Why not burn down the coals?

Pretty sure it happens to all of us. The determining factor is whether your house can hold heat well enough to let the stove mass carry you through the coaling stage.

 

If we can just remember to keep entry doors closed, it'll be even gooder.

 

I can do several things to have less coals.
But when it's cold, & you guys got a small taste of cold,
I have the stove cranking , a full load is 10 hours then.
after a few days of the, I have about 4" of coals, but still enough room for a good amount of wood
to get a 10 hour hot burn. Sometimes & rake & add , sometimes I rake & do a coal burn down,
Either way, keeping the heat output high.

Now with teens temperatures at night, I load at night, turn it to a higher setting around 9am
turn up the fan & go about my business till mid afternoon.
But if I wasn't going to be home, I'd rake the coals & add 6 splits to get it thru until the full load that night.

With 20°s at night, I load at night, then load it the next night, do nothing to the stove. No coaling issues.

I'm sure there are other methods, I use the ones that work for me , my set up & various situations.

I've worked thru the down sides & came up with ways to mitigate them & operate effectively in many conditions & schedules

 

Thing is, I can get a couple of hours at 5-550° from those coals.

 

That's kind of what I was thinking but out definitions of burning down coals might be different. Usually the coals I am trying to burn down already have the stove temp below 300° so I can' t get my stove top to 500.

 

That's what I'm trying to say. The belly of the stove is so deep, and it is so wide, when I pull the coals in from the sides and back and pile them in front of the door, it is a huge pile. With the air wide open, it will climb from 3-350 back up to 500+. You can look in the door and think there isn't much going on, just a few coals and embers left, but dig around under the ash and you will find a bunch of hot stuff.

 

BD, I think you have it. It just depends on your situation. Sometimes I burn down the coals, and other times when it is COLD, I hot load on lots of coals for more heat, deal with the coals/ashes as I have to. Temp dictates my burning.

 

The further you open the air, the more heat you blow out the stack, so ideally I'd like to just run the stove low all the time. Of course when it's cold out that's not feasible, so I settle for burning down the coals with the air on about 1.3 or so which seems to heat the stove top the most, up to about 350. Take a while to burn 'em down, though. If it's real cold out, room temps drop and I'll just have to live with it until I tighten up the envelope a bit more....

 

Definitely not beating a dead horse - good post.

I'm planning to add an ashpan to my Progress, but I wondered if those with an ashpan did so at the expense of having good coals in the morning. I thought those with ashpans had fewer beneficial coals in the morning because the ash would fall through the slots and the coals would therefore evaporate faster during the burn cycle. It sounds to me from this post that if you don't rake the coals too often, you still will have good coals.

I need a red hot coal base in the morning to fire up my stove quickly, and if an ashpan always killed my coal base I would be unhappy.

 

"Definitely not beating a dead horse - good post"
We are not beating a dead horse we are riding it.
I guess its a new thread about an old subject so we joke about it, at my age nothing much is new any more.

 

Too few morning coals has never been an issue for us in either the PH or Ideal Steel. We are decidedly in the camp of too many coals during the deep cold.

 

I am in a couple camps - too many coals during the deep cold, but way too much dust in the house from shoveling ash. I know Dennis has this magic way of willing the dust not to float while shoveling, but I have never perfected his magic .

Based on the fox post, if you simply don't rake the coals with an ashpan, the stove behaves like you don't have an ashpan. The coals won't dissipate any faster than if you had no ashpan.

 

I sifted my ash in to the pan this morning, probably had an honest 2 inches of ash + coals in the FB. I'll let it build up again over the next 3-4 days and do a before after pic of the sifting. I think you would love the pan on your PH. Some don't like the looks of an ash pan but I don't remember reading a negative comment about the function of WS ash pans. Lets beat/ride this horse.......

 

Dead on in my experience. We are burning less than dry wood (this is the last year of that) and find that we have to keep a hot fire to keep the house hot, which leads to coal build up. However, it also leads to decreased overnight burn times, so the coals often get a chance to burn off over night. Next year will be better...

 

I forgot, raking the coals to the front of the stove, to be air washed also lessens the build up. Most know/do this also. Sooo many ways to manage coals, but sometimes excessive coaling is unavoidable for many people it seems.