Pro-Former Model Z stove questions from thinkxingu / Shawn

I just got an e-mail in my regular e-mail box from Shawn, who said the following:

Hello There,
I was given a Pro-Former Model Z stove today and, after doing a couple
Google searches, I found your info. Would you mind if I ask you a few
questions?

I'm in Merrimack, NH by the way.

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I suggested that I preferred answering here, so he sent me his questions in a PM... :blank: I am taking the liberty of copying the stove related questions over here, and answering them in the public forum:

As for questions, I basically have a few simple (I think) ones:

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Well, when I said I wanted to go through here, I was more after the public forums. The idea is that if I answer it here, or in private mail you are the only one that sees it. If I answer it in the forums, then the answer is available to help others as well...

1. The glass was broken. Any suggestions on how to have it replaced? Also, sizing information?

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IIRC, it is 10" x 20", and I believe it was originally tempered safety glass, which should be available from most glass suppliers for a reasonable sum. However tempered glass really isn't the best stuff for this application, and the modern reccomended replacement for glass in any stove is the clear ceramics such as Pyroceram, which you should be able to get at better suppliers, but which also costs a small fortune.

I'm not all that certain how much it matters, as I have NEVER run the stove with that metal "roll front" door open - if the door is closed, I'm not sure what difference it makes whether the glass is present or not, though I'd probably want somethng in the space to keep people from touching the rollup door with a fire going.

2. There are two knobs on the right side (top and bottom), can you tell me which does what?

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They are both spin-dampers, and share the job of controlling the airflow into the stove. The upper one, above the door, feeds into a channel that runs across the top of the stove, sort of an effort at providing secondary combustion air. The lower one, in the door, feeds into a chamber in the door that vents into the bottom of the firebox, and provides a primary air flow. You need to balance the two in order to provide the best air supply.

I find that when I'm trying to start the stove, or get a fresh load going, its best to mostly close the upper knob, and open the bottom one wide. (also open the stack damper all the way) As the load gets going, I close the lower knob and open the upper one, and control the overall fire with the stack damper.

CAUTION - The upper knob is above the height of the smoke outlet, if the stack damper is closed to far, or the chimney is getting clogged w/ creosote, you may get back puffing through the upper knob, especially if the lower knob is openned to far!

3. The fan was taken off. It looks like there's only one way to put it back on, which is on the very back (bottom) kinda facing up?

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It is on the bottom rear, with the motor on the right (same side as the door) - I've never had mine off, so I'm not sure of the details of how it mounts. The fan on our stove is a two speed, controlled by a switch spliced into the cord. I've always used the low setting, as it didn't seem like high gave noticeably more heat and it did make a lot more noise. I modified the setup a bit by getting a "thermal snap switch" that I attached to the rear exit as close to the stove body as I could get, holding it on with a large stainless hose clamp. I cut into the HOT (black) wire of the power cord and put a couple of crimp on spade lug connectors on it so the switch would turn the fan on and off with the temperature. I shrink-tubed everything as much as I could, but the electrical safety folks would probably still not like it as you can still touch the 110 if you really try, but it's not a big issue. However the switch has failed after only a season, so I'm going to be re-examining the setup to see if I need to improve something about it.

4. Where should I buy the piping to connect to my chimney? There is a hole in it for a stove, and it's been cleaned so I just need to connect it.

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Any stove shop should be able to sell you what you need.

WARNING! In most jurisdictions, you are supposed to pull a permit to connect a new OR REPLACMENT stove, regardless of whatever might already be there for connections. As a Libertarian, I have mixed feelings about this (to put it mildly!) but this is what the law says, even in "Live Free or Die" territory. You also need to talk to your homeowners insurance co. about the stove - many will want to do their own inspection, some may want to increase your premium (not many), and most will want to see your permit and inspection sign-offs. Failure to do this might cause them to refuse coverage in the event of a fire, especially if it was at all related to the stove.

At the very least, if you are going to do an "Outlaw" install, (And BTW we won't dime you out, even if some of the other posters here are building inspectors by trade) you need to pay close attention to your minimum clearances, IIRC they are listed on the stove label, and if not there are code references for "unlisted" stoves that give the minimum numbers you should be using.

5. Any tips on most efficient/productive burning, lighting, wood usage, etc?

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The stove is a side loader, and burns from the door towards the end of the stove on a consistent basis. I have NEVER run the stove with the "rollup" door open, so all this refers to how it works with the door closed.

(See next post)

Gooserider

burnlots said:

Hi, I also have a Pro-former Z, model 24. I read a past reply from goose stating you have never used a multi-fuel stove.. This Pro-former is a multi-fuel stove. It is also a side loader. There are two doors on the right, the small one on the bottom is a cleanout. It has two slide dampers on the door side of the stove the front one is the main draft, and the rear one, if open provides direct air from the blower. It also has a spinning damper on the top of the right side and of course the baffle one. If you open the rear slide damper with the blower on high the fire will go to an instant blaze. I only use this for mornings when the fire is slow to take off, I learned the hard way and cracked the glass due to heat!! Mine is 23 1/2 x 11 1/2. Cheapest price so far is $175. I have never put coal in it, so I'm not sure how it would work. THx

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Pro-Former seemed to make a couple of different variants - mostly they seemed to be the multi-fuel as you describe, and I actually was able to get a copy of the manual for one of those. However if you read the fine print, they also make mention that they also had "Wood Only" models available - that is what I have. I only have a single loading door, no ash cleanout or grates, solid steel firebox bottom with a layer of firebrick on top of it. There are only two adjustable air inlets (besides whatever leaks around that rollup door) and both of them are spin dampers - one on the door itself that feeds into the bottom of the fire, and one above the door that is supposed to feed secondary combustion air at the top of the firebox.

Gooserider

Well what I have is a copy, so it will be second generation, but I'll see if I can scan it into my PC and send a PDF - haven't tried doing that yet... If not I can always copy it and snail it to you.

However I wouldn't give FOUR dollars for a Pro-Former-Z, (or pretty much any other smoke dragon of it's vintage) let alone $400! Considering that I can get a brand new EPAII stove from several different places for not much more than that, it doesn't make sense to me to put any real money into a smoke dragon.

I've never run the stove with the "Rollup" door open, so I will admit that if I were looking to get a replacement glass, I'd probably get the tempered glass, or even think about filling the hole with a hunk of steel plate, but that's just me.

Gooserider

burnlots said:

I was thinking the same thing about sinking that kind of money into it. I also have access to an overnighter, I thought it was a mid moe, but I have read that they have two dampers and the one I have only has one, It is at my cabin in Vt. so I can't refer to it now. But I thought I could put at least a 18 inch log in it. Do you think that would be a better stove? I have never really used it for any length of time. The pro-former cranks a ton of heat when the blower is on! Am I allowed to give e-mail addresses/ fax #? You have been a great help! I bought a new stove I" not sure what kind, it was made by CFM corp. I bought it at home depot two years ago, My only complaint with that stove is the blower. It just circulates air through a sheild mounted on the back of the stove and it has very little effect. Single arch topped door on the front with glass, and has a slide damper above the door to the right. It is no pro-former Z, but does the job.

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Well I would say not to put any significant money into a pre-EPA stove, no matter what sort - other than possibly restoring an antique for display, not burning... I figure that with the "value priced" stoves available for under a grand, it just isn't worth it... It sounds like what you have is a Century, which is the value price line from CFM / VC. Other value stoves are Englander, (made under a couple other names as well) Drolet, (and perhaps Vogelzang (though their "value" could be questioned))

That said, if you have an older stove in good shape, and don't mind coming up with the wood to feed it, then it might make sense to burn it. This would especially be the case if it was a stove that wasn't going to get used a lot - heating a cabin 2-3 weekends a month isn't going to benefit from the difference in wood consumption the way that someone heating 24/7 like I am would.

The old stoves could crank some heat, but they also ate wood, and I'm not all that impressed by their heat - As my sig shows, I essentially replaced our Pro-Former with the Encore cat this year. Sitting on the same hearth, venting into the same chimney, it is burning less wood, and keeping the house warmer, and isn't using a blower, just the same ceiling fan we had last year. The Pro-Former ended up in our basement, where it might get fired a couple times a year. Having seen the difference in the way a new stove performs, I'd say that if we found ourselves using the basement stove much more than that I'd be working on finding a replacement stove for it as well.

No telling what is going to happen this year, but early last spring the big-box stores were clearancing out the value stoves at major discounts - took some shopping to find them but there were stoves being sold for close to half price. If I wasn't in a rush, that's what I'd be waiting for.

In general, we tell people to put personal contact info in Private Messages, not so much because we have rules against it as such, but more because it is a good practice to keep that sort of info off the generally visible net as a matter of principle.

Gooserider

burnlots said:

I have been looking around at different stoves. Everyone has their own personal favorite.. The dealers hear push Alaska, Jotul, and Hearthstone. I really am not sure what to get. My house is pretty large(3400 sq/ft), very drafty (old farm house). (I've been insulating as I renovate) The Century stove heats one side of the house, but I am looking for a work horse to heat a double living room, that also has a stairway leading to my upstairs, and assists with heating the upstairs. The proformer was used for that and with seasoned wood, it would. Last night it was 18 degrees outside and my upstairs maintained 66 degrees, boiler never came on! Any thoughts?

If you could fully explain the damper controls for the pro-former z I really wouldn't need the manual. I never used the upper spinner. I only use the two slides and the one on the vent. When I have tried to use the spinner I thought the stove kind of lost too much heat.

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Well, I'm not really sure, it seems that Pro-Former has several different control setups - I don't have any sliders, just two spinners, and the stack damper. On my stove the top spinner fed into a channel that ran along the top center of the firebox, and the lower spinner which is on the door feeds into a opening at the bottom of the door. Thus the top spinner is sort of like top secondary air tubes in a modern stove, while the bottom spinner was a primary jet into the bottom of the fire. If the bottom spinner was open very much it acted like a blowtorch on the bottom of the fire and would cause extremely rapid wood consumption

When I was starting a cold stove, I'd open the stack vent, close the top spinner mostly, and open the bottom spinner, which gave a very strong blast of air into the bottom of the fire, and got everything up to temp quickly. As the stove warmed, I'd close the stack damper most of the way, shut the bottom spinner down to about a 1/2 turn, and open the top spinner about a turn.

For reloading, I'd close the top spinner, open the stack damper, and open the bottom spinner a couple turns, load the box as full as I could get, and give it a few minutes to char, then go back to mostly closed on the stack and bottom spinner, open a bit on the top.

My ash / coal management was to scoop out a couple of shovel fulls of mostly ash from the area in front of the door, and then drag as much coals and ash from the far end of the stove into a pile in front of the door. The bottom spinner draft would mostly burn down the coals near the door, while the part of the load on the other end would mostly coal up, so it was a regular cycle. However I did get a LOT of coals in with the ash as I shoveled - After cooling I would scatter the ashes over the lawn and garden with a sifter, saving the charcoal for summer BBQ fuel - I'd get about 4 gallons of charcoal out of a 20 gallon garbage can of ashes. (I don't seem to get a significant amount of charcoal out of the Encore, just ashes, and in much smaller quantity)

I would basically regulate the fire by balancing the stack damper and top spinner. It was VITAL that the stack damper was pulling more than the combined spinners could supply (plus whatever other leaks there were in the stove around that rollup door) The top spinner is actually higher in the firebox than the stack, so if there is more smoke volume being produced than the stack could clear, you could get a great deal of smoke back-puffing out the open upper spinner. This also made for problems when the chimney started to get dirty and build up enough creosote to restrict the smoke flow.

Frankly, now that I understand the stove and the way draft works a lot better than I did when I first started using it, I would say that this is a stove that absolutely MUST have a strong reliable draft, as a flue reversal could easily cause the stove to back-puff hazardous quantities of smoke into the house through that top spinner.

Now that I have been using the Encore, I no longer feel really comfortable about the safety of the Pro-Former for heavy duty, overnight burning.

I have a CO detector that (per UL specs) only goes off when it detects high levels, but which will show the highest level detected on the LED readout if you push the right button on the unit. While I have gotten occasional small amounts of smoke into the room while loading, I have yet to get a reading other than zero since I've been burning the Encore. With the Pro-Former last Winter I only had one time where the CO detector went off (operator error, some how the load door came unlatched...) but I would regularly find readings on the detector that were greater than zero, but less than the alarm threshold...

I still have the Pro-Former installed, as I moved it down to our basement hearth when we got the Encore, but it will only get burned occasionally if we are doing work down there and plan to be in the basement long enough to need to warm it up... If the situation changed so that we would be burning it more, I would probably insist on replacing it, and NOT let the Pro-Former get installed in another house.

Gooserider

I don't have any favorites among the pre-EPA era stoves - some of this is limited experience with them, some of it is simply that I don't feel it is a good investment of time and energy to put a smoke dragon into service given the low prices on the "value price" stoves such as Englander, Century, etc... If one already has an installed stove, it might be worth keeping it running, but I no longer think that it is worth the effort to install any smoke dragon, particularly if you need to put any work into the stove itself....

As a Libertarian, I don't agree with those who want to outlaw smoke dragons in any way, as I feel that one should be able to make ones own choices, however I make a big distinction between "MAY" and "should" - and the notion that one MAY burn a smoke dragon does not imply that one SHOULD, or that I want to encourage it... (Same as with some drugs, porn, sex workers, gambling, and all the other things our gov't regulates or prohibits even though they are "victimless" or "consensual" crimes - That most Libertarians support "MAY" does not mean they think you "should"...)

As to how Pro-Formers are made - the manual I have talks about stoves with sliders and grates, intended for multi-fuel use with coal and wood. That manual said that if you were going to be just burning wood then you should cover the bottom of the stove with fire bricks (I forget off hand if they said to remove the coal bits first or not) There was a one line mention in one of the pages that looked more like an advertisement to the effect that they also had "wood only" models available. My stove had a solid steel bottom, w/ fire bricks lining it, and didn't have any of the coal related functions, so I'm assuming it was one of the wood only models.

Gooserider

burnlots said:

The dealers hear push Alaska, Jotul, and Hearthstone. I really am not sure what to get. My house is pretty large(3400 sq/ft), very drafty (old farm house). (I’ve been insulating as I renovate) The Century stove heats one side of the house, but I am looking for a work horse to heat a double living room, that also has a stairway leading to my upstairs, and assists with heating the upstairs. The proformer was used for that and with seasoned wood, it would. Last night it was 18 degrees outside and my upstairs maintained 66 degrees, boiler never came on! Any thoughts?

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Not familiar with Alaska, but Jotul and Hearthstone both make good stoves, though most of the Jotuls seem like they run smallish for what you want. If cost wasn't a big issue, I'd probably go for a Hearthstone Mansfield. If it was, I might be tempted by an Englander NC30 or possibly one of the big P.E.'s. Sounds like you want a big firebox stove, but the style is optional.

Gooserider

antenord said:

I have a Proformer Z24 wood and coal burning stove since 1983. Over time, the rocking grates (2) have warped. I am trying to replace them but I can't find them anywhere. Does anybody know where I can find them?

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No idea as to a parts source, and given that the Pro-Former folks are long departed from the stove business (as far as anyone here knows) I would tend to assume that there is no available parts source as such...

I would tend to say that your best bet might be to try and find a local welding shop that would be willing to try and fab up some sort of duplicate. Our Model Z is a wood only model that doesn't have the grates in it, but judging by the pictures I've seen, I suspect they'd be fairly easy to reproduce. (And I don't feel that there should be any patent / copyright issues in duplicating a part that isn't available for sale....)

Gooserider

rrob311 said:

I just picked up a Proformer Z stove

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Hope you didn't strain anything - that stove is a heavy peice of crap... (Sorry, couldn't resist...)

does anyone have a manual for it? I am clueless how to use it. Does anyone know the BTU output as well?

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Somewhere in the large mountain of junk on my desk is a manual of sorts for the wood / coal Proformer Z stoves, but I didn't find it real useful for any information - see my earlier comments in the thread for the way I operated it, and especially note my comments in regards to how I feel the stove has some definite potential safety issues.... The fact that the upper draft spinner is higher than the stack entrance makes the stove a significant risk for stack reversals.

While I do still have it installed in my basement, for OCCASIONAL use when I need to warm up the room to work downstairs, I have to admit that I have SERIOUS doubts about the safety of the stove from a low-level CO emissions standpoint - I'm not sure I'd be willing to go to sleep with it burning overnight again, and would be very much unwilling to sell the house to someone else with that stove installed...

This is not a stove I feel comfortable suggesting anyone install...

Gooserider