1977 VC Vigilant

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cmonSTART

Minister of Fire
Do these buggers have cats in them? I've always assumed they bypass damper just sent the flue gases through a series of baffling but I've heard two people now insist they have cats in them. Considering the stoves are older than I am I'm open to the idea of being wrong about these.
 
To my knowledge, no cats, dogs or mice in the original VC stoves.
 
Don't think so. The baffle just runs the hot air back and forth up the back, rather than straight up the flue. Keeps the heat longer in the box. Good technology at the time.
I have one and it does a very nice job but I have nothing to compare it with.
 
If there's a cat in mine, it sure is doing a good job of hiding from me because I haven't ever seen it. Although from reading a few recent threads, there may be a squirrel or two nesting in the intake tubes of a few owners' Vigilants.

There is a secondary air supply that supposedly adds pre-heated air to a secondary combustion chamber behind the fireback. You can't really see anything, so I have no clue how you would adjust the primary and secondary air intakes to best sustain any secondary combustion. You can always hear a load roar as the flame path switches from an updraft mode to a horizontal burn when you close the bypass damper, but that's just as likely to be the sound of the large volume of exhaust being funneled through a smaller opening on the bottom right. That should theoretically raise the temps up enough to ignite the secondary gases, but I don't feel it is sustained for a long enough period of time to matter (although I like to pretend it is).

At any rate, the stove throws out tons of heat for its size, and for a very long time. I don't think there are a lot of gases lost if you burn real hot. Seems to be a period for about only an hour where the wood is outgassing fast enough that the volatiles get away from the heat and air before they get a chance to light off, and so they go up the chimney unburned. No one has shown me definitively that there will be a huge recovery of escaping volatiles in anything but a cat stove, so I just burn real hot and hope I get most of them before it all turns to coal and it no longer really matters. That's the point where the VC design with its very long internal path really shines. Works almost like a key damper by keeping the heat down in the stove longer.
 
cmonSTART said:
Do these buggers have cats in them? I've always assumed they bypass damper just sent the flue gases through a series of baffling but I've heard two people now insist they have cats in them. Considering the stoves are older than I am I'm open to the idea of being wrong about these.


Any chance the two people that insisted the Vigilant has a cat were incredibly inebriated? Suffering from massive head trauma?

No, the Vigilant does not have a cat.
 
There was a squirrel in my intrepid before i bought it cause i cleaned acorns out of the refractory during rebuild. Hes probably still lookin for them
 
The Vigilant can have a cat add on option...If you can find one, called the energy extender (or somthing similar).
 
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