Help with Hearthstone Stoves

If your concerned about a little smoke,just trade it in for an oil furnace

 

I find it a rare occasion that I would restoke the fire while I have burning wood in progress. Yes, it "could" happen, but it would be very rare.

 

Agreed! I'm not concerned about that little wisp of smoke by any means. The big discussion here was whether one can run the BK 40 on a 6" pipe without filling the house with smoke. Couldn't really get good solid answers, so, I set out to let newcomers know if it "could" be done. I'm only about a week+ into the new BK 40 on a 6" flue/chimney and so far, I'm very confident it's going to heat more than adequately and perform very well on the 6 inch. We'll know within the next month or so once the bitter weather really kicks in. Can't wait!

 

I also ran a hearthstone heritage and upgraded to a BK. The BK will spill smoke into the room pretty bad when I reload at the time you describe, active coals but cat meter falling out of the active zone. Really, anytime there is much of a fire in the stove I am dang lucky to be able to open the door without smoke spilling. On startup, no smoke enters the room. It's weird. Rather than your tin foil trick, I just put my goofy arm up there across the top of the opening and use my other hand to load. Works the same way.

If your wife not only didn't complain about the smoke but even discouraged your move to 8" to fix it then I would wait. She makes an excellent point about how you would be prettty sad to spend all that money and then still have smoke spillage. It seems to be part of these stoves. Now if it was leaking smoke during the burn with the door closed, or stalling the cat out on low then you have an issue but open door with burning fuel spillage is very common if not normal.

When you look into the stove you will notice that the entrance to the bypass opening is even or maybe lower than the door opening which means that rising smoke can easily find it easier to flow out into the room. I think that is why blocking off the top of the door opening works.

 

Very valuable input! Thank you for letting me know you experience it as well. The tin foil baffle literally stopped ALL the smoke spilling out of the stove. My wife asked me why I never did that with the Heritage, and I said, Be cause it had the much smaller side door which eliminated that issue. I found myself always loading the Heritage from the side, strictly because of the smoke spillage issue.

I appreciate you giving me a little peace of mind here!

I have zero smoke issues with door closed, and Cat operates perfectly on a low burn until fuel runs out.

 

I may need to try this foil trick with my AS...

 

Let me know what you think if you do. I hope it helps. It sure helped me.

 

I don’t have smoke spillage issues when loading but when I shovel out ash I have a problem with hot fly ash so I take a piece of sheet metal and lay it on top of the stove hanging about a foot over the door. As I shovel out the ash I keep the ash bucket close to the door and the sheet metal helps draw most of it back in through the door.

 

Why wouldn’t it run on 6”?
I figured it probably would when you started this thread. Deep winter if you needed 100% output then it might make a difference, but most stoves don’t/shouldn’t need full output all the time…save a few days/weeks a year.

As was eluded to earlier, I think it was Highbeam that may have mentioned it, the only thing you may see is the stove may not see its full heat potential with the smaller pipe…that is, total output of the stove.

One thought I have though is this, a 6” insulated pipe is easier to keep more warm than an 8” pipe. Takes more heat and therefore more combustion in the box (more fuel consumption) to heat the larger pipe. In other words, running low to medium cruise should provide for better draft on the smaller pipe than the larger pipe. Stove shouldn’t have to work as hard to reach a certain temperature up to a point. Beyond that threshold you might need the larger pipe, but if not, then if you never need much out of the stove you should be better off with the smaller pipe because in theory a smaller, hotter pipe, drafts better and is cleaner. The better it drafts on a low setting the stove shouldn’t have to work as hard to produce the same given amount of heat.

If you’re getting little to no smoke rolling into the room on reloads then I’d say you got it dialed in good. That’s what you want. You could actually make it to code with 8” pipe/chimney liner and what good would it be, other than meeting code and manufacturers recommendations, if smoke rolls into the room on the “correct” sized pipe. At that point you haven’t satisfied the stove/chimney…you only satisfied regulators, men writing codes/rules based on laboratory tests rather than individual home/stove/chimney systems, of which most forum participants are aware each home/stove/chimney system is different…even if identical in identical homes they will could perform differently because two homes can’t sit in the exact same location and have the exact same variables.

 

Two second update. I sold the Hearthstone Heritage. Unfortunately, I only recovered about half of what I paid for it. Just hoping the new owners find it suitable for their needs. For them, it's pretty much a sitting room center piece.