New Progress Hybrid not getting up to temp?

Thaks so much for all the input. Let's see if I can remember to answer all the questions. First, the wood we're burning was seasoned for two years before we got it this summer, and it had been stored in an open shed where it couldn't get rained on.

No, we know that the stove won't burn constantly at 500. What we were hoping for is that we could get it up to about 600 and then let it burn slowly and drop to around 300 before we added wood. I'd like to get a 12 hour burn where it would still be heating the house when we added new wood.

So what I'm hearing is that most that replied don't bring it up to 600 at all? We have an old house with not much insulation, and on the first floor we have about 1000 sq ft. What our hopes were was that it could heat that much for us reasonably. Our situation is that we have a kitchen on one end of the house with a laundry room behind it. Next to the kitchen is the dining room where the stove is. Then we have, going toward the other end of the house, a living room in front and a library behind that, with a closed stairway between. Then a bedroom on the other end of the house and a bathroom behind the bedroom. We'd hoped that we'd at least have good heat in the dining room (of course) and in the living room and library, and lesser heat in the bedroom and kitchen. We don't want the house hot and 65 would be fine in the LR and libe.

Wolf, what you're doing sounds exactly like what we've done, but with the low temps and wind here, our LR and library were running about 58, a little low for sitting around in. Now that we don't have the wind and the temp has gone up, it's better. But we were hoping for a bit more from the Progress, because those rooms are adjoining the dining room.

Toddnic, how do you go about getting your temp to 550? We've been playing around with it and getting it up maybe to 500 by leaving the damper open and not activating the cat till it gets there, but we were also concerned about wasting wood that way. Somewhere on the forum, I thought I read that when you close down the damper and engage the cat, the stovetop temp (measured next to the stovepipe on the top of the stove on the cast iron) would go up while the temp on the stovepipe would drop. The temp on the stove pipe does drop but we don't see much rise on the stove top temp.

Chipsoflyin, what do you mean when you say "The only time We've seen stove top temps above 500 is when the box is black and and the cat is above 1000"? What box is black and where are you measuring to say cat is above 1000? Maybe our stove's sweet spot is about 400 too (temp at stovetop says 400), because it will cruise there for hours on ours too, but sometimes that's not good enough to put the heat into the adjoining rooms.

Sorry to take up so much space and maybe not answer everything, and thanks for your advice!

OK, here goes again, after saying thanks for more input. Our draft is fine, we have a non insulated 6" stovepipe, I don't know what the height of the chimney is but it goes up two stories. We had two Lopi stoves over the last 25 years, and both had no trouble reaching quite hot burns--they just didn't hold the heat and heated the dining room nicely, but not any of the rest of the house very well. And you didn't want to stand too close if the fire was hot! Ours is an old house (circa 1825), as I said, and it doesn't have much insulation and has old single pane windows that also let in more cold than we'd like. It is what it is. We've been implementing some of the suggestions here, and it's doing much better--two adjoining rooms tonight are 65, which is great. But of course we don't have the crazy high winds and the temp has been in the 20's so that helps.

In checking the screen, it doesn't seem to be clogged--we can see all the holes nicely and there doesn't seem to be any buildup around the holes.

Toddnic, thanks for more details in how you burn. We've been letting the stovetop temp get higher (about 450) and then engaging the cat and closing the draft about halfway, which has resulted in getting up above 500. Then closing the damper down to where you're talking about (1/4") and letting it burn, which has resulted in a nice slow "black" burn for 10 or 11 hours at night, having plenty of coals to start up in the morning and a temp of about 300. I think we need to learn the stove a bit more and we'll be fine.

Chipsoflyin, thanks for your input, too. We've seen the temp go up after closing down the damper and "blacking out", so that seems different, even though it's not for long. We want to be as economical as we can with our wood, without sacrificing our comfort, so we've been trying not to have the secondaries going a lot, but I think we need to heed your input and balance things out because we don't want to save wood only to be cold!

Obviously, we're not going to be able to heat the whole house the same as other people with great insulation, but I think it will work well for what we want once the stove and we get used to each other. We love our Progress and it does a MUCH better job than our Lopis--there's no way we'd go back!

What I'm finding is that I'm not crazy about the side load (and I thought I would be) because the door opening seems pretty small and we're having trouble fitting in a lot of splits. Putting in a large split so that it goes all the way in is hard because of the weight of it and having to hold it from the end instead of the middle like you can with a front load. We had our wood split larger than we used to and are finding the splits to be too heavy for us to handle easily. The back of the firebox is also not the same height as the front, which probably has something to do with burning efficiency but still makes it challenging to fill the box easily. Someone mentioned that they took the little heat shield off the top of the door frame--has anyone here done that to make it easier to fill? What would be the danger in doing that?

So, more questions!

Oops, NE wood burner, didn't say what we're burning--a lot of ash with some oak right now and some other mixed stuff. We buy our wood so take what he has. This has been in an open three sided shed and seasoned two years. The wood we bought for next year is red oak, hickory, ash, and cherry, mixed. Our wood guy gets semi loads of logs and has to take what they send him.

I'll try to attach photos here--you'll see that we have a 90 degree, and then another 90 on the other side of the wall, but it doesn't affect our draft which has always been very good. These are from tonight, cat engaged, damper about 1/4 way open. Red temp gauge on stovepipe, other on stovetop.

NE WOOD BURNER said:

next years wood: it is bought, but is it CSS yet?

Click to expand...

What's CSS? It's covered and stacked--what's the third "S" for?? Just thought, it might be cut, split, and stacked?? I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not real good yet about ID'ing wood. I know red oak and white oak and cherry and know that our wood guy only sells hardwood, maybe I should just assume that the rest is ash?

Thanks for the reminder that oak takes longer to dry--I knew that but had forgotten. That may be part of the issue in terms of putting out heat. Our wood is all stacked for this year and next, so we're not going to restack it, but we can try to be careful when bringing it in to have a good mix.

As I said, we're doing better with our burns, but it's also warmer outside. We'll think about getting a moisture meter--what would be a good one to get and where?

Thanks for the comment on the hearth--it's stone from the property here--it was here when we bought the farm, so can't take a whole lot of credit for it, but we enjoy the natural look of it.

fire_man said:

I removed the annoying smoke baffle. Yes it does block some smoke from exiting, but it also blocks big splits from loading. No danger other than some smoke spillage on reload.

Click to expand...

Is the baffle hard to remove? How did you do it? I think we'd like to do it, too.

Wow, you guys, thanks for all this info! Dave, that's a really good idea--I'd been told that oak aged three years is much better than two years, but your experience sure proves it. We thought we were doing well to get a year ahead--just spent quite a bit to get this year's and next year's, but maybe we'd better try to get another two years supply next year and we can sort it out so that the oak gets the extra year of seasoning.

And thanks Rideau for the shield dismantling instructions--we'll do that when we get back after our Thanksgiving trip, and also try removing the screen. We do have the ashcan, and it's nice to get the info that it helps with keeping ash out of the exhaust stream.