Singing Your Praises (Again): Modified Leaf Blower Trick

  • Active since 1995, Hearth.com is THE place on the internet for free information and advice about wood stoves, pellet stoves and other energy saving equipment.

    We strive to provide opinions, articles, discussions and history related to Hearth Products and in a more general sense, energy issues.

    We promote the EFFICIENT, RESPONSIBLE, CLEAN and SAFE use of all fuels, whether renewable or fossil.
Status
Not open for further replies.

becasunshine

Minister of Fire
Dec 10, 2009
708
Coastal Virginia
We are in our 4th season with our Napoleon NPS40- wow, time has flown!

We clean our stove well and regularly- usually once a day- and we tear it down and give it a "big clean" about twice a season, once in mid-season and then again at the end of burn season.

We have it "professionally cleaned" every other year or so just to get trained eyes on it, to see if we've missed anything. We always get compliments on the care we take with our stove.

When we do the "big clean" we take the Shop Vac outside and run the hose and extensions as far up the vent pipe as they will go. Our stove sits on a 45' angle in the room, so we have one 45' bend in our vent pipe inside. We can run the Shop Vac hose and extensions up as far as this bend, and we vacuum the other end of the vent pipe as best we can when we pull the combustion fan motor.

Yadda yadda yadda we clean the stove. We've never done the "leaf blower trick" until yesterday (yes, Christmas day, but it was all good!) however.

All our big "family Christmas" was done, and we were just hanging out at the house, so we decided to try our own version of the leaf blower trick. We have a direct vent out the side of the house, so we didn't have to get onto the roof. Our Shop Vac has better suction than our leaf blower on reverse, so we decided to use the Shop Vac as opposed to the leaf blower.

We waited until the stove was stone cold, then did a daily clean/vacuum as usual. My husband took the curved end piece off of the external terminus of the vent pipe. He ran the Shop Vac hose and extensions up the vent pipe and vacuumed the vent pipe out thoroughly. Then we fitted a plastic food container over the external end, one that was small enough that it would be snug over the vent pipe and allow for suction. My husband cut a small hole in the bottom of the container into which he could fit the end of the Shop Vac hose. We coupled the Shop Vac hose, the plastic food container and the external end of the vent pipe together snugly, opened the stove door, turned on the Shop Vac and let 'er rip.

Yeah- we were surprised at the amount of soot and ash that was deposited in the Shop Vac dust bin- especially since we'd already cleaned the stove and vacuumed out the vent pipe. In fact, we've already done a "big clean" this season, so it was even more surprising to get that much soot out of the stove.

When we started the stove back up, another big POOF of soot came out of the vent pipe- and-

The stove has been burning so much more cleanly since our version of The Leaf Blower Trick. It's burning like new now!

I'd been unhappy with the way the stove was burning, even though we keep it as clean as we do. It seemed that we could barely get 24 hours out of it before the burn pot started filling up with ash and the flame got lazy. When it's running well, the pellets burn to almost nothing before a new auger full of pellets drops- and that wasn't happening anymore, despite daily vacuuming, and meticulous vacuuming under the burn pot.

The (modified) Leaf Blower Trick seems to have solved that issue. I just got up with a bit of a sinus issue- went in and looked at the stove- and the burn pot is almost ash free. We are coming up on 24 hours of burn time and the burn pot is almost as clean and as free of residual ash as when we started the stove up yesterday. This is a big improvement.

Just wanted to hop onto the forum and sing your praises again, Pellet People! Without you, we would have never known about The Leaf Blower Trick, and we would have been scratching our heads (and calling the service guys out) when really, what we needed was simply to get the soot out of the nooks and crannies in the stove. Thank you again! :)
 
nice job beca.vac does a good job but the leafblower on suction mode is the way to go.you get to point it in any direction(usually towards the neighbors house)and watch that beautiful cloud of black ash emitted from the blower.just a tip for the next time you do it.disconnect the hose from the vac switch in the stove.there is a diaphram in there and you can damage that if there is too much suction. blow thru the end you have disconnected to be sure you do not have any ash in there before putting it back on.
 
Oooh, good call about disconnecting the hose from the vacuum switch, Corkman- we will definitely do that next time!

Yeah, we missed out on the soot contrail, for sure... we have a direct vent, so we wouldn't be blowing soot from the roof, for what that's worth. :)

Smoke Show, I'm taking my husband's word for it on the Shop Vac vs. the leaf blower on suction... mebbe we try it with the leaf blower next time... Sorry, no pictures, but it was a little underwhelming in the visual dept, since we didn't have the massive soot plume blooming off of the roof. :)

Here's the interesting point, for me: we clean our stove religiously- like it's our job- because we really believe in the mantra of "a clean stove is a happy stove." Also we hope to avoid a lot of the "picky pellet stove" stories we've heard through sheer cleanliness, thus avoiding those pitfalls, inconveniences, expenses, etc. A stitch in time saves nine sort of thing. And we've been rewarded for that effort with a pellet stove that heats our entire house without drama or trouble.

That being said- we got a bad batch of pellets for the first time ever last season. We hauled them in and stored them during the fall, and we were burning the pellets we already had on hand, so we didn't realize that we had a bad batch until late winter/almost spring. This was a reputable, well-known brand and we were completely caught off-guard by how poorly those pellets burned in the stove. (I'm not going to name names- don't ask. I don't think it's fair to bash a company on a forum when they may have just had a run of bad luck on their end. Besides, it all turned out well in the end for us, see below.) The bags had a LOT of fines in them, but even bags that had fewer fines burned badly- a dirty burn that filled the burn pot with ashes in record time. In fact, we had so much faith in those particular pellets that our first thought was to tear down the stove and clean it, even though we'd just done that mid-season. We must have missed something, right? A good tear down cleaning didn't solve the problem.

We called our pellet supplier and they told us to stop burning those pellets. This was, evidently, a known problem and a bit of a crap shoot. There was no way to tell which customers got bad pellets and which didn't until the customer called and complained. Our pellet provider did right by us- they reimbursed us with new pellets (different brand, and a local brand, value added for our local economy.) We did stop burning from the "bad" batch as soon as our supplier informed us of the problem but it was amazing how quickly and how thoroughly those few bags of bad pellets fouled up our stove. We went from a well-maintained, clean burning happy pellet stove to a lazy, dirty burning stove literally overnight.

I believe that the "modified" leaf blower trick sucked the accumulated soot from the dirty burning pellets out of the stove thus clearing up the last bit of a problem that started with that bad batch of pellets. The stove had *never* burned dirty before, and hasn't burned dirty since. In fact, that was another thing that sort of caught us off guard and threw us into "normalcy bias": "Is this stove *really* burning dirty or is it my imagination?" Yeah, it was burning dirty- it couldn't get through 24 hours without being vacuumed and having the burn pot dumped and scraped.

We're going to continue to use our "modified leaf blower trick" to make sure that we suck all of the ash and soot out of every nook and cranny- but I totally get it now when people complain about "bad pellets." I used to think, seriously, how bad can it be? Vacuum your stove regularly, vacuum the accumulated fines out of the empty hopper on a fairly regular basis, everything will be fine, people who complain about "bad pellets" are complainypants. Totally eating my own complainypants words now.
 
I do the unmodified leaf blower trick, I have a stihl leaf blower that fits tight in my oak and after letting the stove cool for a few minutes and the exhaust fan still running , I let it have it full throttle for 20 or 30 seconds. Works excellent on my Harvester, haven't tried it on the 3500 yet. Talk about "bad pellets", my ashpan is full after 12 bags, witch is 6 days burn time. Only thing I've burned worse is grass pellets.
 
When you do the leaf blower trick, does it clean out the entire venting pipe? What is the clean out tee for?
 
When you do the leaf blower trick, does it clean out the entire venting pipe? What is the clean out tee for?
you still need to brush the pipe.

the clean tee is for accumulation between cleanings.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.