Absolute Steel Hybrid

It would be better to start an new thread, and leave this one dedicated to questions about Flamestead's experience with the AS. There's going to be a lot of info posted to address your situation, and it will be easier to keep track of in your own thread. Short answer, a full-length liner should eliminate smoke in the house and the danger of a chimney fire that you now have with all the deposits in the clay liner. With the grated ash-handling systems in the Woodstock stoves, virtually no ash dust will escape. You won't believe how much your wood-burning experience will improve with these upgrades.

 

Well, first of all I think you have two different and unrelated problems: 1) is the stove leaking smoke and dust into the house during reloading, and 2) smoke leaking into the house when the stove is running.

Having had a short, 8" square masonry chimney, I can say that I have never had a stove that did not leak smoke and some fly- ash into the house whenever the loading door was opened. But that is also true for a much taller, stainless steel, insulated chimney. The doors on most wood stoves are just too big to swing open and expect all that incoming air, along with the gasses the wood fire is making, to be sucked up a 6" pipe, at least in my opinion. The cure for that is a draft inducer, which is a fan mounted in-line in the smoke pipe; the inducer will force air from the stove out the top of the chimney and eliminate the problem as long as the chimney is at least fairly clean. I only use the inducer when loading the stove but it is a HUGE step forward in clean wood burning, or at least it was for me.

The second problem is basically having a well- sealed stove that does not back- puff, or at least not very forcefully. Modern stoves are really quite good at sealing all around the door(s), external plates, glass and so forth. Older stoves may be able to be re-sealed with new gaskets, door latch adjustments and similar.

Brian

 

I think either would do you well, but the Ideal Steel is a larger firebox and hance will heat longer, so if you have the room for it, GO BIG!

Back puffing through either of these stoves is unlikely as the cat is in line with the firebox and will dampen and minimize any air hitting the firebox. Using a simple key plate on the stove pipe would be a 2nd way to minimize downdraft puffing.

 

I would also add that it's important to be sure your wood is 20% or under in moisture content. This can be measured using an inexpensive moisture meter. The new epa cat stoves will operate at their best with dry firewood. you'll have much less creosote build-up, less smoke to deal with because you won't be drying your wood in the stove, and a much better overall experience. Learned this from this forum.

 

How is there any smoke left for the cat to burn if it sits above the secondaries?

 

I'm not sure the secondaries burn 100% of the smoke. I believe the secondaries burn some and the cat burns some. You can adjust the mix of what system burns the gasses by your air control. More air and the secondaries burn more, less air and the cat burns more. You can adjust the air so that you have a cat only burn.

 

It's all about internal temperature. The cat burns at 500 degrees. The secondaries light around 1000 degrees. So if you choke it down so the firebox stays under 1000 you can get a long slow cat burn. Anything over 1000 and both work together. With the hybrid system the idea is more complete combustion leaving more heat in your house.

 

Interesting. I wonder if I could retro-fit secondary's on my little Fireview?

 

Secondaries alone certainly aren't 100% efficient at burning all the gasses. They do get more efficient the higher the burn but we don't always need or want our stove to be at the verge of glowing red hot all the time! On my prior stoves if you had the air turned down to were the secondaries where getting lazy you could even see some smoke still out the chimney occasionaly, especially with my Shelbune. There has been threads before (maybe not on this site though) about retrofitting older stoves with secondaries. Usually we are talking about old smoke dragons though, and they are still not as efficient as they probably would be if designed for secondaries in the first place. If you already have a good clean burning cat stove, I see adding secondaries as not much of an advantage. Sure with the hybrid it has some advantages to have both, but not enough I would try to go through the work of modding a good working stove and fabricating up parts. We're kinda derailing the thread though.

To keep on the tracks... With milder temps have you tried for a long burn Flamestead ? I've lost track of all the ASH threads but I'm not sure if anyone yet has tried to see how long of a burn they can get? I'm only really interested in this stove if it can reliably hit a ~15hr burn. Let me explain. My work day is 12 hours, and I drive 40 miles each way, plus need to be there a bit early for shift turnover. Plus you can't load the stove right at the time you leave, I like at least 30 minutes to get it settled out. So here is my typical day. Up around 4am and jump in the shower. About 4:20 load the stove. Leave for work about 4:50. Leave from work a bit after 6pm, arrive home usually around 7-7:15pm, closer to 8 if I stop for groceries on way home (I try to combine my trips during work commute since it is so far to go for groceries from my house). So say ~15 hours from a bit after 4am to 7pm.

 

I thank you for your inputs on the previous stove smoking issues and have started the questions in a new thread. I figured it was borderline this thread or new one. Thank you for the initial advice already and I will continue to follow these posts as well. Enjoy the slow burns this March.-Skyrvask

 

Welcome! Sorry for the delay in responding - life etc. ...

Lots of good response here already. We don't have a smoke issue due to great draft. On the IS we locked the doorway smoke flap in the up position and left it there the whole time we burned. My woodbox is 10+ ft from the stove, and I often leave the stove door wide open with a fresh load in there while I go get a few more splits to top off the load. The suggestions to improve your draft, above, will be more of a factor than the stoves themselves.

The Woodstock ashpans will help a lot with the dust - very well implemented designs, very handy to use - you read glowing compliments time after time from the new owners.

Based on recommendations here and elsewhere we bought a PowerSmith ash vacuum. We use it regularly to fight the detritus from handling wood in the house and are quite happy with it.

Regarding stove size, I'd bet the Absolute Steel nearly twice the stove the Classic is; if the Classic almost does what you want you'd probably be quite happy with the Absolute. However, just call Woodstock and talk with them, as I'm just guessing about the Classic, and they will have people with first-hand experience between the two stoves.

We burned a pre-EPA stove on this flue setup and had to clean it on a monthly schedule. It was a big change going to these modern cat stoves - I put 8 cord through the stoves, and suspect I could go all season without sweeping.

 

..snip...

We have done a few slow burns, but not many yet. This week is supposed to be very warm, so we'll try to get in some long burns. Lorin had a barometric damper installed for us to try, and we've mostly not used it, but are trying now. Our strong draft results in the cat air supply actually supplying some of the firebox combustion, and we sometimes get backpuffs when we try the very low and slow. We hope to be able to get some good tries at longer burns now, but both our work schedules are a bit hectic right now, too, so we'll see how it goes.

 

A little more burning paint smell as we cure a new front lid. The lid has a front lip, and the early beta version had the lip too close to the stove so that if you weren't very careful it would sit up off the gasket. The new lid has a slightly different angle to the lid, plus about half an inch of additional clearance. My wife asked for it to be plain - we like the new look...


While changing the lid I checked the cat and the heat shield above it. We are at close to 1.5 cord, and have yet to vacuum the cat, and the heat shield is dusty but otherwise no worse for the wear (we were getting wear to the IS cat shield by this point in time).

A little fuzzy, but this is the dirty (downward-facing) side of the cat. I put it back in without vacuuming it.

 

We checked the flue today since it was so warm out. We swept it right before getting the Absolute Steel installed, so this (see below) was from this stove. We have burn over 1.5 cord in this stove, and some was Sugar Maple that was CSS less than a year (just to see how well it burned in the stove). Also, we have a barometric damper that we've been playing with. I note those caveats because this was a little more soot than we would normally expect. It was all fine, brown, dusty (no black crumbles). Most of it came from the last few feet of flue.
{edited to fix major lapses in sentence structure}

 

WOW! very clean. Even with not so perfect wood.

 

Interesting, I had chased this similar situation around for years myself. I have a very tall stack, great draft and if ait was throttled down, regardless of the stove, I would get random backpuffs. Tried different chimney caps, outside air, turn key damper and a barometric. The barometric helped a ton but did not explain the situation.

One day I was on the roof and the wind was switching directions and I had just loaded the stove and noticed eddy currents around the stack. The steep pitch of the roof was the cause, even though I had roughly 5 feet of rise of chimney coming out the center of the roof.

I added an class A adapter to the liner and added 3 feet. Not that I wanted more draft than I already have, but I've only had one backpuff in the past two years.

 

As I understand it, the IS has an off-center flue collar exit so that it can be reversed to get a slightly lower rear-exit height. Does anyone know if the same is true for the AS? If so, I might be able to fit an AS in my fireplace without cutting the legs shorter. If not, maybe I could put an IS flue collar on an AS, if the bolt hole spacing is the same? It might not draft quite as well but I may be able to get away with it; At 16', my insulated liner draws well with the Fireview, Keystone and Dutchwest I've run on it....

 

The AS, just like the IS can be either top exhaust or rear exhaust. It's not off-center from side to side, I'm not sure what you mean by that?

 

The Specs are here. It says:

Rear Exit Flue Height - 28.25"

Woodstock Soapstone Company - NEW! ABSOLUTE Steel Hybrid

 

If you look at the collar, the top hole, that connects to the pipe, doesn't match up to the bottom hole. The collar has a slanted riser...I guess that's how I'd word it. For instance, if the collar was mounted to the top of the stove with the slanted portion forward, the hole that attaches to the pipe appears to be 2"-3" offset to the rear. If you flipped it around the pipe side would be 2"-3" offset to the front. Same with the back mount, except it would offset the pipe side up or down.

Th AS looks to be centered:



The IS collar is offset: