Advice for a novice wood burner

Vigilant Burner said:

I recently installed a gently used VC Vigilant woodstove.
The stove has been installed with 9' of SS class A insulated pipe on the exterior and 5' of single wall black stove pipe. The entire flue has two 90 degree bends.
I have replaced the gaskets in the griddle, flue collar and doors. I have cleaned all the old ash out the stove.
Going to fire it hopefully this weekend.
With all that said, does anyone have some advice to give a "rookie".
I read in a few other posts about the vertical or horizontal burn these stoves offer. Also read a few posts about the correct flue temp, etc..
Questions:
1. Should I have to worry about the connection gaskets for the top, side, bottoms?
2. I read somewhere about a 2" layer of sand at the bottom for insulation, should I do this as well?
3. My flue has a total of two 90 degree bends. Is this ok?
4. When is it good to do a horizontal burn versus a vertical burn or vis versa?

Any info that the "seasoned burners" can offer is much appreciated!
Thanks,
:roll:

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First suggestion.. DO NOT put sand in your stove. I cant imagine how difficult itd be if you needed to remove it. Your ashes alone after a day of burning will be more than enough insulation. My best advice is make sure your wood is well seasoned. This means its been split and stacked for at least a year, some harder woods do better seasoned for 2 years. So many people come on this site complaining about their stoves, when in fact its their wood that is a problem. Its pretty rare to find a wood seller who claims they have seasoned wood, and it actually is seasoned. You're better off storing it yourself. Your 90 degree elbows may or may not pose a problem.. only one way to find out. If I were you Id experiment with n/s fires and e/w fires. Burning n/s tends to be a bit hotter, shorter fire. Its a personal preference if you are able to do both. Some people dont have the option due to stove size. Best of luck.

My advice is like logger's and all about the fuel - get some seasoned wood if you can, get next year's wood now, make a bunch of kindling, and get good fire starters. Seasoned wood now is going to be tough - maybe a wood burner you know has some to trade for fresh wood. Next year's wood should already be stacked and seasoning, and really so should the wood for the year after next. Starting fires is far easier with good kindling. You can make it easile from a knot-free piece of maple, poplar, pine, or any softer wood. Pieces of 2x4 split into a bunch of pieces also work great. Store some kindling indoors so it becomes extra dry. get some good fire starters. Myself and many others like Super Cedars, although I can't really say they are the best since I haven't tried any others.

For me the most satifying part of wood burning if it works well and the most frustrating if it doesn't is starting a fire. I can start a campfire as well as anyone, but still I prefer to have good dry wood, dry kindling, and a firestarter for the wood stove so that I just load the stove, light the starter, shut the door and except for adjusting the draft I don't bother with it for an hour or two.

Vigilant Burner said:

The stove has been installed with 9' of SS class A insulated pipe on the exterior and 5' of single wall black stove pipe. The entire flue has two 90 degree bends.
I have replaced the gaskets in the griddle, flue collar and doors. I have cleaned all the old ash out the stove.

Questions:
1. Should I have to worry about the connection gaskets for the top, side, bottoms?
2. I read somewhere about a 2" layer of sand at the bottom for insulation, should I do this as well?
3. My flue has a total of two 90 degree bends. Is this ok?
4. When is it good to do a horizontal burn versus a vertical burn or vis versa?

Click to expand...

You need to put something on the bottom or you risk cracking it, and replacement bottoms for that stove are no longer available. Did you save the old ashes? Ashes are best, otherwise use the sand. I started with sand in mine and saved enough ashes during the first week to be able to spoon out most of the sand and replace it with ashes. I remove some ashes every day, about three shovels worth. I personally think the stove burns best with the ashes level with the stove bottom's ribs. Too deep and you don't get the air coming in with enough velocity because it has to diffuse through all the ashes. High velocity air makes for the hottest, cleanest burns.

Vertical burn every day for about an hour to get the stove up to temp. Small wood (up to wrist size) with plenty of air space around the splits heats this stove the fastest. Start with the thermostat lever straight up. On a dead cold stove, the damper flap should be at a 45º angle to the back in that position. If not, adjust the chain so it is. As the stove heats up, the thermostat will start closing the flap. It's important to keep it open enough to get the stove up to temp, so you may want to tap the lever over to the left a bit. Make sure the secondary air hole on the left side of the stove is open all the way. Add some medium size splits and let the flue temp climb to about 500-600ºF and let it get ripping pretty good at that temps for several minutes, then flip the bypass damper handle down to initiate the horizontal burn.

If the stove is loaded correctly, and is hot enough, and you have a good enough coals bed started, and the wood is good and dry, and ..... well, if all goes like it should, you will hear a sound like an oil burner as the flame gets redirected down to the lower right side of the stove. Flue temps should stabilize to between 300º and 400º (higher is better and cleaner). If you don't hear the horizontal burn kick off, open the bypass damper again and let it get hotter. You may need to add a few more medium splits at that point. Experience will tell you what works best for your combination of circumstances. If you don't have flue temps in the 300º+ rage while in horizontal mode, you are really just smoldering the wood and you will get a mass of creosote in the flue pipe. This stove wants to burn hot. It was designed as a large space/whole house burner. Many folks installed this stove in their small parlors and found it was a creosote factory unless they burned it hot enough to drive them out of the room. It really is a very efficient creosote producing machine if burned incorrectly.

Once you have a good, hot secondary burn going, let the stove go for about an hour. It will get very hot during this time, and the thermostat may have shut down too far. I find I get the best burns with about 1/2" opening at the bottom of the flap. If the stove top is up around 600º and the flue temp is above 300º, I don't even look inside the stove. As soon as the flue temp drops below 250º, it's usually time to fill the stove. Open the air inlet flap all the way, wait about 30 seconds for the smoke to clear, then open the bypass damper. Open the griddle top and drop in two medium splits and close the griddle again. When you hear the air rushing into the stove means the first splits are fully involved with flame. Open the griddle again, load the stove about 1/2 to 3/4 full, close the griddle top, let the flue temps rise up to about 500º then flip the bypass lever down for the next cycle. If you time the refills correctly, you won't get too many coals and the stove temp will never drop below 500º. I find this stove really likes to be reloaded when still quite hot, it really helps to get the secondary burn to kick off properly.

On the flue, give it a try is all I can say. Seems short to me, but it may work out for you. This stove needs a strong draft. There is a 55" serpentine horizontal flame path on the Vigilant. You need plenty of pull to get the air moving through all that. If you can't get a strong secondary going, you might as well burn in updraft (vertical) mode. You'll get more heat that way, but you'll send more of it up the flue as well. To get the most efficincy out of this stove, you need to give it whatever it needs to burn horizontally 90% of the time.

Vigilant Burner said:

Thanks for the input.
Questions on advice;
What is n/s fires and e/w fires?

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n/s are rounds/splits loaded front to back in the stove.

e/w are rounds/splits loaded left to right in the stove. ;-)

Vigilant Burner, "n/s" is the abbreviated form of "north/south" and "e/w" is the abbreviated form of "east/west".

All very god information posted by others so far especially by Battenkiller......I also have and run a VC vigillant and all i can say this is a great stove !Like others have said this stove likes to burn hot and only when its hot will the stoves true performance be felt.

I dont know if you have a wood supply that's cut and split yet...but if you don't ,cut your wood a good 18-20 inches long. This VC was designed to burn wood that long long not ur typical 16inchers...I have noticed its easier to get hotter and longer burn times with the longer splits ! Goodluck!

BK gave you great advice. I've learned a lot from his posts. We inherited out Vigilant from the in-laws, whose house we now live in. Dad-in-law took great pride in getting the griddle temp up to about 800 and leaving it there, never understanding why we wore cut-offs and T-shirts in the house when we were visiting them in the winter and it was 20 degrees outside. I do not believe he had a clue about the 'horizontal burn' setting so he burned fast and furious at all times, wasting a lot of wood and sending a great deal of heat up the flue. I have to say it did make the house quite warm but he could have done it much more efficiently if he had taken the time to read the manual. But he was an engineer and I wasn't, so I couldn't tell him anything.

We moved in after the in-laws passed on and I immediately took an interest and a liking to this stove. I downloaded an operator's manual from the VC website and studied it.
I had a pretty good grasp of things, I thought, when I discovered this website. That's when my real education began on not only properly operating a wood stove in general and my Vigilant in particular, but also about gathering and using the proper fuel, what to look for in a chain saw, how to use and maintain the saw and do it safely.

Using my stove: I am a convert to the top down burn method. I put a couple of largish splits on the bottom running E/W, a few mediums on top of that, N/S if I have some short ones, and some smaller ones yet on top of the mediums. Next I lay in half a dozen pencil size cedar sticks that I make from dried cedar fence posts, then I toss in ten or so rolled up newspaper knots on top. I light the fire (make sure you're in vertical burn mode with both air inlets wide open. Doing it this way gives you an instant draft because it heats your flue right away. Within just a few minutes I have a good fire going. I typically leave the door cracked open about an inch. This helps give me a good roaring fire. Within ten minutes the stove box is fully engulfed and the stove top temp is rising slowly. When it's really going good I'll add a split or two- medium size. Once those are burning nicely and the stove top is up to at least 550 for a while I close the doors but leave it in vertical burn for a few more minutes. If the fire seems stable I will then move the damper to horizontal burn. I tend to leave both air intakes open unless the fire gets really hot (650-700 degrees stove top) and stays there then I might close the thermostat flap down most of the way but leave the secondary air open. At bed time I reload to the max over a big bed of hot coals plus whatever splits are still intact.
Be sure to always move the handle back to vertical before you open either door or you will get a room full of smoke. The way I remember it is.... If the handle points to the door you can open the door.

Once I reload at bedtime I leave it in vertical with the air all the way open and the door cracked a bit to get the new burn established. The last thing I do before going to bed is to put it back in horizontal burn, shut the thermostat flap to where it just closes with no slack in the chain and close the secondary inlet to about half shut.
If I happen to get up in the middle of the night for the bathroom, I will check the fire and add another split or two. As often as not, I don't get up. Usually there is only a couple of degrees difference in the room temp in the morning. On average, after about a nine hour overnight, the stove top is still close to 300 degrees with lots of glowing coals should I want to start it off again for a morning burn. If I happen to be burning a lot of hickory overnight the stove top can easily be 350 to 400 when I get up in the morning. If I don't want a morning fire, I rake all coals up in a pile in the center of the stove. This will end up raising the stove top temp by at least 50 degrees.

With the Vigilant, at least with my setup, I just don't worry too much about the stove getting too hot. 700-800 is no big deal, though I don't tend to keep it at those temps very long. I've pegged the stove top thermometer at 900 before but it was only for a very short time and was unintentional. I have about 30 feet of straight up flue with no bends at all so I have a great draft. As BK said, the Vigilant was made to heat large areas. I don't think it does so well with cool, smoldering fires. If it is in a small room with low ceiling I think you're better off just loading one split at a time over hot coals. This will let the stove burn hot without forcing you out of the room. You're spinning your wheels if you load it up and keep it choked back so it won't get hot. All you'll get is smoke and creosote.

End Part One.

Part Two:

Long term burning tends to dry out the air in the home. We keep an old pot full of water on the stove top all the time and refill as necessary. I've got my eye out for an old cast-iron kettle that will also do the job and look a little nicer.

That's the way we do things in this household. Seems to work for us. We have two 4.5 ton heat pumps that we've not used in three years, heating our nearly 4000 square foot house solely with this Vigilant. Granted we have milder temps down here in this part of Texas than in other parts of the country but we've had our share of day after day of lows in the mid teens and highs in the 20s and the Vigilant has done a good job for us. I'm sure yours will, too.

And yes, you should replace any loose or missing gaskets plus re-cement seals as needed. Loose or missing gaskets will allow too much air to enter, which makes it hard to control your temps and you'll end up burning a lot more wood than you need to. I've got a gasket at the back connection that will be replaced when this burning season is over, which is any day now, I think. Several of us here have electronic versions of the repair and maintenance manual that we will be happy to share with you. Just ask.

Cheers! And welcome to the Brotherhood of Vigilant-ees!

One more thing... I forgot to address your question about sand. If your stove is completely cleaned out of ashes, like the chimney sweep did when he was here in the fall, you can put an inch or so of clean sand in the bottom. It will help insulate the stove and possibly keep it from cracking if you light a cold stove and it gets too hot too quickly.

Sand is no harder to clean out than ash. My sand has been in the bottom all winter below the ribs of the floor. When I clean ashes out my little shovel scoots along the ribs, taking ash and leaving sand. Seems like I got the sand idea from the VC manual but won't swear to it.