Englander Improvement

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Clincker said:
2008 Model Englander with the holes below the burn pot. Stuffed the bottom and did not seem to make a big difference. Stuffed the 1/2 round holes at back of burn pot and it seemed to force more air under burn pot temporarily - until steel wool burnt up. No lasting changes though.

I have only had to re pack the steel wool once since I started this, and yes, all it does is force alot more air thru the burn plate which results in a BETTER burn.
 
Tried this modification on mine today...Burning Bayou brands which were leaving a good amount of un burned, clinkers no matter what I had the low air set on. So far seems much better and hotter...
 
Bump to keep this interesting thread alive.

My stove has the 2 large holes under the burn plate and 4-5 small holes running on a 45 degree angel above. I plugged the two holes under the burn plate with (I believe) #3 steel wool. BTW that stuff sticks like a syringe. Anyway, fired up the stove about 5 hours ago as it's been warm here today. Didn't notice much difference at first, maybe a stronger flame but too close to tell. As of 5 minutes ago there was some brown accumulating on the glass. I am running at 5-6-1 on a 2-8 upper setting. That has me at 71 degrees which is about normal, although the temp is dropping rapidly here, so maybe it's a bit warmer.

I am looking for a cleaner burn from this trick. I get a lot of black soot with any kind of pellet. I clean it out 1x per day and vacuum the whole thing 1 x per week. I also gave the exhaust pipe a quick swab and tapping the other day.

I'll need to wait until tomorrow afternoon, during the daily cleaning, to see if the wool is still there, and to get a 24 hour perspective, but I am hopeful.
 
staplebox said:
Bump to keep this interesting thread alive.

My stove has the 2 large holes under the burn plate and 4-5 small holes running on a 45 degree angel above. I plugged the two holes under the burn plate with (I believe) #3 steel wool. BTW that stuff sticks like a syringe. Anyway, fired up the stove about 5 hours ago as it's been warm here today. Didn't notice much difference at first, maybe a stronger flame but too close to tell. As of 5 minutes ago there was some brown accumulating on the glass. I am running at 5-6-1 on a 2-8 upper setting. That has me at 71 degrees which is about normal, although the temp is dropping rapidly here, so maybe it's a bit warmer.

I am looking for a cleaner burn from this trick. I get a lot of black soot with any kind of pellet. I clean it out 1x per day and vacuum the whole thing 1 x per week. I also gave the exhaust pipe a quick swab and tapping the other day.

I'll need to wait until tomorrow afternoon, during the daily cleaning, to see if the wool is still there, and to get a 24 hour perspective, but I am hopeful.

No joy here. Looks like about 1/4 of the steel wool disappeared. The rest was blackened. Didn't notice any difference with heat output, ash volume, or glass blackening. I still think there may be something to this though, so I'll try it with something sturdier. Not for awhile though, it's about to get cold here.
 
2 week update. Still seeing a big improvement overall in my stove's performance. I have only had to add alittle more Steel Wool once. With the impingment plate tight against the back of the stove I did a major clean-up of the stove interior today and found that there was noticibly less soot build-up in the hard to reach areas. I followed up the stove clean-up with a thorough brushing and leaf vac cleaning of the vent from the stove outward. Again, there was alot less soot build-up. I do a daily clean-up and find that the amount of ash has decreased noticably since I started this. As well, my door glass has virtually nothing on it after a 24 hour burn. Out of curiosity, I put the Imping plate back to where it normally would be from the factory for two days. I did notice that my glass was noticably more sooty on the daily cleanup, and there was a slight increase on soot build-up on the stove interior. I am only packing the two larger holes on the upper part of the burn box. I note that the flame is more evenly dispersed across the entire burn plate as opposed to hugging the back of the pot near the auger. All in all this seems to be a noticable improvement for my stove. I see by some of the comments that it does not seem to work on all of the stoves. Heres to experimenting and trying different things. Happy burning..........
 
rotterman, you said a tech at Englander told you to do this?
I wonder if the 2010 stoves will come out with smaller holes under the burn pot?
Wonder if it would work on the 55-TRP10?
If so we could buy the improved burn pot maybe?
If not we could pull the burn pot out and weld in a plate to close off the holes maybe halfway or so?
 
Experimenting alittle more tonight. Plugged one of the large bottom holes as well as the 2 top ones. See what it looks like in the a.m. when i do my daily cleaning. Right now the burn is really complete. Looks like to me that the bottom holes feed up thru the sides of the burn pot. Plugging both bottom holes will cut off the feed to the two large holes on top and will bypass the steel wool burn out problem on the top holes, as Packerfan had mentioned earlier.
 
All this talk of big holes and steel wool remind me of an old girlfriend of mine...

Back to your regular programming...
 
I have an Englander PDVC and I tried this about 48 hours ago and wow what a difference! I plugged the two larger holes below the burn plate with #0000 steel wool and it has worked beautifully. Pot is not clogged, glass is not dirty in the am as it used to be. Nice tall flame, complete burn, more heat output for sure.
Thanks for the great tip!
 
krooser said:
All this talk of big holes and steel wool remind me of an old girlfriend of mine...

Back to your regular programming...

I can understand the first part of that, but I am trying to figure out how the steel wool fits in that equation...........!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
rottiman said:
krooser said:
All this talk of big holes and steel wool remind me of an old girlfriend of mine...

Back to your regular programming...

........but I am trying to figure out how the steel wool fits in that equation...........!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe she wore braces. ;-P
 
macman said:
rottiman said:
krooser said:
All this talk of big holes and steel wool remind me of an old girlfriend of mine...

Back to your regular programming...

........but I am trying to figure out how the steel wool fits in that equation...........!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe she wore braces. ;-P

maybe....hairy? Doh...I think I just threw up in my mouth!!! :)
 
I tried plugging my pdvc's (2006 model) large holes in the burn pot, but this did not seem to help the heat output or reduce the ash buildup on the glass for me. Glad that it worked for others though :)
 
I also have larger holes both above and below the wear plate. I also was given this tip by tech support and at first put steel wool in the holes above. The next day it had all burned up. I then packed the lower holes and have not had a problem in the last year.
 
I was having the same problem with black on the glass and build up of pellets and clinkers. After adding the steel wool to the BOTTOM holes, I saw a huge difference. I guess Englander needs to change their design. I always thought that the problem was air flow.
 
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