Hot Rodding the stove started today

I hope this is close to the topic. But I'm wondering what my Monty has for fire bricks. The sides and bottom are one piece molded of a firebrick type material ( separate pieces). I too notice when things are burning correct they stay very white looking. I used that a sign of how the fire is doing.

Huntindog1 if it's doing it's job it's a good stove and you sound like you're staying warm.

Was noticing last night with my stove, as I have insulated behind my fire brick with 1/4" ceramic 2300 insulation and also coated my fire brick and baffle board with ITC-100 to reflect more heat back into the fire box, that loading with sub par wood is not so painful as it used to be. Its nothing magical but I can get the stove into secondary burn mode much easier.

The key to secondary air is to have it preheated very close to or above the ignition point of gasses, The way a lot of stoves are set up the 2nd air lag time is kinda short to accomplish this. There is of course a cost consideration in this as well. Way back I remember reading about various methods used to improve the efficiency of the old smoke dragons. People would add a good sized ( length for lag time) coil at the top of the fire box ( some were internal ,others external either way seemed to work fairly well) one end intake other connected to re-burn tube/s. The high temp (2300+) insulation above the tubes was to keep from a melt down and of course help hold higher temps in the fire box. Nothing new in this as the mfg world has been using what is called scrubbers on exhaust stacks for years active and catalytic.