2014-2015 Blaze King Performance thread (Everything BK)

SKRAE said:

Thoughts on running 24-30" of single wall from a princess to my chimney liner in a alcove?

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No. Please use double wall as recommended in the Owners Manual, page 14.

BKVP said:

No. Please use double wall as recommended in the Owners Manual, page 14.

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10/4

Thanks!

Highbeam said:

I could have sworn it was mid 2s gph but I don't pay much attention. Visible smoke and gph may not be directly related. For one thing, steam increases opacity.

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I stand corrected. It is the King that is rated 1.76 grams per hour. I could likely heat my entire 2400 sqft with that, but getting heat from the lower level to the upper level was not a chore the architect planned on a later home owner undertaking successfully.

http://www.blazeking.com/EN/wood-king.html

Yup, I expect white smoke is mostly water vapor from burning wet wood.

The ones that really bug me - and it may not be born out by data - are the ones with a dark black plume coming out one edge of the stack with 60-80% of the stack mouth seeming to be putting out nothing. Like if you hold a spoon right over a lit candle and it starts to smoking real hard, but all the smoke seems to come out from under the spoon in one narrow spot.

Poindexter said:

I stand corrected. It is the King that is rated 1.76 grams per hour. I could likely heat my entire 2400 sqft with that...

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I have a question. Why does the King, a larger stove, have less particulate emissions than the Princess, and by a pretty good margin? (1.76 vs. 2.42 gm/hr)

The location in which our Princess is installed is in little danger of thermal inversions and subsequent burn bans, as I understand the set up for thermal inversions. This was one reason why we went with the slightly larger Princess for less money rather than the smaller Ashford 30 for more money.

I entertained putting the King in that location briefly, because it gets blasted cold there in the winter with a wicked wind chill, but it's not Alaska, the Great Lakes region, Canada or New England, even in the coldest months. And the winter isn't as long, and the house is new construction, well insulated and pretty tight. The stove store owner did not recommend the King, said we'd have way too much stove.

Why does the larger stove have lower particulate emissions, and how did Blaze King get the particulate emissions so low in the Ashford 30?

beca, I am punting those questions to BKVP because I don't know. I am gonna speculate it has to do with the size and dimensions of the firebox, the size of the cat and similar math stuff.

I do know the Ashford 30 shares internal firebox with the Sirocco and the Chinook, just three different skins on the same box. Same with the 20s.

Your implied understanding of thermal inversions sounds correct. Just as Los Angeles is hemmed in on three sides by mountains and has open to the sea on the west, Fairbanks is hemmed in by tall ridges to the West, North and East, and open to a wetland the size of New Hampshire to the south.

Define "blasted cold" ;-)

1,3,5 gph. I'm not too concerned since as we know, emissions are determined more by the end user than a new stove in a lab. I can make any stove spew black. I recommend not fixating on 1 gph either way.

becasunshine said:

I have a question. Why does the King, a larger stove, have less particulate emissions than the Princess, and by a pretty good margin? (1.76 vs. 2.42 gm/hr)

The location in which our Princess is installed is in little danger of thermal inversions and subsequent burn bans, as I understand the set up for thermal inversions. This was one reason why we went with the slightly larger Princess for less money rather than the smaller Ashford 30 for more money.

I entertained putting the King in that location briefly, because it gets blasted cold there in the winter with a wicked wind chill, but it's not Alaska, the Great Lakes region, Canada or New England, even in the coldest months. And the winter isn't as long, and the house is new construction, well insulated and pretty tight. The stove store owner did not recommend the King, said we'd have way too much stove.

Why does the larger stove have lower particulate emissions, and how did Blaze King get the particulate emissions so low in the Ashford 30?

View attachment 145777 View attachment 145778

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I have addressed this in previous posts so you may wish to review that explanation. In short, all wood stoves must conduct four burns defined by consumption rate measured in kg/hr. Each of the four burns has a specific range that must be maintained during that burn. This range is wide enough that you can get rather different results depending upon something as unmanageable as how the test fuel collapses during the burn and if your burn rate (kg/hr) is at the high end of the range or the low end of the range. From all four runs, resulted are then placed into a weighted formula that again is influenced by firebox volume and again.....much more.

Respectfully, 1.76 vs 2.48 is not as wide a range as you might think given the fact that test fuel and cord wood both are not a metered fuel. With variability in density, moisture content, and so much more.

In addition to all the above, due to firebox size of the King, it is tested with 4" x 4" dimensional lumber and the smaller fire boxes are required to test with 2" x 4" dimensional lumber.

If you still have an interest in all of this, purchase a copy of Method 28 for solid fuel heaters. You can download from the web directly, no need to approach any test agencies. Then and only then will you say "wholly cow how do these poor guys and gals even pass these tests!"

As for why the Ashford 30 tested so low in emissions....all the above and much more that will remain proprietary.

Have a great Thanksgiving to all!

Chris
Alias BKVP

Poindexter said:

beca, I am punting those questions to BKVP because I don't know. I am gonna speculate it has to do with the size and dimensions of the firebox, the size of the cat and similar math stuff.

I do know the Ashford 30 shares internal firebox with the Sirocco and the Chinook, just three different skins on the same box. Same with the 20s.

Your implied understanding of thermal inversions sounds correct. Just as Los Angeles is hemmed in on three sides by mountains and has open to the sea on the west, Fairbanks is hemmed in by tall ridges to the West, North and East, and open to a wetland the size of New Hampshire to the south.

Define "blasted cold" ;-)

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Thank you, Poindexter!

"Blasted cold":

That river is about 2.5 miles wide, and it bends right at our neighborhood. Above us and below us it flows east to west. As it passes our area, it bends and flows roughly north to south. This bend in this large body of water seems to promote something of a Bernoulli/Venturi effect on the resultant thermals, and boy, do we get wind. I've seen this river look like the ocean just off of our neighborhood, and winds are often brutal in the winter.

The highest winds we've recorded at our house since we've owned it have been just under 75 mph, and that was not associated with any sort of hurricane or tropical storm. That was just a thunderstorm that blew through. We've had winter winds over 60 mph unrelated to any storm system at all. We are sea level and flat as far as the eye can see, so we are a very low risk for thermal inversion.

The ambient temperature is cold enough by our standards- probably not by yours though. The wind chill from the wind off of the water is what really does it. We have a dual HVAC in that house, heat pump with a propane furnace which automatically kicks in below a certain temperature that I forget like that's my job. I want to say that the propane furnace kicks in below 40'F but that might not be right. At any rate, the propane furnace kicks in before the heat coils fire up in the heat pump.

The furnace is under the house, and this house has a nice, thick foundation. The exterior walls are 6" and the foundation is skim coated for additional insulation. The condenser drain for the gas furnace (as well as the outdoor unit for the heat pump/ac) are located on the shore side of the house, not the water side. Smart thinking on the part of the builder and the system installer. We aren't water front but there is an unobstructed field between us and the water, and the house takes the weather off of the water directly on the back side. Winds against the back of the house are so intense in the winter that even though the exterior walls are 6" and well insulated, we put UL rated insulation inserts behind all of the switch plates and outlet covers because we could feel the wind coming in around the electrical outlets. After we did that, I swore I could still feel a draft- put my hand down to one of the outlets and sure enough, the wind was forcing itself through the prong slits in the actual outlet itself. So then we installed those child proof outlet plugs in all of the outlets that are not in continuous use.

So, by intentional design, the outdoor unit for the heat pump/ac and the condenser drain for the furnace are in a protected L-corner on the front of the house.

We keep the house at 50'F in the winter when we aren't there.

Last winter was quite cold for our latitude. We go to the river at various times all year long because we love it there, because we need to show up and take care of the place, and because we have room there to air out that Labbie in my profile picture, and a place to let him swim if he wants to swim in the winter (which he does in all but the coldest weather.) So we were there one weekend last year (before the wood stove) and we warmed the house up to 65'F.

I can usually roll with 65'F and a sweater but for some reason, probably the open floor plan in one half of the house and the 9' ceilings, and because it's super cold outside with that wind, 65'F is less comfortable to me at the river than it is at the little house in town. But OK. We warmed the house up to 65'F and kept it there all weekend.

We knew we'd be back the very next weekend for a community fund raising event, so we set the HVAC thermostat to raise the temp from 50'F to 65'F starting Friday afternoon. We've not yet invested in a remote controlled thermostat. We can set the thermostat to raise the temperature for the weekend before we arrive and lower it again Sunday evening, but if for some reason we don't go to the river that weekend we've just heated the house up for nothing. So we typically wait until we get there to raise the thermostat, because, especially in the wintertime, who knows what plans may change? On this particular weekend, we knew we'd be back, so we programmed the thermostat to warm up the house.

Imagine our surprise and disappointment when we arrived Friday night to find that the interior of the house was at 33'F. The walls, the floors, the furniture, everything was ice cold. Outside temps were around 14'F with snow on the ground but the wind was blowing steadily off of the water, so the wind chill was below zero.

We had power and the thermostat was trying to fire up the furnace, and the furnace would fire, but it immediately cut itself off.

Hubs crawled under the house, did a quick look around, didn't see an obvious problem, so we called the builder who lives right across the street to ask for the name of the company that installed the furnace, so we could put in an emergency call. It wasn't for our comfort's sake- we were concerned about losing pipes.

God bless the builder, who left his warm house and came over to help us even though we didn't ask him to. He and Hubs crawled back under the house, and this time my husband figured out that he needed to check the condenser reservoir. It was full and not draining, which is why the furnace wouldn't stay lit. The condenser drain on the front of the house, protected in between the foundation, an L-shaped corner between two walls, and the outside HVAC unit had nonetheless frozen solid all the way back up to the foundation.

Thank God they figured it out because the HVAC company could not have gotten to us that night regardless. I don't think those guys caught their collective breaths until sometime the next week. Everybody's everything froze up that weekend- it was like we reached critical weather mass on that Friday night and everything we all had froze up. Our builder has lived in the area for his entire life, as has generations of his family before him. He and the other construction people who have lived in that area for their entire lives build well and build conscientiously for the prevailing conditions. Our builder builds a SOLID house. But even though we are on the water, our "prevailing conditions" don't typically involve a prolonged Polar Vortex like last year.

Hubs emptied the condenser reservoir, we boiled water and got the drain thawed. The furnace fired right up, but it took a solid 24 hours to reach 65'F inside the house.

Interestingly enough, it was warmer UNDER the house in the crawl space than it was inside the house when we got there. Per above, the foundation is substantial, with the intent of protecting those pipes in cold weather. The furnace pilot light provides some heat. Despite being without heat in the house for some days, the only pipes that froze were the lines to the washing machine against the exterior wall, and they didn't freeze to bursting, thank God.

Anyway, we'd been thinking about an alternative to propane heat for that location, and some heat source that could carry the entire house during a power outage, so we'd already decided on a wood stove and we were leaning toward a Blaze King or a Woodstock. We'd been to the Wood Stove Decathlon in D.C. and we'd narrowed it down to a Princess or an Ideal Steel. We were debating about whether to wait for the Ideal Steel to go into general production or whether we'd go with the Princess.

That weekend sort of sealed the deal on going ahead with the Princess.

Hubs did some work with that drain tube to reduce the likelihood of it freezing up again, and he put some heat tape on some of the pipes under the house, so hopefully the furnace won't freeze up again- but if we have another winter on the water like that, it's anybody's guess what will freeze up. Per above, I know we aren't in Alaska, or in the Arctic Circle, or in Canada, the Great Lakes or New England, but this is atypical for us.

Give a choice between -50dF ambient with no wind, or -20dF ambient with a windchill of -50dF, I'll take the lower ambient with no wind.

When your wind is coming off the water like that it probaly has supercooled water vapor in it that will freeze as soon as it contacts something warm enough, like exposed skin. I'll pass thanks. At -20dF up here it is perfectly reasonable to get the dead animal skins out of the downstairs closet and dress for the weather.

FWIW below -30dF stuff like fanbelts and tires start just breaking apart. At 50 below the properties of metals start changing unfavorably.

Poindexter said:

Give a choice between -50dF ambient with no wind, or -20dF ambient with a windchill of -50dF, I'll take the lower ambient with no wind.

When your wind is coming off the water like that it probaly has supercooled water vapor in it that will freeze as soon as it contacts something warm enough, like exposed skin. I'll pass thanks. At -20dF up here it is perfectly reasonable to get the dead animal skins out of the downstairs closet and dress for the weather.

FWIW below -30dF stuff like fanbelts and tires start just breaking apart. At 50 below the properties of metals start changing unfavorably.

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We don't get that cold here even on the most brutal of years.

I will say this: I have spent my entire life on the Mid-Atlantic eastern seaboard and I thought I knew a little something about winter on the water here. Since spending time at our current location on the river for the past few years, I have a whole new respect for the local watermen and marine construction guys who make their living all year long on this water. That pier in the picture above is a new community pier that was constructed a few years ago. The contractor was a one man operation- this guy and his pylon sinker. He put that pier in by himself, pylons and all, in January. January. By himself. The pier is as solid as it gets and he did the whole thing by himself in about a week and a half. And he put a pier in before it in another neighborhood, and he had a job lined up to put another pier in right after it.

I would have been curled up in the fetal position under my bed until May at the thought of putting in a pier in January, much less putting in a pier by myself in January.

OK, back to discussions of AWESOME BLAZE KING WOOD STOVES, already in progress!

Some long posts Dayyyaaam.

At -42C I pressed the clutch pedal in on my cold service truck and it never came back up.

This is what dry wood and a decent draft will get you, reloaded 2hrs ago, set to the cool side of norm, right on the line before it enters the zone.

1hr ago I shut it down to 1.5. The pics are deceiving, the wood pile is active.



650F ontop, fans running full tilt.





I expect the unit to cool off in the next few hours.

@ that setting with the current ambient temps, I imagine it will run around till noon.

My legs are still burning from taking them pics.

I can't comment I have my head in the jaw of a grizzly right now!

turbojoe said:

The way i see it, the danger of burning down a cat isn't so much of an issue of overfiring, it would seem that opening the door on a hot Cat. Give a hot cat a bit of fresh air could create a meltdown.
We are not as hot, i would think the exotherm wouldn't be as aggressive.
Sorry to clog the BK thread. And please feel free to correct me BKVP... or whom ever

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OK, I overthink things. I own that right now, right here. But- when we need to reload, we open the bypass, go out to the porch, grab a few pieces of firewood, walk back into the house, a few steps, then unlatch the door to the stove. We give it a few seconds, open it slowly, then add wood.

How would one let the CAT "cool down" before one opens the door? Or am I in the middle of a theoretical discussion (totally understandable and legit) with a pragmatic thing that doesn't go here?

Rossco said:

Some long posts Dayyyaaam.
My legs are still burning from taking them pics.

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He asked me to describe "blasted cold." I did.

Nice pics.

becasunshine said:

He asked me to describe "blasted cold." I did.

Nice pics.

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Yeah for sure. Am only Jesting.

That night the temps did take a dive down to 220C on top but she made it all the way round till 14:00 today.

My by-pass cable just broke after a reload of red oak. By pass is open, turned the t stat all the down. Will I be ok.

Lanningjw said:

My by-pass cable just broke after a reload of red oak. By pass is open, turned the t stat all the down. Will I be ok.

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Yes. Call 509-522-2730 Monday or call your dealer tomorrow. If you call Monday, ask for Jennifer and you'll need your serial number (unless you filed a warranty registration, then she can look it up).

Your dealer can get a repair kit on order and drop ship to you. Some dealers have one for just this rare occasion.

OK. I posted a link to this product in the larger forum.

When I found this product my head exploded. (Huge mess.)

Now I wonder if the CAT in the Princess would somehow interfere with the smoke in the smoke stack being hot enough to run this oven. ???

We have an old school Coleman camp oven that we've used on a Coleman camp stove for baking biscuits, etc. I'm going to try that on top of the Princess soon (maybe this weekend.)

BUT THEN I FOUND THIS PRODUCT.

What think you, Wise Ones?

https://www.lehmans.com/p-4873-bakers-salute-oven.aspx

becasunshine said:

OK, I overthink things. I own that right now, right here. But- when we need to reload, we open the bypass, go out to the porch, grab a few pieces of firewood, walk back into the house, a few steps, then unlatch the door to the stove. We give it a few seconds, open it slowly, then add wood.

How would one let the CAT "cool down" before one opens the door? Or am I in the middle of a theoretical discussion (totally understandable and legit) with a pragmatic thing that doesn't go here?

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I'm pretty new myself but that's what seems to be the practice. That;s how i do it.
Your stove would have to be ripping on a fresh load and closed down. The major off gassing would have the Cat HOT, a rich fuel condition would be present, add a bit of fresh air and the cat could go woof, So i guess what i'm saying is we don't have much to worry about.

becasunshine said:

OK. I posted a link to this product in the larger forum.

When I found this product my head exploded. (Huge mess.)

Now I wonder if the CAT in the Princess would somehow interfere with the smoke in the smoke stack being hot enough to run this oven. ???

We have an old school Coleman camp oven that we've used on a Coleman camp stove for baking biscuits, etc. I'm going to try that on top of the Princess soon (maybe this weekend.)

BUT THEN I FOUND THIS PRODUCT.

What think you, Wise Ones?

https://www.lehmans.com/p-4873-bakers-salute-oven.aspx

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I would not recommend this product for many reasons. First, your stack temps, while very manageable, will have a tough time exceeding 300 degrees. Your stove needs that heat to stay in the chimney for reliable performance. All that steel would be a heat sink and take that draft necessary heat from the system.

For the record, we made a bake oven just like this that sat on the stove. But they were for our pre EPA models that were vastly less efficient and lost plenty of heat up the flue.

BKVP said:

I would not recommend this product for many reasons. First, your stack temps, while very manageable, will have a tough time exceeding 300 degrees. Your stove needs that heat to stay in the chimney for reliable performance. All that steel would be a heat sink and take that draft necessary heat from the system.

For the record, we made a bake oven just like this that sat on the stove. But they were for our pre EPA models that were vastly less efficient and lost plenty of heat up the flue.

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Perfect- thank you! This is exactly the feedback I/we needed.

Once upon a camping time we had a Coleman camp oven that we used on top of our Coleman stove. I swear I do not remember giving it away but we don't have it now. Hubs thinks I got rid of it during a clean out when we bought our last trailer. I could see that; we have an oven in our little trailer so we didn't need the camp oven anymore (so I thought.) Darn it! Oh well; we can still get a Coleman camp stove if we want it. I need to measure the available space on top of the stove before we buy another one though.

Thank you, Chris!

For the last few weeks I've been burning Douglas fir that's not all that dry. Most splits test at around 22%.

I'm thinking of taking a two-hour drive down to Tacoma to pick up this stuff:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/tac/fod/4741483687.html

The price seems great. Has anyone used these Tacoma firelogs? I'm thinking of picking up a one-ton pallet for $225.

Parallax said:

For the last few weeks I've been burning Douglas fir that's not all that dry. Most splits test at around 22%.

I'm thinking of taking a two-hour drive down to Tacoma to pick up this stuff:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/tac/fod/4741483687.html

The price seems great. Has anyone used these Tacoma firelogs? I'm thinking of picking up a one-ton pallet for $225.

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The price is right if the product burns as well as the niels. Would be ideal to test burn a 50# load to see how you like them.

I think it's cool that they are stamped Tacoma.

BKVP said:

Yes. Call 509-522-2730 Monday or call your dealer tomorrow. If you call Monday, ask for Jennifer and you'll need your serial number (unless you filed a warranty registration, then she can look it up).

Your dealer can get a repair kit on order and drop ship to you. Some dealers have one for just this rare occasion.

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Ok, does serial #1120 tell you what year it was made?

Parallax said:

For the last few weeks I've been burning Douglas fir that's not all that dry. Most splits test at around 22%.

I'm thinking of taking a two-hour drive down to Tacoma to pick up this stuff:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/tac/fod/4741483687.html

The price seems great. Has anyone used these Tacoma firelogs? I'm thinking of picking up a one-ton pallet for $225.

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You're still having short burn times, right? I'd definitely try those Tacoma logs, especially for that price.