I moved into a house with a wood stove and am learning a lot about how these things work. Definitely more complicated than one would think.
I am puzzled by a recent, very sudden development. I have been burning wood for about 1 month, 24 hours a day, quite happily.
Thought I had things all figured out. Then, suddenly, smoke started leaking out of the stove pipe and into the house. The stove had been burning just fine all day, and for reasons I don't understand, the smoke just started pouring out of the seams of the stove pipe. This literally happened all of a sudden with no warning signs. I let the fire go out, and used a fan to blow the smoke out of the house. The next day I light some newspaper and observed smoke coming out of the stovepipe seams. I used high temp. silicone and sealed these leaky seams. I then tested again with a small amount of kindiling and the smoke now came out of different seams, that I hadn't sealed.
I cleaned the stove pipe myself a few months ago. This was my 1st time doing this. I was a little concerned when re-assembling the stove pipe to the collar of the stove, because the connections were certainly not air tight. But my concerns were relieved when I began burning because the smoke seemed to prefer to just go up the chimney, and not escape through the stove pipe seams.
Now the smoke prefers to come out of the seams and not go up the chimney. Does anybody know why or how a stove can go from working perfectly to working horribly within a matte of seconds? Should I get up on the roof and check for a blockage? The stove pipe has a cap and also a metal mesh cap over it which should keep critters and debris out.
-Frustrated
