Although wood burning is not an ideal heating solution, it does have a number of advantages over modern heating appliances. It is a renewable resource, does not add carbon to the atmosphere over geological time scales like fossil fuels, can be harvested locally with simple tools, and requires no modern infrastructure to support it. However, wood stoves are not a high-tech thing and are not particularly amenable to automation as a result, At least except for this wood stove from [jotulf45v2].
While this does not automate the loading or direct control of a modern pellet stove, it does help [jotulf45v2] Know the best times to load more wood into the stove and help keep the stove in the proper temperature range to avoid dangerous creosote formation inside the chimney from low-temperature burns. Two temperature sensors, one on the burner and one on the burner tube, monitor the burner exhaust temperature. They feed data to the Node-RED system running on the Raspberry Pi which automatically notifies the user via text message when certain burner temperatures are reached.
For anyone who heats wood, tools like these are indispensable to help avoid spending an unnecessary amount of time getting the fire up to temperature quickly without overheating the stove. Modern pellet stoves have some of the more modern conveniences like these built in, but many of the perks of using cord wood are lost with these appliances. There are many other ways to heat with wood as well; Take a look at this custom wood boiler that doubles as a hot water heater.
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