House full of smoke

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Jan 11, 2011
28
Southern CT
My wife came home today to a house full of smoke. I got home from work an hour later burn pot was full of pellets still smoldering!! Do not know how long fire was out or blowers were not running. I cleaned it out and it refired right up. Running strong. Any ideas??


Us stove 6041
 
I know you don't want to hear this but with that short of a stack you really need an OAK.

Is the venting 4" or 3"?

Now, were there any error codes shown on the stove control panel?
 
A likely cause is a powerfailure that shut the stove down. Without the exhaust fan the smoke just seeped out wherever it could. When the power came back on it may have been warm enough for the auger feed to work, but not for the combustion fan to run. On my stove, if the fire goes out, the auger will stop, but the combustion fan will run along with the circulation fan until it is cool enough to shut down, but the combustion fan runs on.... I don't know if that was manufacture intended, but I like it. I disagree with my fellow name sake. An outside air kit won't help solve anything here. Stoves were available for years without them and they do have a place with some stoves, but the exhaust issue is more a cause of too little vertical rise to allow the flue to work by convection. The three foot vertical rise is just over the height of the stove and will not draw the smoke through the baffles and out. Adding five feet may help, but there is no guarantee. The aok may add to the problem, IF it requires a lot of suction to draw the air inside. Hot air rising only can pull from so far, before the resistance is too great.

If there was a surge or drop in voltage you may have a problem with fuses, so check those before calling it OK.
 
littlesmokey said:
A likely cause is a powerfailure that shut the stove down. Without the exhaust fan the smoke just seeped out wherever it could. When the power came back on it may have been warm enough for the auger feed to work, but not for the combustion fan to run. On my stove, if the fire goes out, the auger will stop, but the combustion fan will run along with the circulation fan until it is cool enough to shut down, but the combustion fan runs on.... I don't know if that was manufacture intended, but I like it. I disagree with my fellow name sake. An outside air kit won't help solve anything here. Stoves were available for years without them and they do have a place with some stoves, but the exhaust issue is more a cause of too little vertical rise to allow the flue to work by convection. The three foot vertical rise is just over the height of the stove and will not draw the smoke through the baffles and out. Adding five feet may help, but there is no guarantee. The aok may add to the problem, IF it requires a lot of suction to draw the air inside. Hot air rising only can pull from so far, before the resistance is too great.

If there was a surge or drop in voltage you may have a problem with fuses, so check those before calling it OK.

Actually an OAK will do two things.

It will keep the airflow going through the system and it will prevent the possibility of smoke exiting the air intake inside the house.
 
Thanks guys. I will definitely add some rise. OAK is also a thought. Just do not want it to happen again. No indication of power outage and wife unplugged before looking at unit!!
 
watersupply851 said:
Thanks guys. I will definitely add some rise. OAK is also a thought. Just do not want it to happen again. No indication of power outage and wife unplugged before looking at unit!!

Ouch, always read the control panel.
 
Besides the power outage, another possibility is that an overtemp condition occurred causing the stove to shut down. Once the unit cooled down the flame was gone and the feed auger kicked back on. I have had this happen with my pellet boiler before if the water temp hits 220 deg. It takes a while for everything to cool down and once it does there is no flame left but the internal temp is still enough to turn on the feed auger, which then keeps dumping pellets to try and bring the temp back up or until the temp drops enough that the feed auger shuts down. I am not exactly sure how your stove works but a lot of them do have an overtemp shutoff feature. I would think it would just shut off and then stay off... but perhaps not. Also, a power outage should have been apparent from other electronics in the house (clocks requiring resetting?). While I think that OAKs do help provide an optimal burn, if you haven't had problems due to combustion air in the past then that seems like an unlikely culprit to me. Also, I have played around with my chimney (4" PL vent) and have found that adding a few sections of pipe make almost no difference in draft readings on my manometer. I had 10 feet of vertical on the outside of my house and removed it this year after doing some draft testing, now I have a stove that runs just as good and much less chimney to clean.
 
My 6041 used to do the same thing from time to time the oak has helped but not fixed my problem completely. I run mine on a t-stat usually on p-3 if the weather warms up the stoves drops to low flame and the burn pot cakes up alot quicker and requires more scraping or it will fill with ash and put the flame out. I hardly ever have to scrape the pot when its cold out but the warmer it is the more i scrape. I can't seem to get the mixture right at low flame to keep the pot clean. Were you burning at a low flame? if not you may not have had enough air to the pot? Good luck
 
mkling,

The presence or lack of an OAK isn't the reason for the smoke leakage or the stove shutting down. It is a simple fact that when smoke starts leaking from a stove it comes out any available orifice it can easily find, one of these is that nice almost 2" hole called the air intake. With a properly installed OAK that isn't going to take place. That leaves you with up and out through the short stack, any air wash system that isn't plugged by ash, or through the drop chute and out the hopper. The most likely exit is through the short stack in that case. Several stove manufacturers even remove the possibility of the hopper as an exit by having a gasket there.
 
One of the first reminders that we hadn't refilled the hopper with pellets occured when the pellets ran out and we got that smokey odor all through the house. After we installed the OAK, the reminder that we didn't fill the hopper was the house getting cool! We have a 3 ft vertical raise for both the OAK and the exhaust.
 
Smokey,
I understand, but I was speaking more about the burn pot overflowing. Yes, with an OAK installed this could help with smoke leakage but to me the major underlying issue is why the burnpot overflowed in the first place. If it was a power outage then no big deal as that is a random event but if it was something else then he needs to understand why it happened. Has there been a history of lazy flames/poor combustion air with this stove in the past is the first thing I would want to know. If not then I don't see why an OAK would be critical.
 
mkling said:
Smokey,
I understand, but I was speaking more about the burn pot overflowing. Yes, with an OAK installed this could help with smoke leakage but to me the major underlying issue is why the burnpot overflowed in the first place. If it was a power outage then no big deal as that is a random event but if it was something else then he needs to understand why it happened. Has there been a history of lazy flames/poor combustion air with this stove in the past is the first thing I would want to know. If not then I don't see why an OAK would be critical.

Likely the burn pot is overflowing because the stove manufacturer decided to allow certain portions of the stove to activate when they shouldn't have. A notable case is when a manufacturer decides to use self reseting high limit switches instead of a manual reset one.

This is fine as long as they also check for the actual existence of a operating fire in the stove. Otherwise it can and does lead to a lot of smoke generation and an overflowing burn pot until the POF finally cools down low enough to shut the stove down. There is a temperature difference between POF on and POF off so there may be a false indication of POF at certain times and this is all it takes to make a smoke generator.

I agree that the OP needs to know why the stove shut down, however that is no excuse for there being smoke in the house.
 
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