Best way to maintain a good charcoal bed (a shout out specifically to Harman owners)

[redhorse]

We have a Harman TL300 combustion dome wood stove. We're having problems maintaining a good charcoal bed, which
is vital in getting the secondary combustion to ignite. All of our wood is 20% or under in moisture (most of it is oak, with
some poplar). We had a great charcoal bed yesterday afternoon, loaded the stove, got the afterburner to kick in after about
8 minutes. However, when we went to load it up last night, even though the stove was still fairly hot, and there was still some wood,
the charcoal bed was almost nonexistent.

We're using smaller wood on the bottom (we were told smaller wood makes charcoal more quickly). It seems we have to rebuild the
charcoal bed fairly often (by adding only small wood and letting it burn down) before we can completely load up the stove.

We were wondering if we weren't getting the fire hot enough, but we have a thermometer on the side of the
stove (near the top) and we get it up to 450 or 500.

Can any give me any pointers on maintaining a nice, deep charcoal bed? And/or pointers on getting secondary combustion
in a Harman unit?

 

[Backwoods Savage]

My first suspicion is to ask how and when you empty the ashes? There really is no reason you should not always have hot coals in the stove so long as you are having a fire.

As for the smaller wood giving coals faster, that is just because it burns up faster and the fellow was probably telling you that for when you build a fire in a cold stove.


Back to the ashes. If you are cleaning the ashes often and/or also removing all the ashes when you do the cleaning, that certainly would be a problem. You need to leave some ashes in the stove. We usually try to leave 2" of ash when we empty the ashes and we also don't scoop out the coals; just the ash.

 

[redhorse]

My first suspicion is to ask how and when you empty the ashes? There really is no reason you should not always have hot coals in the stove so long as you are having a fire.

As for the smaller wood giving coals faster, that is just because it burns up faster and the fellow was probably telling you that for when you build a fire in a cold stove.

Back to the ashes. If you are cleaning the ashes often and/or also removing all the ashes when you do the cleaning, that certainly would be a problem. You need to leave some ashes in the stove. We usually try to leave 2" of ash when we empty the ashes and we also don't scoop out the coals; just the ash.

We haven't emptied the ash pan yet at all. (The pan will hold about two weeks worth of ashes.). We did check it; it has some, but not much.

When we open the stove, after a burn, if we see a lot of non-live ash, we carefully push the live ash out of the way, drag a shovel across the grates to force the non-live ashes through the grate, and then redistribute the live ashes. But we've only done this twice.

The problem is we're not seeing a lot of live ashes after our burns. We were told to maintain a 3-4" bed of charcoal, but we're having trouble maintain even 2". We're really not even seeing a lot of non-live ashes for that matter.

The stove is burning right now at about 400 degrees, the secondary combustion is going (I think -- no smoke from the chimney anyway), and there is barely a good bed of coals. It's almost like the secondary combustion bakes the wood down to nothing and there are no coals left...

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Many folks who have the ash pans will simply not empty them. They let them fill and then when they get too deep on top will shovel them out like those of us who does not have an ash pan.

It sounds to me like the grates are so darned wide that all the hot stuff is falling through and into the ash pan. I'm hoping some other folks who have this type of stove or any stove with an ash pan will come in on this thread soon; especially those who simply do not use the ash pan. I'm betting this is the entire problem and if so, it can be fixed. Good luck.