it. Even worse ashing building up than the walnut. Every morning needing stove floor cleaning to get burning space volume back. But it does not ash fuse clinker. Although it will sun-air dry down on one summer here. Any rewetted and it soon grows molds and fungi. The spores from these gets to us all.
The Doulas Fir (a spruce) only ash builds up once a week. 1/10 the ash of these others Never ash fuses, clinkering.
Will easily in 6 summer weeks here dry down for wood stoving. Re-wetted, then just redries. Will re-dry in-house next to the wood stove. Will even make useful heat up to 30% by weight in my wood stoves. Takes years to develop any mold or fungi problems stacked an stored.
Sure, sure it char-out pops a lot. Not a problem in an enclosed wood stove. Refueling chasing embers can be fun. Sure. Sure. Only ~1/2 the wood weight by volume as these others when dried down. Need to store more volume ahead.
Yes.Yes. Burnt slow, smoldering and “long-stretched” It will chimney’s soots clog.
Here PNW wetside I will only buy; and could only sell Douglas Fir; Red Alder; and maple.
Ha! But I will use any wood species that is on-site or delivered to me free.
Purity. And Purist believers like Idealist believers can go cold. Stay cold. Pining-away (American colloquialism) for their perceived betters or bests.
Good-enough’s; and make-work’s are what will keep you warmed and fed.
Fuel woods, people, machines like chainsaws, vehicles it is the balance of all factors truely needing to consider.
Lab, BTU’s, is too overly simplistic.
S.U.
Thanks Mr Steve, you and the other guys taught me. When I signed up here I was just installing the Atmos gasifier. Still had to learn how to operate it. Paying for wood is something I just wont. The exception was for my parents. My father helped me when I started my hobbyclub. He retired at the age of 57 working for the government. I use to joke that after 40 years of doing nothing I finally got him working . He never wanted any money. He doesnt want our conifer or spruce so I bought him two m3 birch. €400+, auw.
Me, try to take it from our small plot and my clients. But that is drying too. More CNC, less left overs. I was lucky with a trailer Douglas fir, but it is a hell in a gasifier. Bridging a lot, is that the wood or the operator?
And I took down some willows. Still waiting for some dry period to take them to the burner. In theory it will be dry enough in one dummer. 
Had some drama today. Wife mentioned yesterday that she thought the stove wasn’t drawing well. She cries about any wisp of smoke so I didn’t pay much attention, regrettably. I normally clean my flue every three months during the heating season because of the way my stove is built the smoke path is serpentine through a lot of mass and by the time it reaches the flue, which is nearly 30 foot ( 9.14 meters) the temps are right around 200F. I burn full tilt for 12 hrs a day, all Ash and Maple, so creosote is not much of a problem except even a small amount will line the walls of the sub-heated flue. Not sure but I think by code, flue temps here should be high 300f or more. So after the fire was going good I was going to take a walk and loaded up the stove with some larger splits and cracked open the door to get it blazing good. Smoke began pour back out and the whole house was filled so you could see 10 feet in front of yourself. Luckily my wife had gone grocery shopping or she would have had my nuts on a skewer. 30f and I have all the doors and windows open fans at the doors and two air purifiers going. Had to pull all the burning wood out and dump it in a wheel barrow and douse it. Got up on the roof with the flue brush and the flue was pretty clean. The brush dropped right down through to the bottom when a big clump of something that look like black foam had plugged the base of the flue. I have been running that stove for 25 years and never saw anything like that. I should have taken a picture of it. Once I got that sucked into a shop vac we were back in business. Luckily the house was de-smoked before she got home. I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m afraid of her but. 
No clue what that black foamy stuff was from. Nothing gets burned in that stove except a little cardboard and fire wood.
Glad you were able to figure it out quickly and that you didn’t have any major problems.
Okay Tom, just because Wayne as talked about putting a dead cat in his gasifier truck and make enough fuel that he can go down the road a few miles, doesn’t mean you can burn just wood and cardboard in your fire place. Kidding a side.
A lot of so called cardboard has recycled plastics/glues for packing in it. I wonder if it could of caused this.
Are you sure your triple wall flume piping is okay?
Bob
Better safe then sorry Tom. I dont want to get into trouble either with my little Yugo-girl It is the same all over the world.
And you dont know what it was?
Had the same happen to us years back when we lived in an old brick chimney house. One night black smoke started pouring out of the bread oven door (it was how old houses used to be heated). We evacuated the house and soon the smoke stoped and a roaring flame started shooting from the top of the chimney about 10 feet tall. Burnt for a while and it spat out peaces exactly like you describe.
My theory is certain creosote or tar acumulates and if the conditions are right it puffs up like popcorn, forms a carbon foam essentialy. Forms a plug in the flue.
That’s just what it looked like Kristijan. In all these years I have never seen anything like it.
That flue pipe is Schedule 40 steel pipe I salvaged out of a dumpster Bob. They were to be bollards for a loading dock on a building I was working on. No Idea why they threw them out. I welded the sections together as I built the two story house. They are just as solid as when I put them in.
Good safety exchanging guys.
I did not want to intrude and respond to JoepK question to me until now.
JoepK, in my opinion your difficulty with Doulas Fir wood in a gasifier is the gasifier design.
Think about the many woodgasifier use exchanges you read here on the DOW.
Summed up, “I try to limit my use of Fir, Spruce, Pine (all pitchy conifer woods) and use my better Birch, Ash, Maple, Beech, even Oaks.”
So most gasifer designs were made around a low-pitch-resin, hard charcoal making hardwoods. With these woods all being much higher ash than conifer woods.
Design, develop and build for conifer woods characteristics and then those woods will work just fine too. That systems features can then easily use the deciduous hardwoods too then.
But the reverse; not so much easy.
Conifer woods will sticky tar glue much more mid-system then hard deciduous woods. Use added heating there to melt flow the tars. either removing the flowing tars or dripping them down across the hot nozzles faces. Alternatively, use up and down rodding to loosen and drop these build ups. The old gas-plants way. The Soviet Forestry systems way. Specific dedicated rodding ports, capped off.
Conifer woods in-system made chars are fragile, easily crumbled into char dust. Chain hanging grates have an upwards crushing movement. No hanging grates! No aggressive grates! Gentle grate movements. Hopper vibratory shakers will compact conifer woods char beds!!
The ash-blow-through systems many use on their hardwoods will turn conifer wood’s fragile char into a downstream char dust, fuel wasting, and filters clogger.
Moderate flow velocities only. Upsize internal dimensions for lower flow rates and to accommodate the lese dense bulkier conifer wood. Chunk size 50% bigger than a hardwood’s normal.
Not just my opinions. My experiences and others having to depend on local conifer woods.
Ha! Ha! Now this is a distinct SteveU opinion. there is a much bigger difference between true raw conifer woods and it’s Kiln-dried stabilized forms like in say shipping pallets then when these are hardwoods.
Only designing, building around heat cooked stabilized shipping pallets woods, framing cut-off woods; will mean your system will choke when needs-must, then forced onto green cut air dried woods.
S.U.
One thing I have noticed is there is a big differances in hard woods. I have burn only oak wood and I see very little tars coming out of the wood this is Ron L. Wood at Argos. Kiln dry.
Back home on my raw out of the orchard air dried hard cherry wood lots of tar with every hopper load. Best to dump my water/tar condensation tank at the end of a 200 miles of driving because it will be full in 300 miles with this cherry wood. Apple wood a lot less tars. Scrap wood lumber very little tar compared to the cherry wood.
One trick I have learned is to let my hopper get hot once in a while, over 200°f when running low on wood, this helps to keep the hopper clean of a build up of tars on the wall. It just runs down the sides of the hopper and into the firetube to be burned up. This might be why I get a lot more power as my heat increases in the hopper with low wood in the hopper.
Bob
3297 replies on this thread, might include my question? Different wood burn with their specific characteristic ways. I am building my first experimental tar maker(fema), is there some fuels i should not go into? i.e. car tyres… 
Now, I really have almost limitless pallet wood supply, these aren’t standard pallets so they go to waist, might as well use them for fuel. There are some foreign softwoods and hardwoods at those piles sometimes, and i have noticed how they even smell different, might burn differently then?
Wood pallets from Saudi’s, Azerbaijan, Europe, USA, Barzil so on… I wonder where does the Emirates get their wood? Not from their local woods.