Hanging out at my Inlaw's tonight. FIL passed out on his chair after dinner and his osburn in the basement has a mountain of coals.... Nice SIL I am take the time to burn the coals down...... and load it up. Well needless to say this small Osburn insert can't handle the size of load that my BK princess freestanding stove can. I loaded it too full and could not get the secondaries to light. Soooooo, using welding gloves I grabbed and tossed two pieces into the yard. All better.
Weird. I load up against the tubes in my noncat and that thing rips! I thought you might have had a runaway before you had lack of heat.
It was tight all the way around, loaded on coals. Ran with WOT until it was all charred then went to half throttle, thats when it fell on its face.
It just takes some unconventional thinking to get these little guys fired up with a tetris load. That's my experience with my small stove anyways. It's easier with a few inches of space, but even with 1/2" space between tubes and wood is very doable. When I do a tetris load, I try to stagger the load E/W so there's at least a bit of air able to blow around the sides (or one side even) and up to the top. I also load up and immediately throttle the air back a minimum 1/4 of the way, but usually half way. I'm not looking to char all the wood at once, only for something to catch on fire and whip around one of the sides to start making heat up top and catch fire up there. Then you essentially have the makings of a top down fire. It sometimes takes awhile to get going, and it won't be a raging fire off the line, but pretty gas jets. With such limited space for air and heat, it might fool you into thinking the fire isn't hot, but all those gas jets in a 2" x 16" x 10" space gets the tubes hot in a hurry. Again my experience, my stove, but I think the general concept would work with other small stoves.
I agree, my little VZ Defender (1.2 CF) was finicky with a full load...it liked N/S on bottom, then a layer of E/W... you had to rake the coals forward to the doghouse air, get 'em going, build the fire up, then SLOWLY cut the air back until the secondary fire took off. When done well it was almost like you flipped the fire...it started on the bottom, ended up on top!
I have a Drolet 1800i...2.4cf firebox.... And I load it to the gills on a full load. No issues with the secondaries. You do have to push the air control in stages when you throttle it back... A fast close will upset the fire. Every other tube stove I've used also does not like it when you slam the air down.
