Monday, November 22, 2010
The Stove
Here's the wood/electric stove in the kitchen. It's late 30's to early 40's vintage, when electrification was coming to rural Washington, but people weren't about to trust cooking and heating to new-fangled electricity. The stove is a Monarch, once famous for their woodstoves, now long out of business. The oven is both wood and electric. We built a nice fire to pre-heat the oven, put a chicken in to roast, and if the fire gets too low, the electricity comes on.
You can add fuel through the burners, or if you want to put in some bigger firewood, it has a special top that allows most of the top to lift. It also has a built-in timer on the backsplash. I found matching salt and pepper shakers for the warming shelf.
Because it is probably an electric conversion of a wood stove, the controls are on the side. They aren't marked as to which knob controls which burner, so it can be a little confusing at first.
The hood fan is a modern stainless with the actual fan in the attic where it can't be heard. Because of the tight construction, it is possible to backdraft the stove if it's not warmed up yet and the fan is turned on high. It has a dedicated cold air feed on the back side that comes from outdoors, but even that isn't enough. If you go back to the first picture, you'll see that the exterior door has a "speakeasy" in it (you can see that it is open). By opening the speakeasy, there is no backdrafting of the stove with the hood fan on and the dryer running. Still, it requires a little thought before lighting the woodstove.
# posted by gnome-honey @ 12:46 PM 
