Everyone who heats with a wood stove soon learns that wood stoves tend to dry out the room air.
Fortunately, most stoves provide a hot top surface where a container of water can be placed to re-humidify the
home atmosphere as the water steams away.
The problem with most stovetop steamers is that, due to the extreme temperatures produced by today's
high-efficiency woodstoves, the water boils away too rapidly. By the time we remember to refill the steamer, the
hot stove has dried the air out again.
Enter the soapstone steamer. One of the properties of soapstone is that it only heats to about 500 degrees, no
matter how hot the surface it is standing on. As a result, water placed in a soapstone steamer evaporates much
more slowly than water in a metal container, so we don't have to remember to refill it so often.
Another advantage of soapstone: it looks WAY nicer on the stove than Mom's old bean pot.
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