Production Woodstock IS

Yesterday I used the method someone mentioned of running smaller (5 smaller splits) hot fire starting at 4:30p and it noticeably helped when I went to fill it at 9p.

 

I'm not trying to sell my design, but this works very well with minimal effort. I built a long handle into it so you don't feel the heat. It really doesn't take a lot of muscle or involvement. I raked it 3 times within an hour, and the coal bed was down to fine coals and I could easily fill the box for overnight. As somebody else mentioned, doing this also increases the heat output during coaling.

 

Living with a woman...

Some times I feel like I'm getting MY coals raked....

 

Great- glad to hear you found a system that works for you. Unfortunately, that will not work for me, even if it did burn the coals down, because the coalbed alone will not produce enough heat to heat the house. So again the problem remains: how to get rid of the coals faster at the end of a burning cycle, or (better yet IMO) how to burn the coals during the next wood burning cycle so they do not build up over the course of several days.

Brian

 

Yes, I am able to manage the coal bed the way I described. But I agree Brian, burning the coal bed in that manner will not result in enough heat oputput on those colder days unless the house temp is way up before the burn-down . However, on days when I need more heat while I burn down the bed -- I do what some of the other forum members suggest; put in some small pieces . I know you only have oak (poor little rich kid ) but if you split some straight grained easy "gimme-splitters" down to a real-small size; you should get some serious heat out of the IS while you burn down!
I think you, others in the forum and I realize, the answer to this ever present condition of coaling in burning wood comes in combining a few techniques.
I'll tell you, just between you and me == I have opened the bypass and stove door and slid a fireplace screen down in front of the opening and burned the coal bed down. Serious heat output! Sometimes if I'm feeling dangerous, willing to sit next to the stove and there are no 'sparkers' or 'poppers' in the firebox; I remove the screen. OMG -- there, I said it! Now, that's some SERIOUS heat output!
It brings be back to the old days when I heated with the open fireplace (the IS is installed in front of that very same fireplace) . No one perished from CO2 or CO back then! However, having said all of that, I have recently decided to install a SS liner at the end of this burning season. The flu I'm going though now is a bit too large. I believe I'll get better low-end burns with the liner. And at the very least -- it'll be easier for me to clean the flu in my old age. I know you mentioned you were thinking about doing the same at the end of this season. A dedicated 6 inch flu may help burn down your bed a bit faster.

 

I started to notice a slight decrease in my stoves performance and a little bit of smoke. I was getting worried so I decided to cool it off and check the basics starting with the cat. Sure enough metal chips from the radiator had started to pile on top of the cat.

I would say 25% of the cat was blocked. I vacuumed it out good and scraped any loose flakes off of the radiator before putting it back together. Big improvement! If you haven't done so yet, you might want to check yours.

 

Definitely something the folks at WS would want to know about....

 

Yep, I hear you and would agree that those (opening the door, putting small splits in with the coals, raking the coals into 'furrows', etc.) are all useful methods to deal with the charcoal buildup. And none of them sound dangerous to me.

But I want to take a different approach and a singular one that is <basically> wood in, ash out and some adjusting / tending along the way. Again, for myself, I believe the 'fix' is an air bleed from under the fire (not all of the primary air, and not necessarily throughout the life of the fire but more toward the end) along with wider slots in the grate. Maybe another way to put my thinking here is that I do not want to develop a technique to deal with this situation, I want to develop a method that prevents the situation from happening in the first place.

I believe you right about my chimney and having marginal draft. A liner may well eliminate the problem but I do not think so because so many others have mentioned it and I think at least some of them must have decent chimneys. I believe I will try a liner next year but unfortunately, I will need another Class A chimney somewhere in the house to install a liner in the current chimney. That is also part of the overall plan, including a new boiler but as you can imagine, it is a very involved and convoluted path to get there.

But as always, I do not want to leave the impression that I think this is a bad or inadequate stove. Quite the contrary, I like it a lot and would not consider putting these or any other modifications into any stove I did not like as much as this one.

Brian

 

You're a thinkin' man Brian! A teach-a man-to-fish kind-of-a-guy. Finding the prevention to coaling would in fact be better than finding the solution to dealing with it. Feeding the fire from below was always the way-to-go historically in wood/coal burning stoves. I did it when I built my steel box within the cast iron stove. I built the steel box then fabricated a grate out of sheet steel. The air feed to the fire came up through the coal bed. I'm certain the design of such a "set-up" in a commercial for sale stove is a bit more complex. Fabrication has greater (no pun intended) cost and longevity of parts is compromised. But damm brother...the fire sure gets it's fair share of oxygen that way!
Again, at the risk of repeating, the design of the IS (IMO) included providing enough volatiles to feed the secondary and cat combustion. I believe feeding the coal bed air was never the "primary" (pun intended) concern of the design of the IS.

 

Saw the same thing a few weeks ago, but not quite as many. The bulk of them were on top of the cat.

 

+2...+3. I just cleaned my cat yesterday for the first time and found 5-6 large metal flakes. I didn't think to scape the loose flakes off the radiator, it was so dusty (ashy) and I was in a hurry...next time.

 

So my wife and I made the trip to Woodstock on Friday to pick up the new stove.
About a three hour drive, got there at 4 o'clock, borrowed my wife's companies truck, a ford ranger.
What a great place, lots of stoves in the various stages of completion.
Very friendly people there, you can tell they really take great pride in their stoves.
My stove was supposed to be ready for pickup Saturday morning but they let me pickup it up Friday night.
It really helped me out a lot.
It was mighty cold up there.



We got her home about 9:00 o'clock and backed her up to the back deck, it was mighty cold down here to.


Set up the come along to pull her out of the truck and onto the dolly.
A bit of pam spray cooking oil on the bed to help her slide along.
I screwed the pine plank to the deck to keep the dolly from moving while loading.


Took four long deck screws from the pallet to the dolly to keep the stove from sliding off.


Up the stairs and in thru the slider there's lots of blocks under the plywood to smooth out the steps.


Had to use a plank to lever her over the threshold, went very easy.
The come along is attached to an L bracket temporary screwed to the floor.

And the stove is in and Its eleven o'clock enough for one day.
We never had to lift the stove once, my wife worked the come along and I guided the pallet.
Now getting it off the pallet that was a challenge.
I can only seem to post 8 pictures at a time.
The saga to be continued.

 

"Chestnut roasting, by an IS fire"

 

Great pictures, Chestnut - if you are replacing an old Defiant with your new IS, yer in for a treat. Ours replaced a VC Encore and we are very happy with the upgrade. Looking forward to your posts on how you feed, care for and use the IS.
Good lookin' stove!

 

Well, I like to solve problems rather than find ways to deal with them more easily. And Woodstock did a great job on the I.S. IMO but hey, it is not like the designer(s) had one in his / her house to live with for a season, right. So I think it would be pretty easy to improve the stove a little bit from experience 'in the field.'

In addition to a minor alteration to the air path, I think a little bit of automation would go a long way to making the stove, and really, most wood stoves, a lot more predictable and much more 'hands off' after loading them with fuel. I believe this is the next step in the progression of modern wood stoves where we have some minor electronics assist us in optimizing the stove's burn in several areas at once: running cleanly, a faster start- up sequence, and the ability to regulate heat output, within safe bounds of course, to the building's needs. Right now I have turned my I.S. WAY down as it is quite warm in here but sometime overnight, it will be set a bit too low to keep up with the house's heat requirements. Imagine a stove control that senses that and not only bumps the draft open another 10% or 20% but does so to the correct draft (yep, more than one) depending on where in the burn cycle the stove is at the moment.

Brian

 

Great post Chestnut . Glad you have come to the life with the IS. Awesome pictures and I'm sure some good reports once you get up and running. I'm interested in what you chose as side medallions.

 

I had the same thing happen with the radiator paint falling onto the cat. Just vacuumed them off gently. I am not so sure any paint would hold up to the cat temps....
It has been mild the past few days and the stove rocks at temps slow and low. I have been loading twice in 24 hours.

 

If the chips act as a restriction like mine did, you are not getting gas movement through part of the honeycomb. That probably results in a reduced draft causing a lazy burn with the bypass closed. That's what I was seeing. I would engage the cat and the fire would get sluggish. With the bypass closed everything has to go through that honeycomb. If 25% of it is clogged it definitely has to have an effect. Either way it is a good thing to keep an eye on.

 

Samesies.

 

I gotta 2' x 3' piece of stainless steel that's just a beggin to to be cut to size and end up on the underside of that radiator!