"RogerN" wrote in message
m...
"Ignoramus3322" wrote in message

What is OK for an outdoor smoker, is not OK for an indoor wood fired
stove, a much more dangerous device.

i

True, if you make a mistake with the program, you may never find
out!

However, about everything that can be sensed with electronic sensors
can be fed into a controller and acted upon or at least sound an
alarm. So, on a wood stove you could monitor temperatures, carbon
monoxide, or any other relevant conditions that you might want to
monitor on a wood stove. Controls checking and acting on conditions
hundreds of times per second can catch and correct a problem better
than a person can.

RogerN

I share Iggy's concern enough that I don't run the stove when I'm
away. In midwinter I came home from work to a 50F house, the setting
of the electric backup.

The control I was considering would have closed the air inlet on the
door as the stove came up to temperature. I didn't add it because I
don't want any possible interference if the fire runs away and I need
to shut it down.

After Thanksgiving I let the house cool to measure the rate vs
outdoor temperature. At 2AM on Saturday the smoke alarm blasted me out
of bed, to the smell of something electrical that had overheated. I
rushed around checking all the electronics, found nothing warm,
rechecked them twice anyway. Then I noticed that the smell was
strongest near the hallway radiator, which hadn't been disassembled
and vacuumed out in a long time. I had forgotten about the backup
setting. The radiator had turned on, and the alarm and hot plastic
smell were from rug fibers in it.

jsw