RESOLVED !!!!

This problem was resolved. The 6 inch stove pipe had become clogged. We put back the 8 inch stove pipe and it has worked flawlessly ever since and we love this stove!!

Original post: Please help....smoke pouring out the front of the stove when opened....
Has anyone experienced this problem with their Englander NC30? If so, what is the likely cause.
The stove has been in use now for over 2 months and now recently smoke just starts pouring out the front when you go to load in wood.
I have asthma and this is not good, plus it sets off the smoke detectors throughout the house.
This is unacceptable. Can anyone give me any suggestions as to why this could be occurring?

Thanks!

Shari said:

Is the mesh on your chimney cap plugged?

Shari

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I don't know but we can check that as soon as we can get a ladder safely set up as well as safely climb onto the roof. We just had a bad snow storm today so it might be a few days until we can safely climb around the roof and set up a ladder to get to the 2nd story on the cape.

EKLawton said:

+1 sounds like a good cleaning in order..

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Possibly, but we used to have a Vermont Casting Defiant Encore and never had issues with creosote build up.
We could burn from October straight through until May and never need to clean out the chimney or stove pipe.
But it was 20 years old and started needed yearly rebuilding so we replaced it this year with the Englander.
It definitely seems to throw off more heat than our VCDE had been which should be very nice for those arctic temps we can get for days at a time around here in upstate NY.
Seeing it's a compact 1500 sq foot house we can passively heat the bedrooms upstairs as well if we leave the doors open to the rooms.

dave11 said:

That happens to me on occasion, in fact it seems a little worse since the cold weather. The first reaction folks have is that the draft must be insufficient, and I suppose that might be true for you, though if the stove works properly, I would think that's probably not it.

I have a draft meter, and in fact my draft is a bit higher than Englander recommends for optimal performance. yet I still get some smoke when I reload.

I believe this problem has come up before, here and elsewhere. Try cracking the door open for 10 seconds before opening fully to reload. Also, make sure the blower is off, if you have one.

The other thing that helps is to wait longer until reloading. If I wait till the fire's down to just red coals, I don't get any smoke.

Also, on windy days, you might get more smoke than otherwise.

Also, do you know for sure your flue is clean?

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Well, it is cold and windy here today, but it wasn't typical winter weather until last night and my husband said he had noticed it before today, although today it's been extreme and no way to overlook it (especially when it sets off the smoke detectors in the house.)

Where can one get a draft meter?

Cracking is what we were doing but the smoke will pour out from just that crack ... and set off the detectors and smells up the house, etc...

We do not have a blower, so that is not contributing to this specific case (thank goodness)

Regarding the cleanliness of the chimney flue, it was cleaned prior to using the stove. We are vigilant about cleaning it at the end of the season as well as before the season starts just in case something built anything in the chimney over the off-season. We used to have a VC Defiant Encore and after attempting to clean the flue on various occasions when we had a warm spell and let the stove cool down, we never had any significant build-up, so we tended to never need to clean it until the end of the burning season. But maybe that is not the case with the Englander. The stove pipe on the VCDE was thicker and enameled as well as larger in diameter, so possibly that is the difference. And we tend to burn the new stove on the lower end of the appropriate burn range (per the thermometer), so maybe it is building up creosote more so than the VCDE had.

I guess we will need to check the chimney cap and attempt to check/clean the chimney sometime soon with some luck, although for the next week we are supposed to have cold temps, so the stove will not be cooling off enough for us to check on what the levels in the pipe looks like this week - if the weather forecasters are on target.

Thanks for all the replies.

I just did not know if something inside the stove might have been defective and needed to be replaced.

Hopefully BrotherBart will comment too if there might be somthing inside the stove that could be causing the extreme smoke conditions to have started recently.

littlesmokey said:

Just curious, did your drafting issues start at the same time your temps dropped? How tall is your stack? What steps do you take when reloading? Have you changed the way you do things from your old stove to the new one? Curious minds want to know :-S

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They apparently have gotten worse since the temps dropped last night.
Offhand I don't know the exact height, but I believe it to be high enough as we have been heating with a woodstove for more than 20 years.
The damper is always opened to ensure the gasses get burned off before cracking open the door.
The old stove was a cast iron toploader and this stove isn't cst iron and it's a front loader.

Thanks!

Our chimney is internal for 3 stories before it exits the house. It is double not single lined.
The problem was with the 6 inch stove pipe.
It got clogged. We put the 8 inch stove pipe we used previously with the VCDE and it has worked flawlessly ever since.
We have been burning it hotter (since it would appear that we possibly may not have been burning it as hot as necessary to ensure that the creosote doesn't start building up in the stove pipe.)
The chimney looked fine. (When we took the stove pipe apart we also checked the chimney and it was limited to just the stove pipe.)
No issues with smoke when starting up the woodstove since we resolved this in January.