I am new to the forum and am really interested in learning about heating with wood. Mine is a 1990 model. Has anybody been able to keep a fire going all night in theirs? Sometimes when we first light it there is smoke coming out the bottom (see pictures). I am going to replace the door gasket and the pipes on the top of the fire box look real good. Any other maintenance I should do?
I have one in my garage. Maybe I am treating it wrong but it just seems like it needs to be fed constantly. My two house stoves are older Vermont Castings and I can keep both of them going all night and there are coals in the old Resolute for days but the Lopi just burns the wood and then goes out.
We had one. It needed a constant supply of wood. It is a small stove and we kept it pretty darn hot to heat our house. We replaced it with a big cook stove. The lopi was a nice stove, but it was too small to hold any wood.
I have a Lopi Freedom insert that looks similar to yours. I get overnight burns every night. Overnight for me is 6 to 7 hours but I've had burns up to 10 hours without adding wood. Make sure you have a good bed of ash. About 1 to 2 inches is about right. Less than that won't hold embers well and more than that takes up too much space and decreases the amount of wood you can fit in the box. Use a good coaling wood to build your ash base. Oak and hickory work well, ash and maple don't coal nearly as well. With the stove running about 400 degrees surface temp I load the box up with a couple of o'ernighters. Large splits, 4x4 and bigger, preferably with a knot or two in them. I'll let them get going for about 10 minutes or so then engage the secondaries and pull the lower damper all the way out. That should burn all night for you.
