First Burn

I'll be the first, How seaoned is your wood. When was it cut and what type.

One more question I just thought of, How warm was it outside there may not be enough draft in warmer weather.

also describe your chimney setup. Photos would be awesome. Inside and out.

If your having issues, its going to be draft related, or user error. This units are hard to use improperly, unless your would is not seasoned, or as the other poster mentioned, its warm outside. Stoves dont like to draft when the inside and outside temp are close together. Most stove problems are not stove problems at all. Its chimney problems. Chimneys are typically too short, have too long of horizontal runs in them, have too much pipe exposed to the outside, have too many offsets, wrong volume etc.

who installed it?

The difference between 12 and 15 is great when it comes to draft. Also, 3' is the minimum distance for fire saftey. The performance rule is 2' above anything with in 10' of the cap on a horizontal plane. It might be the wet wood, but is sounds like you have a marginal chimney as well.

3' out of the roof, possibly 12' of total hight. Thats a marginal chimney for these high efficiency stoves. What does the manual say that the minimum hight is? The minimum alot of times will give sub par performance. The chimney is what is responsible for making your stove run properly, the stove has nothing to do with it. If the chimney does not suck hard enough on the stove, then the stove will burn poorly. Its a easy fix, you just might need to extend your chimney.

look at page 12. Minimum is 15'.
http://www.englandsstoveworks.com/manuals/30-NC.pdf

so a 12' chimney is not going to pull this stove, a 15' chimney is the minimum, so the perfect hight would be 16'-18'.

Give yourself a little time to figure out the stove, you will get better with some trial and error. Still kind a warm and it will mess with your draft as others have stated. Another tip during these warmer shoulder season fires is to use plenty of kindling and smaller splits til you have a good coal bed established before adding larger splits.

Like these folks are saying, try the drier wood and if you still have problems add another 3 foot section of chimney. The 30NC really does need at least its minimum length to work well.

Was there a lot of hissing from the wood while you had the door open?

Good info MountainStoveGuy and BrotherBart...

I have that old crappy cast iron stove I've posted a few times with:
3' singlewall, almost 3' metalbestos inside
almost 5' (counting cap) metalbestos outside

draft seems ok

I've got a marginal chimney; roughly 14' tall, 8" in dia, insulated metal...all exposed. Oh, and it missed school the day they taught the 10/3 rule. :lol:

With that being said, I have been able to get stove up to operating temp. Granted, it may be more of an issue in cold weather, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Despite my limited experience, I can tell you, seasoned wood makes a HUGE difference. We have some seasoned pine/hardwood the previous owners left behind. It burns great and I can get the stove up to 550F, and start turning down the air control. I put in a split of hardwood that was delivered in August.....the stove temp dropped and the fire became "lazy". I dug out a bit of hardwood from the season pine pile and that burned great.

So experiment a little with the more seasoned wood. Also, try splitting some of the seasoned stuff into smaller, square splits. Not all of it, just a few. I find medium splits are great when you're building the fire and initially ramping up the temp. Once you start clearning 400, you can start with the bigger stuff.

Oh, get a stove top themometer. As a newb myself, it's VERY helpful in telling you what the stove is doing. It's much more accurate than: "The room feels warmer...and it's hot standing near the stove...."