Baffles and Air tubes on Hearthstone Homestead

On many of these I gather you grab a tube with vice-grips, and then tap/hit the grips with a hammer to slide the tube to one side (which side? good question!), freeing up the other side for removal. Don't know if that applies specifically to Hearthstone though.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it....................

i know with my quadrafire you have a allen head screw that must be removed. and then it can be slid to the side after the bracket and nut are removed.i have never sience 1998 take the tubes out till this year and belive it or not they were clean as a whistle.

fish said:

i know with my quadrafire you have a allen head screw that must be removed. and then it can be slid to the side after the bracket and nut are removed.i have never sience 1998 take the tubes out till this year and belive it or not they were clean as a whistle.

Click to expand...

The design of these stoves is such that there is always positive air flow out of the air tubes into the firebox. There is almost no way to have any kind of buildup occur inside the tubes themselves.

I haven't cleaned my Oslo beyond vacuuming the loose ash out of the flue collar area. We're on our 6th burning season and it is still working as if new.

I have had a good amount of experience with my secondary manifold and baffle on my heritage. Hopefull they are similar.

The stove sends full throttle air to the secondary manifold through a steel square tube set vertically in the rear of the firebox. The secondary manifold sets on top of the feed tube, is held down with a single bolt through the stove back and then in front it rests on little tabs. The only thing really holding the Manifold in place is that single bolt accessible from the firebox. The manifold is made up of two halves that are held together with phillips head screws. The two halves are cast iron and appear to sandwich the SS secondary inlet tubes in place. The tubes are very tight and there are no mechanical means to hold the tubes other than the sandwich. The cotter pins, 3 on my stove, are there to hold the ceramic baffle in place only. When you remove the cotter pins you can remove a little stainless steel bracket from the front and then slide the baffle out without removing the secondary manifold or tubes from the stove.

If you ever wanted to remove the entire manifold you can do it but it isn't fun. I had to grind down a good bit of sloppy cement to provide clearance for manifold removal.

Remove the baffle only for chimney brushing and don't break it. They are fragile. I have done a thorough cleaning where I ran the shop vac snout over all of the holes and it cleaned the fly ash well. There really shouldn't ever be anything inside the secondary manifold since as mentioned, it is always passing air out through the holes.

I also have the Homestead and wondered how the secondary air was set up. Are the air tubes fragile? I seem to bang them a lot when putting in new splits.

I recently replaced the baffles on a Mansfield if that helps. It was easy and I didn't have to remove any air tubes. Basically you just reach up in there and remove the insulation blanket and then the two baffles. I also cleaned up the air tubes with a wire brush. The stove burns a lot better now.

This last spring I tried to pull out the baffel on our homestead, what you do to remove the tubes is pull the cotter pin, then on the right side you will see a plate that is slotted into the tubes. Get a screw driver under that plate and pry it out about 1/4 inch then it will come down and you can remove it from the slots and the tubes, then slide the tubes to the left and they will all come out. That is as far as I got because the baffel was still cemented in place and I didn't want to take a chance on breaking it, so what I did to clean out the ash on top of the baffel was get some clear 3/4" flexible tubing and tape it into my shop vac hose and fish it up on top and vacuum out the ash. If you really want to take the baffel out it would probably be a good idea to wait until spring or summer to take it out in case you break it.