Ideal Steel Season #2 Tips, Tricks, and Improvements.

Yep me too. Little hazy on left side and more active on right side corner.

 

That unregulated air jet on the right you mention is one of two; there is one on the left also. For some reason, the right one seems to provide more air than the one on the left. Unregulated air goes into a 3/16 hole centered below the door opening (outside the door gasket), splits and blows through the channel inside the angle iron that supports the andirons. If you don't see any air jet (bright embers) on the left side unregulated hole at all, maybe your left side hole is plugged. Next time your IS is cold, run your finger along the rear Ridge of that angle iron - you will feel a dimple 2" from each end of the angle iron air channel. Those dimples are the air holes. Even with both my jet holes open, the right hole always blows stronger, contributing to cleaner glass on the right as most IS users see.

 

I've been tempted to open up the left side EPA jet some to try to counteract the IS's tendency toward always burning more vigorously on the right, but don't want to mess up a system that works really well just as it is. Some of my 'experiments' turn out not-so-good, heheh.

 

Does anyone else have a whistling IS? It's our second year with the IS, maybe 4 or 5 times strong windy conditions have sucked air through the stove so hard that it whistles. Doesn't whistle when burning, only during off season or between burns. Have localized the whistle to the "EPA hole" centered under the door opening. Wierded me out the first couple of times...

 

I have heard mine whistle a few times also when I wasn't burning. I could adjust the air & change the tune. Kinda different for sure !

 

All,

I was feeling creative tonight. I have a spare set of andirons that had warped (Woodstock sent me new ones that also warped) . So I tack welded a 3/4" x 16" plate to the base of my andirons. The idea here is to further prevent smoke spillage when reloading. I have subtracted 12 sq in from the door opening.

If this doesn't work, I will keep going up in plate steel size until it does the job completely.

Smoke spillage is more of an issue in mild weather which we had plenty of this season.

I realize another option would be to get wider andirons, but I like the narrow bears for ease of loading without tipping the andirons. I shall experiment...

 

Its a whole nother ball game for me tonight. The temperature has dropped here remarkably at the Jersey Shore.



19.6 degrees and falling. I've become very good at running the stove when it gets into the 30s but we skipped the 20s and went right to the teens. I've loaded the stove a little bit ago with 25% maple and 75% locust. I've got the air set at one notch above the first big notch and it's putting out pretty fast secondaries. Getting the mini torches. I'm thinking it's a little too much air but I believe I need the btus.



I get up at 330 am. Guess we'll see what's happening when I get up.

 

The question there is how much heat do you keep in your house vs how much you send up the chimney .. hard decisions..

 

I'm still pretty new with it and getting the hang of what I need for an overnight load and to cover my work shift. On my days off the length of burn really doesn't matter and I can dial in for whatever heat I need, but on workdays it's more about hitting certain burn times. So far its been great with temps in the 30's... yesterday we dropped to 20's and today 10ºF. Came home last night from work with just coals but good enough to put the overnight load in without needing any kindling, and house pretty much at 70ºF. That is with the pellet stove also going on the other side of the house (just on a 1 setting). Loaded the stove at 4am today, left it between notch 2 and 3, 10º outside, house at 69º. Left the pellet burner still on as low as it goes. Stove loaded with ash, though short pieces I am trying to use up so not quite full. We'll see when I get home around 7pm how a 15hr burn does on a colder day. Suppose to hit 28º, so 'average' temp today still in the teens.

I know I'll likely hit a point where a 15hr burn won't keep the house warm (like sub zero temps I mean) but turning up the pellet burner on those days might still help enough to keep the house warm.

 

I had an issue with my overnight burn that I was talking about a few posts back. I was in bed around 10 and I smelled something so I went out to look at the stove. It was firing hard. The tops of the dragon andirons were just starting to turn orange. The smell was the stove pipe. It's new this season and every new high temp it smells. The flue probe registered flue gasses at around 700. The area by the cat was over 600 but not sure what the exact temperature was due to my IR thermometer only registering up to 600 degrees and then showing an error code.

I lowered the air a few notches and it settled down after a few minutes and I went to bed. By the time I got up the stove wasn't keeping the furnace off anymore. However the stove was still pretty full. Once I busted up the big pieces I had approximately 6 inches of hot coals in the stove. I raked it forward best as possible and put a few splits on. Got back up to cat temp so I engaged it and let it settle in at one notch below the first big one. I didn't want a repeat of last night. I checked my thermostat remotely a few times and it did raise 2 degrees. It dropped back to 70 within 3 hours. I'd say by the forth hour the furnace was coming on. Not enough btus. My stove isn't in an ideal spot..end of the house in a den converted from a garage but a fan on the floor spreads heat nicely. Ranch house btw.

Kinda disappointed in not keeping the furnace off but the temperature was really cold. 13 degrees overnight. Plus I think I can go a little lighter wood wise for the overnight burn so I don't wake up to a half full stove.

Any other suggestions?

 

What notch did you have it set on before and after? I tend to run the stove until I'm sweating in shorts before I give it the final load for the night. That is how I compensate for colder nights. Last night was down right freezing here. Real feel of -4 and windy.

 

This is a pretty common problem with the Ideal Steel because it has very strong secondaries but pretty weak primaries (air supply). So once the wood is all done gassing, the remaining charred wood and coals do not get enough air to burn quickly enough to put out sufficient heat. Put another way, with the stove full of hardwood and the draft set so that the stove is putting out the desired amount of heat, it will only produce that amount of heat for about 1/2 of the burn- then the heat output falls way off because the remaining fuel is all coals and they burn much more slowly.

Introducing just a bit of air under the grate really went a long way to balancing the burn for me. I put a small adjustable air supply in the ash pan door but generally do not adjust it at all- it is probably set to the equivilent of about a 1/4" diameter hole.

Another mod. that <may> help would be to open up the holes in the front of the stove; there is one larger hole just under the door opening that feeds two smaller holes in a piece of angle iron inside the stove. Of course drilling those holes open would be tougher to undo later should you want to- closing a small hole or two in the ash pan door could be done easily with just a nut and bolt installed in the drilled hole(s).

It will take a while to learn how to set the stove up as well as what splits to use and how to load the stove. Larger splits burn slower and really contribute to longer, more even plus they allow more wood (in weight) to be put in the stove in the first place. Unfortunately, they can also aggravate the problem of producing a lot of coals that will not burn down well. In my own stove, I find it packs and burns best when loaded E/W with the splits packed in pretty close. Lately I have been pushing them up against the left side of the stove (same side as the bypass handle) and leaving all of the space on the right side of the stove.... not sure yet if it makes much difference. But loading E/W vs. N/S does seem to make a big difference both in burn time as well as being able to pack more wood in the stove in the first place (E/W).

By the way, 700F flue gas temp. is not too hot IMO. That is exactly where I limit my own stove for starting and hot burns. The smell from the paint curing is quite normal and not really anything to be wary of as long as you are monitoring actual stove, and especially flue, temps.

Brian

 

What is the t-stat set on? Turn it down a bit.

 

Last night was our first night to really let the IS do its thing. Loaded the stove right around 11pm with my 1.5 year red and white oak splits. Cat probe got to just under 900 when I engaged the cat and was pushing it's way over 1200 when I dialed the air back for the final time to 25%. I got a shower and came back out to the cat probe sitting at 1450
The mag stick on thermo 18" up my single wall pipe read 375 and my ir gun read an average of 650 on the face of the stove and a peak of 707 next to the cat probe. Stove top Temps were 575 on either side of the pipe. Burner Temps were right around 400-475 depending on which one I hit with the ir gun this morning at 6:45 I had about 5 inches of cherry red coals and I forgot to get Temps before I hurried to reload and get ready for work.......I hate waking up late

 

My thermostat software pizzes me off. I'd like it to track when and how long the furnace runs but so far nothing on the app or the horizon. About 18 months ago it was almost a top of the line thermostat with WiFi. The new batch are so much nicer. I want more data. It was a Honeywell, touch screen with WiFi. Backlit screen. Not the color one. Just grumbling...

 

I track a new oil boiler that I installed last spring and I do it with an external 4- channel thermocouple device, in fact, the same one I use for my woodstove. I measure boiler temp., flue temp., DHW temp. and DHW water return temp.. You could do the same thing with a furnace- just measure the flue temp. along with the plenum temp. and you will know exactly when it goes on and off (both the firing as well as the fan), how long it ran, what time(s), etc. It stores the data on an SD card so you do have to take a walk but it does not take long to swap cards and I find looking at the data yields a LOT of information, at least it did on my boiler.

Brian

 

Well, I've been running this stove (off and on with the weather we've been having) for nearly three months, and we couldn't be happier. Tonight is the coldest night so far, so I loaded the stove full of oak and poplar. It's 25 degrees outside currently, 88 in the stove room, 78 in the living room adjacent, and 68 in our bedroom that's right off the living room. Life is good(er)

Loaded stove throttled back for the night:


Stovetop temp:


Front temp:


Where I'm running it:


Living room next to the stove room:

 

88 in the stove room, whew! Don't think I've ever had a stove room that warm, even 78 is sweating hot for me. My burn yesterday, our coldest day so far was perfect, temp in LR showed only a fluctuation of 1 degree (69-70ºF). Plenty of hot coals at the 7:40PM reload from the 4AM load.

Today will challenge the max burn length I've tried thus far. I'm going to see Star Wars on the big screen on the way home. Won't be home till after 10PM. Loaded at 4:30 today, after my shower to gain an extra 30 minutes, and loaded it about as full as I could with ~20" ash E/W. It was loaded a a hotter than usual bed of coals and took off pretty fast. I closed it down to the second notch.

Hey BDF, what kind of software do you use to view your thermocouple data? I don't suppose it creates a data file that can be read by some kind of text file does it? I've been thinking about doing something like this, but I've been windows free for a few years now which complicates some things. I do have an old controller module somewhere that I got years ago for use on my aquariums that had temp probe modules and a web interface (hooked straight to network with its own built in webserver) so I could view it anywhere over the internet on any machine (or smartphone). I'm not sure if the probes it used were standard though, I'll have to figure out if it would accept something that would work on a stove.

 

Brad38, looks perfect to me.. stove room warm, normal.. living room comfortable. Bedroom perfect for sleeping... Good job on placement of stove. Appears to be a sweet setup! congratulations

 

Yep, exactly that- the data is stored as plain text, tabbed in columns. Looks like this:

MN/AT date time int 1ch 2ch 3ch 4ch unit
AT 2016-01-01 09:29:36 2m 398.3 303.4 524.0 238.6 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:31:36 2m 404.2 297.9 569.8 244.9 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:33:36 2m 665.0 365.7 865.7 259.4 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:35:36 2m 682.5 402.9 772.7 275.4 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:37:36 2m 601.8 402.6 668.0 287.4 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:39:36 2m 1264 616.6 745.5 322.7 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:41:36 2m 1248 655.2 1125 370.8 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:43:36 2m 1286 668.0 1065 410.4 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:45:36 2m 1311 687.7 1021 445.1 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:47:36 2m 1310 687.4 927.6 478.8 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:49:36 2m 1351 691.7 906.1 505.2 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:51:36 2m 1285 678.3 747.9 528.5 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:53:36 2m 1209 651.4 695.8 538.1 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:55:36 2m 1169 636.8 689.9 542.0 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:57:36 2m 1082 622.9 679.2 540.5 F
AT 2016-01-01 09:59:36 2m 1035 599.5 669.6 536.2 F
AT 2016-01-01 10:01:36 2m 1004 590.6 679.1 528.5 F
AT 2016-01-01 10:03:36 2m 956.4 571.5 681.6 519.2 F

I drag that data into Excel, create a graph and with just a very little manipulation, have a data graph, some that I have posted on this forum. I am sure any spreadsheet software would be capable of the same thing, and if none of those are available, you might very well find something on the 'Net that will actually do the conversion and display for you. ??

As far as the sensors, yes, you have to match the data gathering device with the right probe(s). In my case it is fairly easy as they are a pretty common thermocouple but some do use thermistors, and others use different thermocouples that are not compatible or interchangeable. And of course, the sensors have to go where the data you want to measure is being generated..... inside the stove; some stove mods. are needed, mostly drilling (and in my case, tapping) holes where needed. Modding a commercial stove is not a big deal to me but I understand some others are reluctant or simply will not do that; it IS possible to get custom thermocouples into the firebox and catalytic area of some woodstoves without modifying the stove but the thermocouples are expensive and it takes a bit of work and some simple fabrication to do it. There is no way into a flue without drilling that I can think of but flue pipe is really quite inexpensive so poking a hole in that stuff is not a big deal IMO.

Brian