Another Ideal Steel adoration thread

Woody Stover, I got a few sideways looks from the locals when I said I'd be using Pine Mountain (gotta be pushing twenty cord between what's processed and still waiting on the splitter) to fuel the new inside stove. I have had the "guy with an owb who can burn pine" reputation around town for awhile. Got to jawing with the nice fella who tends the garden/farm next to my field, and he gave me the typical evileye when he asked about the pine.. I stated my case rationally, and much to my surprise he actually agreed, and even "confessed" to burning some pine now and again for some quick heat or to burn down coals. He's hooked us up with plenty of veggies this year, and even let my rugrat wander through the pumpkins and pick out a couple. He's going to get a nice bundle of pine to take home whenever I can get to processing some more.

Brad38, thanks! We are already loving it with the 30s and 40s over the past couple weeks. Haven't seen inside temps at 82 since early summer before the window rattler went in. Mrs Papi got a little carried away the other day.

CBVT, no doubt! Bedroom ac needs to come out, then I'll have control of the window on my side of the bed again.

Dylskee, it's crazy to see the wood reduction. Owb would run through two wheelbarrow full of big pine splits daily in this weather, and I'd be cutting in some hard stuff on the nights it's been under 30. With the IS, I fill the wheelbarrow at night, load it by the door next to the stove (after splitting a few pieces down.. Had a heavy hand with the splitter this spring, planning for the owb) and it carries us through a day and a half or more, And the house is ten degrees warmer, give or take.

 

BigPapi remember this and let me know come spring when I first put in my IS and I went through 4.5 cord. I wasn't really turning it down enough to go black and all cat burn.
Several members with IS in Bradford VT we're discussing my situation and could not believe I actually burnt 4 cord of wood in a year.. They honestly thought 3 was max without shoveling out hot coals.. Turns out I got phenomenal draft according to Woodstock..

 

Glad to hear you're loving it! They truly are amazing how well they heat vs how much you.need to feed them, especially compared to an OWB.

Gotta say though, it's weird seeing an IS, or even an AS without some kind of contrasting color lol.

 

I had to laugh at this. The ladies in my house made me order a "neutral" color IS. The contrasting schemes looked too amped up for their tastes. Went with all charcoal except for the copper medallions on sides & top. But I snuck in copper handles on the bypass & air intake. LOL

 

My AS is charcoal, but the artwork on top and front is the metallic brown.

If you need to buy the paint they use, like to paint your pipes, Woodstock seems to have the cheapest prices for it anywhere.

 

We tossed around a few ideas on the color scheme.. Ultimately went the "safe" route knowing we could add accents later. Wife hasn't decided what color she wants the dining room yet, (only been five years.. No rush, I guess) so we'll probably coordinate with whatever she wants to do on the walls or trim. I kind of like the black hole effect.

One of these days I'll let it go cold and finish the back wall behind it - still tossing around the idea of some shielding on the wall above the thimble - it catches quite a bit of heat off the collar. Clearances meet requirements, but I think I want to overbuild a bit. Maybe a shield over the collar would be the smart way to do it..

 

We let the stove go out overnight so I could work behind it on some stone to gussy up the hearth a bit. Started this morning, pecked away at it until afternoon (work is slow when it involves keeping micro-me out of the adhesive) when Mrs Papi got as chilly as she wanted to be and wanted heat. Grabbed up a stove load of pine splits and decided we'd warm up the house quick and head out to build a snowman with the little one.

Came back in a couple hours later to find the stove still holding 620 stt, nice secondaries and a nice toasty house all the way through. Spent about four hours there before I dialed it back to our usual cruising temp, about 450. Dying down now about seven hours in. Good to know that it can do this on white pine - come winter weather with a full load of sugar maple, I don't think we'll have to worry about waking up to a cold house. Maybe I'll even take it out of second gear and let it hit 700 next time.

 

I hope they are in stock! I just got mine last week and the guy wasn't sure if they were in or not when I called. Apparently some are out of stock.

 

I think I burned 4.25-4.5 cords last year and that was a cold winter.

I just reloaded after 15 hours and still had enough coals to get her going without a lighter or fat wood. Just a few tiny kindling sticks and a bit of air through the ash pan door and away it went.

 

Man, that would be a blessing after fifteen cord+ the last few years with the owb. I'm about a half cord deep so far, maybe 3/4, almost 100% white pine.

 

I used the ash pan door re-light trick this evening, and could not believe how well it worked! No more smoky reloads for me.

 

I never touched the ash door last year, but I have been experimenting with it this year. Big mountain of coals raked near the door, close the door and open the ash door and you could use it as a forge! Buns the coals down fast and really gets the stt back up quick.

Then I'll leave it open for the reload as well.

 

Opening the ash pan door will definitely burn down some coals and help get a fresh reload started quickly.

But.. please be very careful using this method. I will sit with my hand on the ashpan door, and the main door loosely latched.

After our install, I opened the ashpan door and was sitting on the couch, when the gasses from the reload built up and when secondaries kicked off, there was basically a gas explosion in the stove.

Flames and hot ash was ejected from the ashpan area.


Thought I was going to have to change my shorts after that happened.


Please be careful.

 

Wow! That will definitely get your attention! Thank you for sharing that.

I've had a few secondary explosions about 30 seconds after I closed the ash door. Definitely going to rethink my reloading procedure now.

 

Oh yeah, the dreaded wood stove 'sneeze'. I used to have a Tempwood that would do that pretty violently about every three weeks or so. And it would lift the 12" cast iron lid off the stove, which then clanged back down to onto the stove top. Scarred the hell out of the dog and it would take him a good two weeks to recover from that and stop sliding down the walls / couch to avoid the stove while giving it the evil eye..... which was just when the stove would do it again

A little air introduced under the grate (through the ash pan door) works well but the key word here is 'little'. And using a small amount all the time will greatly help burn down the coals as the firewood fuel is also being consumed so you do not end up with that big pile of coals in the first place. But as you say, be extremely careful if opening the ash pan door via the latch because it is very easy to introduce a LOT of air under the grate. A better way is to make an adjustable vent in the ash pan door, or experiment with a very small hole or two through the door, on the order of 1/4" to 3/8".

Brian

 

Hi guys. I currently have an OWB wif a voracious appetite for wood tied into my propane boiler via a heat exchanger. Any way to make that work with an IS stove ?

 

Not without replacing the OWB

 

Bummer

 

Farmchuck, do you have much hot water storage? If your water storage was substantial, it might be worth firing the owb once a week or so to charge your tank for DHW and install an IS to heat the living space.

If I bumped into a couple extra hot water tanks for free, I'd definitely be thinking about it, even with the leak in the owb piping that caused us to install the IS this year. If I could top off the circulation water once a wee k, burn a couple loads in the owb, and be able shut off the breaker for DHW... I'd run it year round. With three girls plus me, no way am I getting away with that on our single hot water tank.

 

OFFTOPIC:

When I was considering a wood boiler, it was pretty apparent that the most efficient way to use one was to fire it at the ideal burn rate, which was far too high for using the heat output directly, and store the energy in the form of hot water. The ideal I thought was the best was making a chamber out of rigid Styrofoam insulation blocks, then lining it with a plastic membrane much like an above- ground swimming pool, and using a heat exchanger to make actual use of the hot water. The downside to all of that is that the volume of water becomes quite large, well over 500 gallons at a minimum because there is not a very wide range of temperature water that can be used; you can have a huge amount of water at, say, 130F, which is certainly 'heated' but it will not transfer much heat at all into a house through something like baseboard hot water heating. So the minimum useful temp. might be, say, 160F, and with an upper limit of maybe 190F, that is only a 30F usable temperature difference. So the volume of water has to be big enough to absorb and entire boiler's worth of heat in those 30 degrees, which translates to a tremendous volume of water. But it is the most efficient way to use wood to heat water and not have it smolder, make a mess and become wildly inefficient.

Brian