Ash / Shoot when loading wood?

We need to post this as a 'Read Before Burning' suggestion:

Don't open the loading door until it has burned down to coals. It's really that simple, and there are very few reasons that you would ever need to open the door when it's in full gasification mode. It's tempting, of course, but curiosity neddn't always be satisfied.

Here's my personal approach:

1) Build a fire with the firebox filled no more than 1/3 of the way with a few pieces of kindling and loosely spaced smaller splits. Light the fire.

2) Wait a few minutes (4-6 minutes typically) until external flue temp reaches 275 °F. Close bypass damper and lower door, turn on EKO controller.

3) Leave. Come back in about 30 to 45 minutes when it's down to mostly coals. Load enough to carry it to bedtime. This varies a bit by time of day. On colder days I will have started the fire earlier and will need a bigger load to carry me to bedtime. It takes a little bit of experience to judge this, but there's a really wide window of time since the coal bed will last and be usable for hours.

4) Refill with enough wood to carry me to the next evening. It will burn out sometime in the night and the system will switch to heating from storage at that point.

An average winter day requires about 7 hours of burn time. That translates to a bit less than two full firebox loads, so this pattern works pretty well. On a few of the coldest days, or if storage is really depleted, I may need an extra load.

The graph below shows this pattern, with an extra load. The red line shows combustion temperature (divided by 10, so 120 is really 1200).

I started the fire at about 5:30. I came back at about 6:00 and added some wood - maybe half a firebox full. I'm burning poplar now, which doesn't last long.

At about 8:30 it had burned down to coals already, so I added another half load.

Finally, I loaded it to the gills at about 10:30. It burned out around 4:00 in the morning. At about 7:00 the system gave up on the boiler and switched over to heating from the tank.

I never opened it when there was any more than coals, and I never got any smoke out of it.

I just recently got the new (to me ) controller. If you play with the parameters in the Fb mode you can adjust so boiler will shut down ,display FUEL and leave the right amount of coals to start the next load. push stop to cancel and start again. I am trying 90 Min's now .I leave the Fd settings at -- or off because I have storage and I don't want boiler to shut down premature do to low temp rise.This might be a good way to help with loading to soon?