T6 Is Doing Awesome

The stove is definitely rocking this morning. Flu temps are at 750 and the stove top is at 650 with the fan on medium! Figured since I was going to be home I would stretch its legs a bit.

 

Reloaded last night at 7:30pm and at 7:30am the house is 76 degrees and I still have log forms in the stove. Probably won't need to reload until close to noon. Last nights load was Hickory and the temps outside hovered around 28 degrees. Not to shabby IMO.

 

Good idea on the sliders Cert......if you can't swing the cost of 3 (I certainly couldn't), maybe do one at a time, starting with the worst.
Actually money in your pocket if you think long term.
Nice to hear the insulation is helping. Seems to be what everyone says after they've tightened things up.....me included.

 

Just got home from church. Stove room is 73 degrees and the stove top is at 200 degrees with the blower fan still running and plenty of coals for a reload. Close to 18 hours.

 

Just a word about sliding glass doors.

I have a Pella set, each panel 4 feet wide. They leak air, AND the glass gets COLD. We were -11 this morning, the inside of the insulated glass was less that 40 degrees. I suspect the problem is inherent in SGDs. My parents had an awful time with Andersons on Nantucket (which of course is very exposed and windy). If it weren't for the fact that it is the fastest egress/least time with the door open/most convenient for bringing wood in the house, I'd have the darn things sealed off and insulated for the winter. As it is, I roll a towel at the bottom, and have insulated curtains closed as soon as the sun sets. Last winter when it was so cold, I even clothespinned a down comforter to the inside of the curtain. That worked wonderfully...I was tempted to make curtains out of down comforters.

Bottom line, I'd be more tempted to spend some money installing a really first class indoor retractable shutter than to spend $6000 on sliding glass door replacement, unless the SGD is in poor enough shape or is low enough quality so you just want to get rid of it in general. If only because of heat loss, I'd look into some of the shutter set ups that are available (don't know if that is what they are called, but they exist). Or put excellent insulated curtains up.

 

Update: my wife is out of town for the next few days so I loaded the stove at 5:30 this morning and it was 22 degrees outside. I then worked until 7:30PM. I got home half expecting the house to have cooled down considerably since the temps didn't get above freezing until after lunch and it is already back down to 28 outside. Anyways it was still 71 degrees in here and I had a great coal bed to reload on. Not to shabby.

Edit: the stove has always burned like that but I attribute the house not cooling down as quick to all the insulation.

 

Still amazed as ever at how well the insulation is working now. I can burn this stove down almost nothing but ash in this 0 degree weather and the house isn't dropping below 70 on a 10 hour burn. Last year with these temps I fought having the stove coal up pretty bad and needed 8 hour or less reloads this year I am doing 10 hour loads in this weather with no issues whatsoever. I know I sound like a broken record but insulation is the best bang for your buck and was definitely better than a second stove!

Oops forgot the picture...... 8 hours in on this load the house is 74inside and it is 8 degrees outside. I easily have 2 more hours with whole log forms in the back half of the stove and the stove top sitting at 500 degrees..

 

Stove is still cranking right along in these temps and the house was 69-70 after a ten hour burn last night. I thought I would add one interesting thing that I forgot I had done until last night.

My basement will drop down into the low4 0's and upper 30's during really long stretches of cold due to the fact I have a lot of exposed concrete. For example I shot the inside of the concrete walls with an IR thermometer last night and they were 22-30 degrees depending on where you were measuring. Anyhow last winter I really noticed how I had cold air billowing out of all the HVAC registers and returns on my first floor. After some thought about it I decided that warm air from the second floor must be rising up into the return air registers in the ceiling of the second floor then condensing and falling back down pushing the freezing cold air in my sheet metal duct work back up and out of the first floor registers. This wasn't a little bit of air as it would actually make the carpet ice cold for a foot away from the register. Fast forward to this fall, since I don't even have my furnace hooked up I decided I would plug all the registers this fall once AC season was over. I made plugs by stuffing rags inside trash bags and inserting them into register to provide an effective vapor barrier. Well it has been working beautifully and we have had floors that are warmer than they have ever been and very little draftiness on the floor. Last night I decided to pull one of the return plugs just to see what it was like as they have been plugged since fall and let me tell it was unbelievable the amount of air that began flowing out of it! You could feel the 40 degree air blowing out of it with your hand 2-3 foot from the return so I quickly plugged it back up. I just though I would share that in case it might help someone else out in the same situation. The difference has been unbelievable this winter!

 

Great shots!!!


Here are a few pictures I took with a low shutter speed and thought they looked really cool!
View attachment 43718 View attachment 43719
View attachment 43721 View attachment 43722 [/QUOTE]

 

Just seen this for the first time. Glad your T6 is working good for Ya Certified. That's a nice looking stove!

I need to do the more insulation thingy in the future.

 

So far so good........ -19 here last night and it burned from 8:30-6AM and kept the house 70 degrees. In all honesty the stove hasn't really changed in the way it burns it's more that I have slowed down the amount of heat escaping! Definitely insulate if you think you need it as it made a huge difference in retaining the heat as well as our overall comfort level!

 

I know most sliding doors (and sliding windows for that matter) leak worse than others but one thing to keep in mind about any large area of glass; the glass itself, even the insulated multi-pane gas-filled type, is a very poor insulator and it will setup a cold air current near itself. What I mean by that is as warm air contacts the glass and is cooled it will drop down the surface of the glass getting colder and picking up speed. Since doors are by their nature very large areas it can feel like an actual draft is coming straight through them when it's really just the air currents. Even just slowing this process down with some sort of curtain makes a huge difference. You may accumulate frost on the window without air movement but who cares as long as it keeps your house warmer.

I have a similar issue/problem in the far end of our living room; 6' tall *decent* Anderson casement windows with a large 6'w x 3' tall eyebrow stationary window over them. They face north/northwest which of course is less than ideal! We've got heavy curtains that reach the floor on a regular rod that cover the casement windows when it get's down below zero. Even though the curtains don't really seal against anything they disrupt the natural air flow enough (by reaching to the floor) to make sitting near them a lot more comfortable.

 

Great stuff with the T6 Cert!

Your stove has the spring loaded ash drop eh? The only complaint I have with the T5 is its leaking and when I cooled down last month and had a real good look at it I couldn't see how mine is leaking?
Gonna be welding it shut in the spring this year as its driving me nuts watching the front left wood NOT flipping its flame.

 

I am with Ray, I have never used mine at all. The first thing I did was pack it with ash to make sure it is sealed off.

 

I totally understand what you are talking about however this slider in particular was installed incorrectly and the frame has some slight warping which makes if gap in the center of the door. It is definitely an air leak that you can feel a breeze blowing through! The other slider definitely has that cold feel you talk about but no air blowing through between the doors. I honestly can't believe how cheap and junky these things are the plastic frame that holds the glass is barely 1.5" wide and you can flex the door with pushing on it with two fingers.

 

You know if there was one thing I wish this stove had it would be a nice ash grate in the bottom of the stove that falls directly down into an ash pan area with it's own sealed door like the Dutchwest.

 

Last night I let the stove go 11.5 hours with outdoor temps in the low to mid teens and this morning I still had enough log forms in the back of the stove to get heat that raised the temps 2 degrees in the living room over a two hour period so that was 13.5 hours of burning on one load and the house was still 68-69 degrees.

Also I usually run the blower on low setting as the air flows throughout the house with much nicer distribution but this morning I turned it off to sweep up the hearth a bit and didn't turn it back on when I reloaded. I just checked and was happy to see the stove top temps with the blower off were running about 50-25 degrees higher than the flue temps depending on which side you measured. Pics or it isn't true right......lol. And before anyone asks I did confirm the temp with the IR thermometer and it was showing 7 degrees hotter. I had the air about an 1/8 of the way open so there was some active flames on the logs when I shut it down all the way it cuts back to almost no active flames and just secondaries burning from the top down and the flue temps will drop back to 500 or a bit less and fall off as the load nears the coaling stage until you open the draft a bit.

 

Yeah I didn't think about that I guess. I agree shoveling isn't that big of a deal and I just take a shovel or two of ash out as needed. It actually works pretty well as the stove burns down to the back you can easily scoop the powder out of the front and then pull the coals forward. At least that's how I have been handling it.