Comparing the Ideal Steel to Progress Hybrid

Can someone explain this secondary air damper plate to me? Does this only feed the cat or the fire box as well? Is it adjustable?

 

Back-puffing: I can get my PH to do an impressive back-puff, blowing out smoke around the edges of the top stone. I have yet to be able to back-puff the new stove to the point where I could smell any smoke in the room. It will do little puffs of flame, but they are "soft" and small.

 

That's a good thing

 

Can we get an update on how the Steel compares to the PH?

Heat output? Burn times? Heat movement? Getting the stove up to temp?

 

Love that floor,,,don't touch a thing You can't buy that character!

 

OK, between ridiculously cold and long work hours I haven't spent much time playing with the stove - the primary focus was to get it to chew through one load, get rid of coals, and get the next load going.

But we are at 26 degrees now, and can ease off the accelerator. The draft control is awesome - if only the PH could get a retrofit! The airflow is different between the two stoves. The Ideal Steel is slower to get rolling - I think the plate the andirons are connected to deflects the air coming down the glass so it fans the side of the wood rather than fanning the coals underneath the wood. A couple of times I ran two short pieces N/S and then the 20" load on top of that (E/W), which allowed more airflow underneath and got a quicker start, but at the price of less wood in the box.

The Ideal Steel secondaries are "softer" (lower velocity air). The PH can bore holes into the top of the load with the secondaries.

Our Red Maple loads in the PH would pop and throw sparks for the first hour. The Ideal Steel has a few pieces that pop, but maybe 20% of what goes on in the PH.

I feel like overall heat output is very similar, although the tail end of the Ideal Steel load (coal disposal time) is cooler than the PH. We are still experimenting with different load sizes, and have not done a packed-to-the-gills load (I'd say we generally run an 80% full load, which is how we also ran the PH). I think there is more intense heat out the front of the PH, but either stove up at a 550 stovetop and rolling secondaries backs you off away from the glass.

We start the PH slow, out of concern for the soapstone, so, once it catches, the Ideal Steel tends to have a much quicker start-up for us. But the PH has the airflow to start just as fast. Brian wrote of starting with the door open, and I thought 'not me', but if I don't leave coals showing at the front, it can take a loooong time for it to build up some heat. I've used the open door method multiple times (with me sitting right beside it on the hearth). I did open the ash pan door a couple of times, but it is on the other end of the spectrum - I almost immediately start worrying about damaging the grate due to the intense blow-torch effect - I don't see that as a sustainable method.

Tonight my wife collected me a couple of armloads of shorter wood, and we are burning our first N/S load, and are liking it. We'll be able to burn a few more loads like this, but most of the wood it 20".

We are one week into burning 24-7, and the glass has been a lot cleaner than the PH (we are burning hot most of the time, but we did that frequently with the PH, too). And the glass is dead-simple to clean (no reaching around andirons like with the PH).

 

Thank you for the detailed write-up. It's looking more and more like I will either go with to Woodstock Steel stoves or a Steel and Princess combo if I can find a used Princess.

When burning hot, how long are you getting usable heat per load?

 

That is a really nice pic. How long of those splits? Almost looks like the firebox is more usable than the 30 based on this load.

 

Flamestead, how many splits was that load in the pic?
I think I'm counting 12 of various sizes, and there's room for a few more.

 

I didn't really pay attention, so let's try again.
After it is loaded...



And before...
(That's an 18" x 48" hearth extender, and the wider floor boards are 4.75" (splits are not huge))

 

In under 4 hours we can be down to a big pile of coals that you can still see the grain of the wood in, but that have lost the shape/structure of being a log.

I tend to do smaller, more frequent loads when I am home, rather than trying for as few as possible (I tend to not run very hot when filled, and normally would not have done a load as large as pictured above; aim to have a few inches between the load and the secondaries inlet).

The load pictured above is now at 500 degree stovetop and two small areas of weak flame on top (largely black in the firebox).

 

Lower right corner shows where there is an air inlet (no flames, just glowing). I can comfortably hold my hand within half an inch of the glass. Hottest spot on top is at 500, flue probe is just below 400. It is 33 degrees outside, no wind, drizzle. Still have room to cut airflow. I can get my PH to do this for half an hour or so at the most, but then the secondaries kick up. Woodstock will be here in 12 hours to test a modified door latch, so at some point tonight I'll need to introduce some air.

 

I do the the same thing with my PH... big fire box, just more room to easily load it half full . To me it would take the fun out of burning wood,,,, trying to get every last piece of wood in every time you loaded the stove... To me efficiency is not having to cram the stove full to have a decent burn time...

 

At that rate, it's gotta be making some serious BTU's. Not surprising after seeing the pic of your house, lot of footage. Where is the draft set burning at this rate, 1/4 -1/2? How do you think the Steel stacks up to the PH? Any preference?
It's gonna take some wood to make big time heat. Some homes in some climates need big time heat. There's no free lunch. There is no magic BTU's. There are magic burn times at minimal BTU's. BTU's come from wood, not magic. If you want more BTU's from a load, get a bigger firebox. I just don't believe one EPA stove makes appreciably more BTU's from the same load of wood (and I admit to being cat biased).
I almost always do two loads per 24hrs in a Keystone, one 14 hr + one 10hr, typical with lows in the teens and highs in the mid 20s. It's not magic, I have a very tight, well insulated, small house. If you need serious heat, this (KS @1.4 cuft) is not the stove for you.
Sorry, just my $.02.

 

I am 100% with you on the need for wood to be consumed rapidly in order to generate high rates of heat output. I've had people question my PH burn rate, so I've done the math for a 75% of rated max output, and it comes out to relatively short burn times for my Red Maple loads.

Draft had 1.5" of travel remaining. I've since closed it to about 1" of travel because the stovetop inched up to 525 degrees and the secondaries were spreading across the whole top of the firebox. Flue probe stack at 400 degrees. Hottest spot on the box is on the front, just above the door (right in front of the cat).

My message back to Woodstock will be to rebuild my PH to give me this degree of control - this stove (Ideal Steel) is in a completely different league than the PH on these low burns. I would seriously consider an expensive retrofit to my PH to get this flexibility. I would put up with an ugly kludge back at the PH draft inlet to get this control.

As for the high burns, the PH cranks out a lot of heat and it gets rid of my coals more quickly, so small advantage to the PH.

 

What do you think of adding a damper to the PH? Waste of time?

 

Out of how many total inches of travel?

 

I think it has about 8" of arc.

I've closed it down a little more because it was starting to heat up the firebox more. In addition to very slow secondaries, I am having the occasional ghost of flame along the front glass.

 

An in-flue damper? I'm not sure, but it would be a cheap enough experiment to do.

The nice thing about the Ideal Steel damper is the secondary and primary are on the same control (like the PH), but the control is graduated (when near wide-open, an inch of movement closes off more air than an inch of movement near fully closed, and at a different rate/ratio for secondary to primary. You would not get that fine tuning with a flue damper.

{edit: a colon followed by a 'p' gives a rude little smiley, which I just removed) (looked like this: secondaryrimary)