Up until the last couple of days I was not real satisfied with my new AS. The last 3 days I am hooked. A couple of things changed: Much colder outside temperatures. From upper 40s to 30s. Went from shoulder season wood to better wood. Shoulder season wood wasn't that bad. Dead Ash css last winter. Learning curve: Been running surface temperature up to 450-500 before throttling it down lately. Reloading it fully instead of adding a few logs when it got burnt down. It doesn't seem to like a partial load. Not real sure what the better performance can be related to but glad to have it.
Throttle it down? The way my Progress works: Stove top temp gets to 300 sometimes full air supply, sometimes not depending on the wood. I engage the cat and set the air intake to low, a tad above fully closed. The temp goes up. I can shut it completely and the temp remains high. So for me, throttling down means the temp goes up.
Marshel54 my IS is similar, give it full load and don't mess with it until next one.. Simple to use, throws great heat. Only use dry wood.
True enough!! My learning curve was a few weeks. I had to go to 6 hours of meeting, set stove up, got it up temp, lowered air and left. 8 hours later came home to find stove was doing better without me messing with it
We started burning in our IS at the end of September.. Learned a lot in a short time. Not experts yet, but it runs great and does what we want. Now we're learning how behavior changes with colder outside air. Have made a few mistakes along the way - dialing down too far too fast on a warmish day and the firebox heat isn't enough to keep the cat going - dead fire. Didn't throttle down enough on a cold windy day, came home to 600* stove top with crazy secondaries and dining room at 85* when shooting for a low cat burn.. Normal learning curve stuff.
Still learning with our IS. Unusually thankful for colder temps, less 84°F evenings with the window open.
Its the colder weather...you now have proper draft, and you are loading it up with more and better wood, so now the stove can "stretch its legs" a little...its kinda like driving a dragster on the street, poor drivability and a real PITA, but put that sucker on the strip and open 'er up, yowza!
Big dogs like to eat and get cranky if you starve them. Same thing with wood stoves...they crave draft and good wood....get pizzed when they are missing one or both. In order to meet the EPA regs stoves are engineered to be run basically wide open, so keep that in mind too
I load up around 11:00PM at night and after 5~10 mins I throttle down to .75 on my draft. Sometimes I think that's too much, but I've learned to let the stove do it's thing. Sometimes I'll wake up to a nature call at 2 or 3 in the AM and go down and check it... and I've got 600'F on the stovetop, 250F on the flue, and the nicest little light show that no one sees but the mice. But it did take me a full season to get used to the AS. So many variables with each installation. Weather, wood, wind, stack height etc etc.. like I've said before, don't need to crank the door to tight with that big handle. It'll just flatten that nice big gasket more quickly. But if you do, you can let the stove go out sometime, and just pinch the gasket till it fattens up again. An easy fix.
By .75, you mean below #1 right? Just wanted to clarify for others. I just glanced at my stove, and that's exactly where it landed this morning. I've had pretty good results loading light this shoulder season. Put 2-3 splits on the coals, then 1-2 more on top of those, but turn them a bit diagonal. Let it get up to temp then close the bypass and slowly start closing the draft. Usually let it sit 5-10 mins to get the cat going, then drop it to 3-2-1 in 10ish minute increments to avoid cat stall.
Learning patients is good. I need to allow time for the wood to char before closing the bypass. Roger with the change in weather today, are the reloads heating up faster? Mine is working much better today than it did yesterday.
The only thing I question if that 450-500 before throttling it down. You should not have to do that! More like 250 stove top then start throttling it down. Otherwise, you are wasting wood when you don't need to and also shortening the burn time. Not critical now but when you want long burn times in winter (nights), then it is even more important.
Yes, just a tad under 1 in below freezing weather, and after I've got a good blaze going in the box. Sometimes I'll drop down gradually, but I'm on a 2 year plan with my wood now and am finding I can just go directly to 1 or slightly under. But each stove is going to draft a bit differently. Regarding loading at an angle, that is especially good today as your getting the stove going, in order to maximize airflow around the splits. Once you're up and burning and cruising along there is no need to do this if you want to maximize the wood load for an overnight or all day long burn.
Reloads may be heating up somewhat faster. Today it is not running as good as yesterday. Playing with the air settings. Stalling out the cat? Please explain. How do I know if the cat is burning or not?
Marshel54 if daylight out and you have cat engaged, check chimney, if smoking cat is stalled. Much harder to stall a new cat then a 2 to 3 year old one. I sometimes can stall older cat by shutting air down to quickly. Helps to think of it like an old carb
I’m getting an education about my Fireview with this cold snap we’re having. Last night I loaded up with KD oak and cherry and set it at .5, lower than ever before. I watched the stovetop climb to 700 and saw the best light show yet from the cat. I opened it to about 5/8 and it settled at 675 and I went to bed at 9. The wind was blowing and it got down below 20 with a single digit wind chill through the night and all day today. At 5 the 2 biggest splits were still pretty much whole but glowing and STT was still 450. Stove room was 76 and upstairs 68 bedrooms 64, just right! Today I thought I was gonna need a pipe damper on reload. With the wind so strong I had the air down to just barely above closed or I had too much flame. I’ll have to be careful first time it’s windy and below zero. Tonight’s low is supposed to be in the single digits but without the wind so I don’t expect we’ll see much difference. The wind tends to suck the heat right out when it’s gusting over 40 or so. I’m impressed by how well it heats our house so far. I haven’t turned the heat pump on once and we just got the lowest light bill either of us can remember in the 25 years we’ve lived here. We did just have to replace the fridge and maybe that was sucking more than I thought but we all aren’t running a pellet stove or the circulators for the baseboards. I can see the payback being very reasonable at this rate. This is an amazing stove, and I know the hybrids are even more so.
The Fv just gives such nice even heat and in my house it does really well with distribution too. Might not be so quick to get to high heat as the hybrid, but the soapstone holds the heat and transfers slowly allowing it to spread out across the various rooms in the house. I use one little floor fan for a hallway with two what use to be back bedrooms before we became empty nesters. 17'F here in north central Mass tonight.
