I have a Woodstock AS. This may be a stupid question, but I’m in the school of no question is stupid. I just went to clean out the ashes. Hot bed of coals and no active fire. I have two ash pans. Take one ash pan out and put the other one in. I had the ash pan door open for literally no more than 3 seconds and I started getting a roaring noise, so I shut the ash pan door quickly. Imagine this is not good. Should I not do this? If not, how do I prevent it in the future and be able to change out the ash pan? I find I usually need to clean out the ashes once per day when I’m burning all the time. Thank you.
If I'm needing to empty a hot ash tray, I don't leave the ash door open for long. I open, slide out the tray, close door, empty tray, return the tray to where it belongs. I have only the one tray. I don't have a Woodstock, but I'd think I'd follow the same behavior. Up on the NH border, eh? Nice area there.
Maybe rake the coals toward the back so the air rushing through the grate is not firing the coals back up...or maybe crack the firebox door open a bit so that it "breaks the vacuum" on the grate/ashpan area...
That pretty common on the IS with similar design. Inside fire box it’s probably 200° and the air you’re letting in is 70 so it’s causing a suction. It doesn’t seem to hurt anything but I try to limit it. Breaking suction helps by opening fire box door
You didn’t say that the main door was open when you opened the ash door? Doing ash door while the main (loading) door is closed makes it into a blast furnace. Or am I missing something here? With our Ideal Steel, we must slowly first open the main door before (& let it stabilize a minute) before opening the ash door.
I guess we know you've got a draft working there. That's a good thing. I only have one ashpan. I empty the ashpan when I've let the fire die or pretty close to dead. I open the ashpan drawer pull it, and close the door. I've got a 5 gallon galvanized bucket and that's where the ash goes. I'm outside the house at this point. Too much fly-up ash to do it in the house anyway. I think I did learn the open door trick at one time, finding out by accident. I think you can switch from a full one to an empty one, but just let the coals be burnt way down. Then you can once you've changed, close the ashpan door and open the main door, and use a grate tool to work the ash back and forth. You'll be down to just hot coals. and it should re-start easily with some new splits.
My furnace does the same thing when I empty my ash pan. I don't have an ash pan door. The front of the pan is the door so it comes out with the pan when emptying into a metal trash can I have outside my cellar walk out doors next to the furnace. If there is a decent amount of red coals when doing this, I get a bellows effect that turns my ash grate in the floor of the firebox into a forge. This gets the whole furnace singing and moaning and starts a pretty strong vibration. While this might seem alarming, it's harmless and the pan is back in shutting it down in about 15 seconds or less.
No, I wouldn't go take a shower while it's going on but it's certainly harmless in the amount of time it takes a person to empty an ash pan.
