Secondary burn tubes, glow or not?

I was able to remove the sound from my videos. In a previous post we were talking about if the secondary burn tubes need to be glowing to burn secondary gasses since, to burn them it has to be 1100F+. I wanted to show the difference between my burn tubes glowing red with secondary burn, and when they're not. Here's the video's and, I don't know how the sound got converted to Congo drums but it's more enjoyable than my wife yelling at me as they were originally.


Here's my secondary burn when the tubes are red (notice short blue flames on them)
Here’s the link when they’re not (no blue flames anymore)

As you can see, when they're glowing red I get blue waves of flame against the secondary burn tubes. When I turn my air down a little, as you can see by the speed of the flames they're not much different (I've mastered at what position the air handle needs to be). In about 5 minutes the tubes stop glowing and I slowly start losing those blue flames on the tubes until it looks like a normal fire. Your thoughts if the one with the blue is secondary burn going on and tubes should be glowing?

The best answer is, that whether the burn tubes are glowing or not there usually isn't smoke out the chimney unless I turn it as low as it will go which usually smothers the fire. So the blue flames at the burn tubes aren't a role in smoke out the chimney.

They are a HUGE impact on heat output and how quickly the unit heats up. Last night, I got the tubes glowing red in just 30 minutes from a cold start and in 45 minutes the unit was throwing out TONS of heat. That's a new speed warm up record for me. Without those blue type flames at the burn tubes takes me 1.5 - 3 hours before the unit warms up. There isn't a big difference in the air setting, and as you can see the flames aren't going very fast. That's about a 6 hour burn there with the blue flames, and close to a 7 hour burn the one without. I can set it as low as 10 hours, but it smothers that low.

I've found my house is consistenly warmer if I get the blue flames on the burn tubes. For example, having the blue flames and burning for 6 hours my house will be 2F warmer in the morning consistently than when I set it to a 7 hour burn and don't have them. I'm curious if others have seen them and experienced similar results, and those little blue flames are what secondary burn actually is. I originally thought, it's when you get that burning floating cloud at the top and kinda spooky looking but, I'm having second thoughts now as to what it really is.

The main difference is that your secondary tubes are designed to get/be over 900F without damage and it's pretty common to have your secondary burn tubes glowing red but having the your stove surface be only 500F. The tubes are made out of stainless steel to ensure they can take the heat and have insulation above them to get them as hot as possible so they do end up frequently glowing and that's normal. I guess it's like the difference in seeing a burner on your kitchen stove glowing red, vs. seeing your entire kitchen stove glowing red. Maybe that's not a good example but you get the point.