Replacing Fireview with....?

Oh good, another ultra. They really are pretty good. I would have a fireview on my hearth if not for the huge rear clearance requirements which pushed me to the princess. It’s not as pretty as a stoner but sure can perform!

 

Quick update:

With the unseasonably warm temps, I've found it a piece of cake to hit 24 hour burns. Longest I have gotten is 28 hours before I decided to reload. This is with burning my sawmill slab wood pieces. Should be interesting when I get into the big hardwood splits later this season.

Still learning the quirks, tips and tricks with this stove, but so far, so good.

 

This is an example of why you should toss out most of the mfgr. hype. The volume I measured was closer to 3 cu.ft.usable. That 4.4 must be with the heat shield and cat out. I could however usually find some splits that were bigger on one end and I ended up getting the box packed pretty well. The ash dump has a hinged lid and the opening is pretty big so in lieu of a grated system, it worked pretty darn good. I had to work around some air control issues but ended up loving the stove. It's built like a tank. 620 lbs. of plate-steel..no sheet-metal stove here. As far as the bay window, it would be cool if they stayed clear and you could view the fire from the sides, but that's not happening at all. They are blacked out by creo pretty quickly. Trying to keep 'em clean would be a full-time job.

I love my Keystone but this is the reason I may eventually go steel. My Ks came from the factory with a leak at the left front vertical seam. It was easy to slap some cement in there (the Woodstock cement is the best I have seen so far..stringy and tacky.) Eventually though, you are looking at a tear-down.

You don't really understand how huge the grated ash handling is until you have it in the house..then you are never going back if you can help it.

I'll cut you a great deal on my Dutchwest 2640. Then I will have an excuse to put in an Absolute and move the Ks to the backup role.

AND you got the grate in the floor to move out the ash and get bigger loads into the box each time.

Dammit man, you are making it harder still for me to resist the draw of the AS. Haha.

Yeah, the thermostat and the blower, if you need to move air in a bad layout, would be the main draws for me. Don't keep us in suspense..how good a deal did you actually get? Price of those is a big negative when you look at what you can get from Woodstock in the steel stove configuration. Keep us updated with a running commentary of life with the Princess...or at the very least, don't completely vanish again!

Face it, you are a Woodstock guy. You may stray for a time but you'll be back.

Uh...AS if you've got an upstairs stove as well?

I had no idea you were considering a Fireview at one time. You didn't have the 18" rear clearance required with the heat shield? The Keystone shield gets it down to 14.5" but would it be too small to handle your place? Even though my Ks is on the hearth of a masonry fireplace, I still have the rear heat shield on to add a little convection and keep the radiation from going into the brick and then outside.

 

Woodstock or blaze king, I've owned both and I don' think I'd buy any other brand but one of those two. My house would determine which stove I would go with.

 

Yeah, I looked at a Buck 91 really hard and while a very interesting stove, I think there are enough quirks that I moved on; the odd shape and the side panel glass were two of the main reasons.

I do not know why but if a manufacturer would use a grate with openings bigger than the floor area itself; thin blades of stainless steel about an inch high (by about 3/16" thick) with one- inch openings work very well. That way, everythign just falls through the grate and there is absolutely no need for the user to scrape, fiddle, wait, or anything else. The downside is that the bottom of the stove becomes part of the firebox and so much be up to actual burning coals in the ash pan 'cause it will happen. But it is nice to just toss wood into the stove, and take the ash pan out of it without having to ever rake anything anywhere. Easy to start the stove too because kindling can be put right in the ash pan, ignited and then slid under the existing pile of wood.

As to the Dutchwest, I was eye- ballin' the big version of that very stove also. Front load, side load, catalytic, good size stove.... what's not to like? Not sure if they are still making them though, and it looked like maintainance parts would be expensive and a real problem if / when they stop making those parts.

Thinking of trying a different grate in my Ideal Steel; I cut one to fit over a year ago and just have not installed it. Not sure if the existing ash pan and ash pan housing are going to be up to a clean ash pan combined with a hard burn though as the pan will see a LOT of heat. Of course I could always put an inch of ash in the other pan before using it instead of putting it into the stove empty.

Brian

 

Am I the only one worried about the books next to the woodstove? seems awful close to have such combustible material....

 

I'm not in the room, but the books look to be well to the left of the stove and behind the stove as well. Given it's a front loader I'd be surprised if there were any issues with that.

 

I like to have the option of leaving a bed of ash on the floor of the box. That way when you swirl a poker around and drop some of the ash, there are little or no coals that go into the pan. No big deal though, I never pull the pan immediately after dropping down ash anyway, so the pan is always cool. On the Keystone there is a hole in the back of the ash pan housing that feeds air up through the grate to the bottom/back of the load for a more complete burn at lower primary air settings. Sometimes I'll let ash build up on the grate to block that air, and leave the primary open a bit more, as unrestricted ash pan air can be a little too much at times, like when you have a load of soft Maple or Cherry in there. I could partially block that hole... One feature of blocking the ash pan air with ash is that I get a mostly-burned skinny charcoal split that has gone out, left in the back of the box. I use it with a couple little SC chunks for a top-down start on the next load. If I'm in no big hurry to leave, a top-down is fun to do.

 

I like that idea. Wonder why it couldn't be done on the IS...

 

There IS a hole in the front of the ash pan door of an Ideal Steel. You just need a few tools to set it free..... sorta' like the drawing always WAS in the pencil, right?



Without a little air introduced under the bottom of the fuel load, some wood, such as oak, will generate so many coals that the stove is 3/4 full of them and will not put out enough heat when it is really cold outside. At least at my house. A small amount of air introduced under the grate solves this by burning the coals down as the wood above is consumed.

Probably opening the two small air vents in the front of the stove would serve the same purpose if you kept the area directly in front of them from filling with ash.

Brian

 

Yep, I hear you and the I.S. and other fine- grate opening stoves work this way. But if the grate is open enough, coals and ash all fall through and finish burning in the ash pan; the ash pan becomes the <real> bottom of the firebox. Everything in the ash pan will be gray ash, with no coals. But used that way, the ash pan and ash pan housing become part of the firebox too and so really should be somewhat heavier than what Woodstock uses in the first place. Of course using a very open grate was not their intent so I am not knocking them, just suggesting an alternative method where absolutely no attention is needed to clean the stove, just take the pan out and dump it.

Brian

 

Another advantage of having the ash stay in the box until I run a poker through it to drop it into the pan; If the pan is pretty full, I can just let the ash build up on the grate until I have the inclination to deal with the full pan. I can always fire up another load without being concerned that the ash pan will get too full, and some will get knocked out of the pan when I pull it..

 

Oh yeah, that is exactly right!

I build such a stove with a huge firebox (over 10 cu. ft., probably 6 cu. ft. usable) and it produced a LOT of ash and coals as it ran. The ash pan absolutely would fill up into the stove itself and what you describe would have happened excpet that the grate area was only the last foot of a 30 inch long ashpan, so I could reach in through the draft door, located at the end of the ash box, and rake the ashes and coals back in the pan, away from the grate. The ash pan itself (I made two so I could swap them) was huge at 6"H X 14"W X 30"D and so held a LOT of ash. And the top layer was usually red when I did remove it so it had to sit outside for a day and cool down (OK, finish burning ) before I could dump it. But cleaning the ash pan was an every 10 or more day event with that stove so no big deal.

But on something like an Ideal Steel, the ash pan would have to be emptied every other loading or so or it would overflow exactly as you describe and make it necessary to clean out the ash pan housing before the ash pan could be reinstalled.

Brian

 

Life has been good with the princess, running 12 hour loads when its real cold out and 24 hours when not so cold. i am amazed at the amount of headroom this stove has if you want big heat. I've emptied the ash into the ashpan exactly once since I lit a match in it. That has probably been the biggest surprise so far.

The ash pan on the ultra is slick, pull the plug and push the ash through, put the plug back in. Remove ash pan and close flap doors. Run outside with ash and spread on the field or ice on the driveway. Done deal. I do love ash pans. A lot less dust in the room. I have gone back and forth with stoves with and without. I prefer an ash pan. I love that I have an ash pan without a grate to lose the coals. The BK stove has the right idea with the plug. You do not have to worry about a loose gasket seal on the ash pan causing an overfire or air leak. I am not sure why more stoves do not do something similar?

This stove is so simple and quick to heat up, it's almost ridiculous. Still fighting dirty glass on the sides, but its to be expected with a super deep firebox and burning low and slow.

We hit a low of 6 degrees and 50 mph winds, I checked draft and was running .22" of WC on the manometer on reload. It settled down to .18" of WC on a low/medium burn with no risk of flame impingment, runaway and still got a solid 12 hour burn on a full load of ash. That thermostat really does its job as advertised.

You know it. I am hybrid owner, one BK and one WS. haha.

It's a country mile away, photos are deceiving.

A lot less than the base price of an IS not including shipping.

 

I should note that I did have to replace the door gasket, it was lapped over the at the seam and had a slight smoke leak. It bothered me. Thanks to Highbeam for giving the 411 on his awesome technique of door gasket replacement.

I am a bit concerned about dealer support in my area for parts, I do not have any dealers within an hour. No dealer is ever super excited about selling parts to someone who didn't buy a stove from them either.

 

Glad your happy with it jdonna sounds like you got a great deal