Production Woodstock IS

As the weather progressively gets colder, the Ideal is showing its strengths. It does not have the wild temperature swings of my 2010 EPA tube stove and seems to have an attitude of "slow and steady wins the race". It will be very interesting to see how it runs when temperatures go into negative numbers. For now, and yes, you can laugh at me for this, I'm having trouble figuring out how to load it. My wood was cut over two years ago to 16 inch lengths as to accommodate the prior stove. The Ideal is tough to load with this length as the sloped firebox does not allow for a consistent front-to-back (North/south, East/West, I forget) load. Every load is Rubik's Cube. Thank goodness for welder's gloves.

 

I have 16 inch splits and either direction you can make a tight square to the top (in back) and then put one E/W on top at the front. When full, I never saw much difference loading the wood N/S vs E/W (except that top front piece that only fits one way).

 

Agreed! I have been loading my 16" splits N/S and putting the final 2 smaller splits at the very top in front to fill it completely. I'm sure I'll try different setups as the season goes on and just stick with what works best.

I'm not sure who brought this up the other day but after reading it I noticed this in mine today as well, the fire seems to lean to the right of the firebox.

 

I am going through the same learning curve with 18" splits. What seems to work best so far is to pull all the coals and ash forward and load the stove E/W (left to right) starting in the back / right corner with the biggest splits on the bottom. Then load up and forward until the stove is about full. There will be a channel on the left side of the stove left that will hold 3 more medium splits or so if loaded N/S (front to back).

And yep, reaching over a pile of red coals really does help a person be quick.

Brian

Edited to reflect actual compass readings.

 

Brian doesn't wear gloves when reloading...

 

You can get away with that better in a side-loader but I'm still using glove to place these chunks I'm burning now. The 211 is a side-loader...

 

Draft inducer report: I received the inducer and proceed to mount it (Easy Boys!). It is a Tjernlund model AD-1, made for wood stoves specifically. The good news is that it increases the draft so that I can fully open the door and have a positive draft everywhere in the 'hole'. When raking ash, nothing spills out of the stove from the door.

The not so good news: this thing is kinda' ugly. Well, really ugly. More of a cellar / garage item than an inside the house item. And it is quite loud although that is not terrible as I only planned on using it when actually tending or reloading the stove.

The terrible news: this thing spews smoke out the entire length of both seams when it runs. The sides of the fan housing are spot welded to the curved part but they are not sealed. When the fan runs, at any speed between high and low, the entire outer seam on both sides sends smoke into the room. And not a little bit either, quite a lot actually. More than the amount the door ever spilled certainly.

So, Christmas is coming and you folks out there is wood burning land are going to want to be sure you tell Santa that you do NOT WANT a Tjernlund draft inducer for your wood stove! Not for your least favorite relative's wood stove either.

I try to be pretty reasonable regarding product expectations but put simply, this thing is not usable in my opinion and limited experience. It could be that I got 'a bad one' but I believe the very method of manufacturer is flawed and they will all be the same. I will remove it tomorrow (stove is hot right now) and replace it with another piece of smoke pipe.

Brian

 

Aw damm. I thought East/West loading meant loading splits parallel to your chest, and North/South meant perpendicular to your chest. Now there's a loading direction called East/South? Fork!

 

Ah but I do and they are genuine, double leather wood stove gloves too (long gauntlet). But they are merely leather after all, not metal- bestos, and everytime I put my hand in the stove to place another split in the back, the gloves get hotter. So it is really a matter of being quick about it or after the third or fourth split, ripping the glove off, throwing it on the floor and using totally inappropriate language around such young firewood.

Brian

 

Has ya considered sealing the seams with RTV? Tractor supply had 500-degree red, black and clear for sale this past weekend. Just trying to make sure you don't thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

 

Opps- yeah, I meant E/W. Although E/S could be corner- to- corner and take the really long wood.

I fixed the original post too.

Brian

 

Yep, sealant might work but that would require taking it apart..... again..... and that is really a gigantic pain in the butt with all the spacer, set screws, etc., etc. Plus it seals terribly poorly to the actual stove pipe anyway; that too is seal-able but as it would have to be done from the outside, it would be uglier than.... well, anything else w/in eyeshot. I would use some type of stove sealant though because the outer casing of the inducer is over 500F right now. As the sealant got old and cracked, it would just start leaking again.

It could be made workable if the seams were welded, and then the casing itself were welded to a piece of dedicated stove pipe. But that is a lot of work for what is really a pretty crude, inexpensive product that I do not believe will last for years anyway.

I will take the inducer and [stove pipe it is mounted to] out, replace it with a new piece and change out the 90 degree elbow for two 45 degree El's. That may make enough of a difference, along with the colder weather, to perform well enough for this year. Next year I can re-work the chimney (liner) and I think that will basically solve my problem. Finally, I can block off a portion of the door opening with a piece of sheet steel and that will go a long way to easing any draft problems I think. For right now, I will just set the inducer aside.... I want it to sit there and think about what it had done.

Brian

 

I believe I am now the record holder for highest temperature recorded on the IS. With the thermo gun we hit 780 at the cat port. The rest of the stove top was mid 600's. This was by no means by choice. I am still trying to figure out what happened but I am fairly certain my wife left the air too far open for too long. I had loaded the stove before I left for work on a bed of coals that I had spread out and made a tunnel down the middle. She said she closed it down pretty quick from over a 1/4" to the lowest setting but the temp just kept rising. FAST. With a black firebox. I think she has a new found respect for this beast and for wood heating in general.

So. I have not heard this discussed but seeing as I just went through a frantic phone call throwing out all the ideas on how to stop a run away stove, do we have any thoughts on how to control a runaway hybrid stove?

We tried the following:
- Open air wide open with bypass open
- Open the door to try to flush hot air
- Close down air with the bypass open
- Point fan at firebox

The fan and closed air with open bypass ended up controlling it. My wife said there were raging primaries for a LONG time. My analysis is that the full load on top of a full bed of coals with plenty of air got too far. When the box went black , the wood was putting off so much smoke that the cat overheated and the closed air only made it hotter. However, I had no ideas on how to control the secondary combustion once we opened the bypass and had the air as low as possible. She said this contributed to a temp increase for a bit. Would it have just been best to keep air shut and open bypass?

 

beet stix you got nothing. this was the second burn on my beta. and i had it hotter almost to 900. prob 850 or so

 

This will make my wife so happy.

 

this is what the single wall pipe read at the same time. cat engaged and st to the 4 line.

 

I believe what you mentioned at the end is what happened- it is not uncommon with wood stoves: you put a load of wood on hot coals and the wood off- gassed quite a lot. This is pure fuel to the cat., and on an I.S. you cannot control the cat. air feed so that really raises the temps.

The way to control that is to open the bypass and if needed, crack the door open just a hair to allow some cold air to enter the firebox and cool the top of it down a bit. This is a double- edged sword though because of course you are also feeding the fire and coals air as well. Usually just opening the bypass will work, especially on the I.S. because the cat. is actually moved out of the exhaust path as opposed to most other cat. based stoves, which merely open another door near the catalyst.

The other thing that I believe happened is that because you are monitoring temps. outside the stove, the cooling down was not seen right away and even though she had the problem under control and the temps. under the radiator for example were actually dropping, the stove front / top outsides did not show that change or worse, continued to rise as the thermometers had not yet registered the highest temperature. I have thermocouples inside as well as outside my stove and changes made to the draft, bypass or anything else register change w/in seconds (always less than 10 seconds, usually faster than that) while the outside magnetic thermometers are reading the temperature of the steel outside the actual stove internals, and they are quite sluggish to change even if the stove does beginning to cool down. Besides all that, it is not possible to see a 10 or 20F degree temp. change on that kind of thermometer.

I cannot and will not speak for W.S., nor can I say anything regarding temps. with certainty but I have seen other combustors maintain 1,600F and higher temps for hours with no ill effects. I have never seen my I.S. cat. temp. exceed 1,400F; once it climbs that high, I adjust the draft and it responds and cools down in increments of a degree or two per second until it stabilizes again at a lower temp. But you would never, ever see that on a external, bi- metal thermometer and it could look quite scary when in fact all was well, under control and moving in the right direction.

One way to help avoid this is to rake the coals forward so the surface of the coal bed that wood is sitting on is smaller in area. That will prevent so much off- gassing of the wood after reloading. Otherwise, I think you did all the right things and just my opinion but I believe the stove responded in the correct manner and much faster than you could know from measuring outside the firebox / combustor.

Brian

 

Well there is your problem right there: no safety screw!



Brian

 

I am running the best POS I could have hoped for. An old cast iron Atlantic box stove (door at one end). When I first lit it, the fire climbed up into the 6" pipe. That was great when they historically installed the stove on one side of the room and ran the 6" probably 15 or more feet to the other side to the chimney.
To improve the stove I built a "shoe-box" with a grate floor out of sheet steel and "dropped" it into the stove (the top is removable from those types of stoves). The dead-end of the box inside the stove was at the 6" pipe end of the stove and the opening my box was at the door. The fire then was forced to burn first toward the door then between my box and the cast stove wall and doubled back toward the 6" pipe. I effectively doubled the fire path and inadvertently created a red-hot baffle (the red-hot sheet metal box) to act as a poor-man's secondary burn devise. I heated 1800 square ft to 68* - 70* with outdoor temps of 10* and higher.
But....enter the Ideal Steel....
I'm sold.
The retrofitted Atlantic will have a new life in the play room in the basement.

 

And here I was all excited the other day when I was at 775...