Production Woodstock IS

Installed my damper today. I had heard there was room for air to flow around & through the cast iron damper plate, but did not realize how big of gaps they actually are!

That being said, I have a full load in, damper at a 45 degree angle, & the stove is cruising nicely. I have never been able to load it over half full without it whistling or running away on me.

 

yup pa.forester you got good draft.. I told Tom (Woodstock owner) what my draft measured he said yup put in a damper!

 

Yes, even "closed" all the way, they really are not even close to closed. I usually run my I.S. with the damper horizontal or fully 'closed' and I still need to throttle the draft (the factory draft) to control the stove.

By the way, with the damper closed and the draft set a bit further open, my stove actually generates more heat in the house and less heat up the stovepipe.

Brian

 

I was actually just thinking my stove should generate more heat. I did have to run my damper horizontal/fully closed once the stove got up to temp. It's much more controllable now!

 

Woodstock installed a pipe damper for us while testing the AS, and we've left it in place this Fall for the PH. It helped a lot with the AS, and is giving us a lot more flexibility and finer control of burn in the PH.

 

Great pics - I loved this very slow, lazy, hypnotic burn of the IS. I can't get the same effect with either the PH or AS.

 

My draft is funny. I had to extend the chimney to get better starts and less smoke spillage . So it seems strong now on the start. I am still able to control the low end and put it into a deep cat burn. I feel like I might be right in the sweet spot. I wonder if there is any benefit to me installing a damper.

 

My stove <seems> to produce more radiant heat and have lower flue temps. but truth be told, I had too many changes at one time to have any certainty that that is the case. I changed chimneys from a relatively short, 8X8 masonry chimney that shared a flue with a boiler (quiet down you angry hordes- it was perfectly code- legal when it was installed ) to a considerately taller, double- walled, 6" diameter SS chimney; I found that on cold nights, I could not throttle the stove down as far or as fast as I would have liked so I put a damper in the stovepipe just above the stove. Unfortunately, I did not have the new chimney long enough to really get a feel for how the stove behaved while using it.

On the other hand, they are only about $8 and really pretty easy to install so not much time, money or effort to try one, at least IMO. The worst thing that can happen is that you never use it and just leave it open....

Brian

 

I think I'm going to install a damper on my system just so it is there and it gives me something to tinker with to get the most heat out of this stove. My chimney is 20 ft up from the T so far, another couple feet and a 90 to get to the T from the inside. I'd rather have it in for the the possible overdraft on those really cold days/nights. Also in my mind its just easier to have it put in right away rather than messing with cutting pipe down the road.

 

I had one in the pipe on my Quadra Fire. The thing I loved about it was I could close it when burning down coals. It seemed to keep more heat in the house. When you had the air control wide open you close the damper it is more effective.

 

Started a nice top down fire earlier. Seemed established. Engaged cat and it was rising. Now it's a dark box at half air and cat is slowly falling. Wood is fine. Under 18%.

Just figures since I'm tired and didn't want to fiddle with the stove tonight. Bah humbug

 

Had just about the same experience tonight. Tried to make a little fire because the fires I've been making overheat the house. Seemed like it was progressing fine then suddenly I had a firebox full of unburnt fuel barely glowing orange and falling temps. Adjusting the air either direction just made the temps fall faster. Full air didn't catch it, throwing the cat back out didn't catch it. Eventually had to crack the door again, the fire instantly went POOF! and I had some flames. I just shut the door, pulled the lever to put the cat back in, and have left it wide open since. Seems it just doesn't want to sustain a secondary or cat burn with this little fuel in it.

 

Yeah its not liking my half load. I should have put another layer of splits in.

Had the same exact thing happening that you just described.

Gonna ride it out now and see what happens.

 

Well, now I need advice from those of you who have had the stove longer.

As I said 2 posts above, I loaded the stove up small tonight to try to not overheat the house. I put 4 Enviro Bricks in plus a pile of kindling on top to get them going. They went well for a while, had a stall as detailed above, then got going OK again. I just checked on the stove and things are not good. The cat was at 400F and falling, the flue was 300F and falling. The stove is at full air and the remains of the bricks are glowing orange in places. Out of curiosity and uncertainty about what to do, I opened the door and poked it with a stick. The sawdust bricks are still solid-ish enough to hold their shape but I can push the poker several inches into them without any significant resistance.

1) Am I right that at 400F and falling, the cat is not burning anything up?

2) At this point, given what I've described, am I far enough onto the downside of the burn that creosote is not a concern even with the very low temps?

3) If creosote IS still a concern, what's my best move now?

 

How did you stack the bricks? You have to make sure air can get in between them. It's not going to burn well if you have them neatly stacked on each other. Try laying them on their sides with a 1" air gap. Or stagger them in a way that does not restrict airflow.

 

My experience with the bricks (not with the IS though) is that they burn awesome when the my are stacked tight. I found them to be a different beast than cordwood. I used two tons of them one year.
I'm not sure you can get much creosote out of them no matter what you do.

 

These stoves will not burn 'low and slow' with small loads of fuel, at least in my experience. So we have two choices: burn a small, hot fire without bothering trying to use the cat. or throttling the stove much, if at all, or load the stove and get a well- established fire, then try to damp it down so it does not overheat the house. My experience is that the second method just does not work- I end up with an over- heated house.

If you really need an extremely small fire, just to 'take the chill off' of the house, what I normally do is burn a fast, hot fire (with flue temps. never exceeding 750F of course) of cardboard and some kindling an just let it go out. The stove will radiate heat for a long time once it is warm, even without an active fire.

Unfortunately, this is a woodstove and we are burning large pieces of wood and they just cannot be regulated like a fuel oil or natural gas furnace / boiler, at least on the very low end. They really shine when it is fairly cold outside- I can keep an active fire going in my stove once the temps. drop to 35F or so and below.

Brian

 

I'm thinking maybe for quick hot fires to resplit some splits in half and use those. Not quite kindling size but not regular split size either.

As you were saying the stove doesn't do small loads well and I agree. I think in part because the stove is pretty big. Too much airspace in there for good secondaries and not enough fuel for the cat if you want to run that.

 

I don't think just 4 Enviro bricks plus kindling (assuming this was a cold start without a thick bed of hot coals then?) is enough to sustain the stove properly. Even on a hot reload with a lot of coals 4 Enviro bricks isn't much. This is a very large heater and to maintain proper combustion it needs a certain amount of heat 500+ for cat, 1,000+ for secondaries to burn properly. The stove itself is going to suck up a lot of heat especially on a cold start, as the firebrick/soapstone.steel sucks up that heat and while your sensors may indicate it's hot enough it might just be the active primary flames and once you start to dial it back to normal operation the temp drops and can't sustain proper burn. The secondary air gets preheated by channeling through the hot stove, so just having a tiny fire isn't going to keep things hot and the air preheated. If you're just planning a short burn (not continuous 24x7) and don't want to overheat the place you could either just let it rip with a mostly primary fire, heat the stove up good and hot and let it burn out early, hoping the thermal mass will stay warm enough to heat the place long enough. Or I'd load it more normal and just idle it lower. I've found to really burn well it needs to be over half full or the characteristics drastically change. But you can certainly load it mostly full and turn it down into a cat only burn and not generate nearly as much heat. Cat only burn still throws off a lot of heat when the cat is well over 1000F, but If you can keep the cat say under 800F and stovetop around or under 300F it's a very gently heat. If that still overheats your house than crack a window open, fresh air on mild days is always nice anyhow.

It also seems to take a while to get Enviro's to really outgass. Always seems to be a big spike several hours into the burn, unless it was just from the falling outside temps or wind picking up. If I am going to load mainly bricks, I'll throw a couple splits of hardwood in there too to make sure I got a good burn for 2-3 hours when the bricks sort of take over. I experimented with many different ways last year, didn't find a huge difference how I exactly placed the combo, but found 1 layer of even splits on the bottom with a layer of bricks atop them to be good for lighter loads. The splits will burn a little quicker and keep a good hot coal bed under the bricks. Tightly packed bricks keeps them from taking off to quickly at first, and after several hours when the splits disintegrate underneath it shifts the bricks around which keeps them burning better later in the burn. The bricks do tend to slack off a lot more later in the burn, so stirring them up 2/3rd the way through the burn helps, and cordwood turning to coals underneath helps do this for you.

For a shorter burn not to overheat the house though I'm doing about the opposite of you... instead of using an extremely dense and high btu fuel I've got a cord of spruce for the shoulder season. You can pack the firebox full and have only about half the btu of coordwood, and a fraction of eco bricks. And easy to maintain and control the burn. Just some food for thought for next year. Often time people are giving away softwood for free since nobody around here thinks its good for anything except plugging up your chimney and housefires. But if you've got the Enviro bricks to burn, just try packing more in there and getting a nice burn, and just dialing it back. During the shoulder season is the time to not mess with the stove so much and enjoy a just-warm-enough stove that can burn 24 hours or even 48... Why mess with a cold start, kindling, matches, and struggling stove once or twice a day when you can reload once and cruise for 2 days with very mild heat

Of course experiment with lighter loads before you go all the way!!! But fwiw here is 24 Enviro bricks (formerly called eco bricks) in the ISH:

I did several smaller burns prior to loading up this much, experimented with 12, 14, 16 etc.

At 31 hours elapsed:


And 48 hours and still nice and warm and glowing after some stoking up:


Stove top temp averaged around 275F, not going to overheat most houses with that. Spent about 4-5 hours out of the 48 between 300-350 is all. Should be great for shoulder season, as long as the draft isn't wonky with outside temps (that burn I photographed above was during somewhat mild Feb last year, but still much colder than now - I have a second stove too so can get by more with the Ideal Steel just cruising low and slow).

Of course YMMV, draft and control characteristics may be different for different installations, and be careful loading that much btu into the stove at once until you have a good feeling for it.

 

I've been thinking that from a cold start a top down fire might give you a false sense of security when it comes to engaging the cat. It creates a lot of heat up top. The gasses are hot too so a cat probe and a flue thermometer or probe will show you that it's time to engage the cat. However that big hunk of steel might not be up to temperature yet. So when you engage the cat especially with a smaller load of wood it starts to drop temperature because the stove itself is sucking up the btus. I think that's what happened to me last night.