Woodstock Absolute Steel

Yesterday I pulled the catalytic converter out of the AS for a 50/50 white vinegar/distilled water. I use an electric 2-gallon pump for the job, as I have the pump to use on the lawn and garden chores as well. Still takes me 30 mins or so to put a gallon of the mix through, and then a gallon of straight distilled water through. Then I use a hair dryer to dry it out completely.

I got to thinking about the AS and it's been a great stove for my finished basement/what used to be my home office before I retired, I think I was one of the early buyers, I bought it in 2016! But I don't burn 24X7 with this one, as I really only need it warm down here in the basement when we're doing laundry type stuff these days. But when it's below 15'F I feed it around the clock. I've got the Fireview upstairs and I burn that stove 24X7 except when it's shoulder seasons.

I love the Fv upstairs and the AS has proved itself as a excellent heater too. I'm wondering how many other folks we have out here with the AS? I know the Ideal Steel has very big numbers. But I have no idea how many AS stoves we have out here? So I'd love to hear from AS owners, and You know we love pics or video's as well. Mine is pretty basic but I bet some owners have the real pretty ones.

I'd also love to hear other folks thoughts on the stove in general.

I do a few videos and here's one from the early years of my burning with this stove.

 

Great to connect with you again too Dennis. I doubt you'll need to replace the Fv. Maybe a gasket or a Cat, But the AS has some nice features. It's got a larger firebox, 2.45Cu Ft, where the as opposed to the Fv at 1.85Cu ft. With the hybrid catalytic & secondary burn technology it has the best of both worlds. Also the large ash bucket is very convenient, and the Flu exist it top or back. I've been very impressed with mine.

 

I’m sure the AS is a great stove but I’m not sure I like the looks of any of their steel stoves. Maybe it’s better in person and pictures don’t do it justice?

 

The AS has a pretty giant air control lever!

 

Had a Absolute steel in the house from 2017 to 2020. It had a nice firebox, wonderful view, but gaskets didn't last a 9 month constant burn season. I only heat my house with wood. Many of us do up here, so getting the stove cool enough to clean the cat was a big pain. Always seemed to need something when it was 40 or 50 below. Most people don't get out constant cold though. I recommend to my clients (I'm a builder) to get either a large woodstock or Blazeking if they have supplemental heat. I prefer a good old fashion stove for my needs. 3 or 4 more cord of wood is nothing to me personally. I did end up welding on my AS and sticking it in my garage for hunting and trapping season. Works very well in that setting and I get the flames to view. All in all a nice stove, but a modern one. Kind of like all these new vehicles with computer junk on absolute everything. Great customer service is all I experienced.

 

There is that! I think buyers should be able to get customized ball handles like we had on our hotrods in the 60s! This little black one is nothing to write home about.

 

The only gasket I've had an issue with was the door gasket, as I was closing the door with a heavy hand which squeezed down the gasket to the point is caused a minor air leak. But all I did to fix it was squeezed it fat again. I did buy a gasket kit, but haven't had to use it yet.

 

We've been running our AS since winter of 2016/2017. It's our sole heat source and heats our 1800 sq. feet like a boss. Our house was built with electric baseboard but it only gets used if we're away for more than a day. We burn a fair amount of soft stuff through shoulder seasons and hardwood or hard/soft mix when it's actually winter cold. Once the real burn season sets in, I load at approximately 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., with a large coal bed providing a quick recovery into cat mode. I run it hard, with stt peak around 600 pretty much every burn during hard wood season. The stove is central along a basement wall, and being the stairwell is also centrally positioned, heat distribution is excellent (and plentiful) throughout the upstairs.

Reliability has been great. I replaced the cat once (2022) and also have the gasket kit "in stock" but have yet to use any of it. I "loosen" the door gasket every few weeks or so and then it gradually packs itself back in, but I'm still on the original.

Prior to the AS we ran the notoriously evil VC Vigilant 77 for about 25 years, so of course I think the world of the AS. Cat stoves may be a bit more tedious to deal with, but they pay you back fully with efficiency and a clean flu. The secondary burn light shows are legit!

This may be my first post here, and I'm gonna try to link a pic, but go easy on me if I screw it up Burning a load of cedar this evening...

 

two6's you didn't screw anything up. Great first post! Excellent install and hearth. You are up there in the north country too, beautiful area! I get up there occasionally on a motorcycle ride to Hoosick for lunch at Man of Kent, or Americade in the Spring at Lake George. I also have a friend in Greenwich NY who has a business refurbing vintage turntables. I met him as I bought one from him.

You've got big hours on yours compared to me. I am very impressed that it meets your need for the whole house! I'm guessing you've got a nicely insulated tight house there. Thanks for posting! I'm still on my 2nd cat as well and I just do the cat cleaning twice a season. How many cord do you typically burn in a year?

Again, thanks for posting.

Steve aka Oldhippie

 

The house was built in 1993, so definitely not a breezy old 1800s farm house. It's single story with full basement. Ironically, insulation is an area where our builder could have done better work, but it's by no means terrible. The south facing end is sliding glass, and on sunny days we get a solar boost added to an already plenty warm situation. We burn 3.5 or 4 cord, with about a third being softwood.

When I was looking into new stoves, I decided on a steel Woodstock but wasn't sure which between the AS and IS. So my wife and I headed over to take the tour, get a look at the stoves and see what they thought might be the right call. The woman who helped us felt our layout was right for the AS, so decision made.

Agree the northern New York region is a nice area, although we've lived to see Glens Falls/Queensbury grow from small town to typical northeastern suburban sprawl. My sister lives in Ft Miller, just a few hundred yards from the Greenwich line. I'll get some up to date pics of our setup here, we've got a cool little wood lot/"woodland garden". FHC is having pixel issues with the several years old phone pics I'm trying to link.

 

I also installed our AS in 2016 and have had some ups and downs with it. Over the years, most of those downs were due to my own inexperience with this kind of catalytic stove and some design issues with our stove pipe, chimney, and windbreak. Note, all technically not AS stove issues!

In the first three years I overfired the stove two or three times. That caused some really tiny warping in the combuster housing that we didn't notice until the first combuster needed replaced in 2022, and some weakening in the bypass frame. Cracking is now showing up from that.

To account for the first problem, since we're way out here in Nebraska and they can't come to fix the housing, Woodstock has decided to custom manufacture a combustor! Honestly, I can't imagine many stove companies would do that. It was a stressful experience as I was convinced we wouldn't be able to use the stove that season (our only heat source), and my measurements between the old and new combusters seemed identical-- just couldn't believe that I had messed something up! I sent everything back to them and they made a new combuster that fit within a week and we went on with our lives.

The cracks have so far been repaired by a local welder. The newest cracks are a little harder to access, but generally, I think still fixable. And I can't go back in time to not overfire the stove, so here we are.

The stovepipe and chimney issues are due to our windbreak that causes downdraft intermittently. Our initial stovepipe installation had too many right angles and we finally found a chimney cap for high wind that corrected that downdraft. (Vacu-Stack, for those interested.) But it took almost 4 years of fussing over that to quit having "mini explosions" in the stove. If anyone is having issues with their AS stove that sound at all like this, I would be happy to communicate about exactly how we fixed it.

Finally, it took me until 2020 to realize that I just wasn't leaving the damper open enough when I closed the bypass lever, and throughout the rest of the burn. I routinely snuffed fires because I thought I had to follow the company operating directions "exactly". Everyone has a different draft pull, and ours was so variable and weak depending on the wind direction that I always have it open more than most people recommend, including what's printed in the manual. I honestly can't believe it took me so long to just try leaving it open more.

The ups are that it's super efficient now that we fixed the draft and I know what I'm doing. And I love to watch the fire. We would be using way more wood with any other set-up in our home, which is very old and drafty.

In the end, we will probably only run the stove for two or three more seasons. We're building a house and leaning toward installing a masonry heater so that the process of heating with wood can require less management from me during the day, and be more user-friendly as we get older. Between an old drafty house and a CC stove, I can barely hold a part-time job in the winter and keep the house warm! Just didn't forsee how much time it would take. With a well-insulated house (or even just an insulated house) and a straight stove pipe/chimney install, I'm pretty sure this would be an easy-peasy stove to use. Twice a day at most, moderate, beautiful burn. I still like the stove, but we're ready for a *house* and heating that takes a lot less work.

 

Wow, you probably got stove number one. I had a field-test stove for 2015, so I didn't get my "product stove" until I brought the FT stove back, which I didn't do till November. I have one ninety in my stove to feed the chimney, but I do have a 2nd ninety at that point as it enters the chimney, so starting a cold stove I need to keep the feed door open until the splits are burning strong. Then I bring it down to 2.5 for cat engagement, and if it's a nice cold day, I'll finally drop it to 1. But I've got a good draft, and haven't had any issues with downdraft.

I've been burning since 1979 when we built the house, and in 1985 I bought a Consolidated Dutch West for the basement. It was one of the very first catalytics on the market and so learning about burning and then about Cats was something I had experience with. My very first stove in my living area, was a Garrison 1, a big smoke dragon. but I had to learn about wood seasoning on that stove which back then there was no Firewood Hoarders Club to get smart about only burning seasoned wood.

I'm pleased with the AS now that I'm on "the 3-year plan". Between the 2 stoves, I burn about 4 or a little more each year. most of that is in the Fireview in the main living area, Between that stove, seasoned wood, and a well-insulated and fairly tight house, about 1600sq ft home.

I live in a small town on the Massachusetts border with New Hampshire. There are about 3000 people in the town, and a lot of them burn. Every year, there are two or three serious chimney fires due to poor chimney maintenance, unseasoned wood, and very old smoke dragon stoves. I have mine professionally serviced once a year. (I don't like getting up on my roof.) Each year the Chimney cleaner guy shows me a bucket with less than 4 or 5 inches of ash in it, no creosote. But I've gotta admit, I learned so much here that I never knew before the internet all FHC and other pre-FHC sites came along.

 

Are you able to harvest your own wood down there?

I'm finally getting set on the three year plan, which took some time getting 12 full cords cut, split, stacked, and just now properly aged. After I got the stove, I had to buy wood and really struggled to find sellers that sold it dry enough to burn in these modern stoves. I'm sure it would have been fine in a smoke dragon or open fireplace, but not for a cat stove.

 

I have some land and a lot of hardwood, as well as Ash and Pine. I do cut here and there, mainly because they are dead Ash trees with Borer bugs or trees that came down in a storm or something.

Otherwise, I buy 4 or 5 cord of green, cut/split/delivered. I stack it, and 3 years later I'll be burning nicely seasoned wood. I don't know if I save money, but I like the warm heat and pretty fires.

 

I had no idea when I made that order that it was one of their earliest AS stoves. I had read an article a few years before (2014 maybe?) about them winning an international efficiency competition with the AS, and I decided that I wanted to pursue getting one when we moved. Interestingly, I've never had a comment like that from Woodstock, but I might ask about it when they call me back about some welding questions.

Per dry wood-- that was also an issue the first two years. We didn't have a meter to test our wood and I didn't realize how the AS would be more sensitive to moisture than a non-cat stove. Now that our wood is all on that three year+ cycle, there are no more problems. We cut almost all our wood and burn hedge, hackberry, some bur oak, a small amount of siberian elm, and even some eastern red cedar. These are all "weed" or invasive trees out here (except the oak) and need a lot of management, so I feel good about heating with them.

We burn about 3.5 cords between Nov-April, which doesn't sound like a lot to most people running older stoves, but the big issue is that I can't load the stove much more than I do when it's really cold (sub zero and windy), and our house has so many weak spots (insulation/foundation/leaky windows and doors...etc). I think when we move into the new place, I'll probably have the stove shipped back to Woodstock and they can factory refurbish it so it can serve someone else. It makes more sense to me to have a stove that's from a regional manufacturer so they can do service calls.

The craziest thing that we experienced since having this stove was a fluke stove pipe fire during an ice storm. I started the stove up in the morning from a small amount of coals just as a big ice storm hit. We had a different chimney cap at the time and the draw was really poor so the little bit of heat going up the chimney just barely melted the ice as it hit this mesh on the chimney cap, causing it to ice over completely. An inch thick! It blocked everything up and held all the heat/smoke in the horizontal stove pipe attached to the chimney liner snout, which very quickly turned to creosote and started a fire. This all happened in about 10 minutes. The paint on the double-wall stove pipe started to smoke which is when I realized something was wrong so we shut the whole thing down and I carried all the just charred logs out of the house in a metal bucket and threw them out onto the snow. Talk about adrenaline.

 

This is our 4th winter with the AS. I am glad I paid for 3 cords of kiln dried in 2021 because it made the wood a non issue when dealing with the learning curve of the stove (my first). Oldhippie was a big help early on with pointers.

BUT the biggest difference for me was to eliminate my 90 with 2 45s and add 4-ft of class A to the top of our chimney. I found a great liner to class a conversion plate. Since I installed that it has made a huge difference.

https://www.rockfordchimneysupply.com/products/rock-vent-transition-plate

I do think woodstock writes their manuals for worst case scenarios so I have learned to keep the draft open much longer at a 4 than they say to which helped alot. I usually go straight to a 2, but have learned to wait until the secondary's appear to turn it down more.

I was able to do a cold start today when it was 45f outside and get seconadries which I would have never been able to do before I added the height.

 

Nice post! Interesting about the 2 45s, as opposed to 1 90'. Also adding the height to the chimney. You've come a long way. I'm glad it's all worked out well for you.

Sounds like you're getting the same weather up there that I am getting in north/central Mass. A long shoulder season! I didn't buy my usual season pass to a ski area, as last year's season was so poor and this year doesn't promise any better as far as snow and cold.

 

Here is a note I got in replies on this 2015 post I made when Woodstock Soapstone put on a nice Barbeque/Get Together for any and all of their customers at the time or maybe in the future.

"This is the most comprehensive 360-degree look at this stove I can find on the internet. Funny, Woodstock doesn't record a nice in-depth look at all its stoves; all I can find on the Ideal Steel is a single camera angle and time-lapse burns from them. Thanks again for a good look at the stove front/side/back!"

I didn't take this video for any purpose other than to catch a few of our long-time members here so I could share some of the fun with the folks here who couldn't make it. But apparently, I'm an "influencer" (what my daughter calls me) for wood stoves in general and Woodstock Soapstone is definitely my fave.

So anyway, for a remember when!

 

Great video