Englander PAH

Oh I beat the snot out of it (but not enough to dent or anything like that), usually with a medium split of firewood (I still use the hearth the pellet stove is on for stacking wood so it's within arms reach) since I don't own any real 'mallets'.

I was debating having a friend in the back of my truck shove it out the back while driving 55 down a country road
(kidding of course)

Well I got busy yesterday and didn't get to the stove. And I'm on shift now through Sunday so won't have a chance to work on it until at least Monday unfortunately. Luckily the weather is mild, woodstove will be plenty until then.

 

Well I picked up a brush I am eager to try, and think I have some ideas of rigging up my leaf blower to my 4" pipe. But 3 days in a row now it's been windy and raining. Besides not wanting to get wet and cold and carry ladders around in the soggy yard, the metal roof is a bit slick when wet so kind of dangerous to get up there unless it's dry. It's the end of January not supposed to be raining!

 

With the forecast looking colder and windy I went ahead and got the thing cleaned out finally, yay! I was able to rig up the leaf blower. Roof was still a bit wet and slippery but I survived with no broken bones. At first I didn't think the rubber 4" coupler was going to work, seemed 1/8-1/4" too small for my leaf blower but after heating and dawn and some elbow grease I got it on there, drug it up the roof and mounted it atop the pellet vent. After vacuuming everything loose out the front of the stove, I kicked the leaf blower on and went to town on it with the brush I picked up at the hardware store and my putty knife.



After looking at a few brushes I tried this one, nice long flexible 36" handle 'exhaust vent brush'. It was too big around, but I went after it with scissors and trimmed it on each side roughly flat(it was round) and a little bigger than the thickness of the passageways. I might trim it a bit thinner still, maybe take the other sides in some too, but it seemed to work well enough. Still without knowing exactly what the inside of the labyrinth looks like, I just poked it in a few different directions and brushed it until it hit an end. Hopefully it got it clean enough, the bristles aren't very stiff - if there were hard chunks stuck on there good I doubt it scraped them up, but anything loose or not hardened on it did a good job with and the lbt sucked it all up.

Thanks CF and imacman, you got me questioning that all the exhaust went through those holes on the exhaust chamber plates and thought maybe there was some other exhaust hole I hadn't discovered yet! I mean how could the stove even work with solid plates if that is where the exhaust went through. I started probing around more and after being half way through the third season I finally figured out where the exhaust holes are in the back of the firebox! I thought it all venting through the holes on the exhaust chamber ports on the bottom corners. But with the brush stuffed up about as high it it could go I reached around the 'corner' of the firebox back and felt some bristles poking though into the burn box. There are two holes around the corner on one side and 3 on the other. I had no idea! Thanks Englander for pointing this out in the manual lol! They were pretty caked over with crud. That might have been a lot of my problem right there, dam.

Fired up this morning and burning well. Been a long time since it fired up with clean glass - usually there is some soot on it even right after startup. And those flames are so thin quick and twitchy it's like a whole different stove. I have some other problems with the OAK and wind, but that is minor an unrelated to the dirty stove.

 

Sounds like it's working out for you bud

 

Yep it's working great so far. Now will just have to wait on a long term test and see how long it takes before I need to deep clean again. I suspect my longer chimney piping will always need a bit quicker cleaning interval but I really hope I can get more than a week or so out of it lol!

But now I have the adapter and can use the lbt on my pipe and have that brush, those will help a lot.

 

We appreciate the update , an keeping us in the loop

 

x2 - way to get it done T-Stew !