Cat question...not the animal

Does a catalyst have to stay red hot for it too work? This is my second stove, first was a stand alone vogelsang I believe, went to an opel after a chimney fire. So this is the only one I've been able to see the cat on.


Anyone else have an Opel 2 or 3C? I don't hear too much about them.

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I tend to think that the cat doing its job causes it to get red hot.

 

That's what I'm thinking, I noticed there wasn't any smoke from the chimney got inside the house and it was still really warm but the cat wasn't red.

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No, the cat does not need to be glowing red hot. Depends a lot on the condition of the cat {age and if it needs cleaning}, but I often see no smoke coming from the chimney and nice temperatures in the stove without seeing a glowing cat. We have a thermocouple located in the stove, located just behind the cat that helps monitoring cat performance.

 

Great thanks for the info!
How do you go about cleaning it?

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My cat can be 900F and glowing red or 1300F and dark.

 

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Thats weird. I'd expect glow color to correspond to temperature.

 

Me too, until I got a cat probe.

 

According to my cat probe the cat is running hot even with a relatively small fire.

 

The catalyst just increases the rate of the chemical reaction taking place in the stove. For the reburn tubes some guys have, the internal temp needs to reach approximately 1000F for the full reburn to be happening. Many of us can see the tubes lighting off well before that, as fresh oxygen is burning off the smoke- but the secondaries occur at 1000F.
The catalyst lowers that temp to approximately 500F in the stove, so the chemical reaction is in fact taking place at a lower temperature- the obvious side effect though is that the stove gets "hotter" by burning the offgasses from the wood.

In any event the cat itself when under operation is going to be quite hot when it is working. The size of the fire itself doesn't change the chemical reaction.

Long way to say it sounds like it is working fine.

 

That's interesting and would explain the high temps even with a smaller load.

 

The cat is burning particles and gasses that escape from the wood and aren’t burned by the flames. When that cat starts burning, it can get pretty hot fairly quickly. The actual temp will depend on air flow and how much burnable stuff is in that air.

So, a small fire of recently added logs fan gas off enough junk to get that cat pretty hot, but after a bit, the temp will come down. A big fire will have more junk which means that the cat may stay hotter longer. If you really stuff it, and keep the air flow sufficient but low, the cat in my IS can hit 1600 plus, but in normal operations it usually peaks out in the 1300-1500 range early in the burn and then settles into the 800-1000 range for a while before dropping further.