A mechanically operated (airflow) damper.

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Jay H

Jay H

New Member
Nov 20, 2006
659
NJ
Was up at a friend's house in the catskills and he was showing me an old top-loading wood stove from a mfgr down in Alabama, it had a mechanically operated damper that opened or closed the airflow dependent on the temperature which I think is a stovetop temp. Was mechnical and didn't need power to operate but how effective were these auto-dampers and why didn't it catch on. It would seem pretty handy to be able to set the stove to run above 400degs stack temperature and once the fire is going good, to let the auto-damper control the airflow... But I haven't seen anything like that in my limited stove experience, were these not safe, not effective, or just not popular?

Jay
 
They were and are still on some VC stoves. This is what is referred to as a thermostatic damper. And you're right! I would love to see them on more stoves.
 
Definitely, they are a nice feature on my VC Vigilant and Resolute. It is just a spring coil (kind of like what is in a recoil on a pull start lawn mower), that as it heats up, it gets looser and closes the damper. To get them (at least the VC's) in ultimate slowburn though, you put them in bypass mode and open the keyhole on the side, and just close the main damper to the min so that regardless of the stove, it only takes air in through the key hole. The thermosat damper comes is most handy during the day for me, when I want fairly consistent hot heat. But heck, I may be doing it bass ackwards!
 
Those springs probably look like a mower's recoil spring, but I imagine they are more like the "bimetallic" springs used on automobile "automatic chokes," on pre-EFI domestic automobiles. The two metals have different expansion rates, presumably engineered to effect opening and closing.

I believe the Pacific Energy stoves have them, in their EBT system, and I wish more stoves did too!

Does anyone know of stoves that have these, other than VC and PE?
 
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