Rapid River said:
BeGreen said:
I think most of us here would love to see VC get back on their feet and restore the company's good name. Hopefully they will improve their refractory castings to the level of their cast iron castings. Doing that and tweaking the NC design to be a bit more draft flexible should help a lot.
I see this issue differently from you. I see competent wood burners having good results with the VC Everburn. Then I see newbies who don't even know what a good coal bed is blame the VC engineering group for a bad design.
This ain't rocket science.
Wait till the competent wood burners remove the flue and do their annual cleaning after 2-3 seasons, and ask them how much crumbled refractory material they find in the rear chambers. There are several pics of this in this thread:
https://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/4188/P154/
This material is so fragile, that you can easily poke your finger right through it (someone did this and posted a pic a while back). These refractory assemblies are not built to last. That is poor design by anyone's standard. You have to completely disassemble the stove to replace it, and that is no small task, and the replacement parts are >$400 and we no longer have warranties. So I hope you can understand why there have been a few complaints.
As for the comments about the videos - I'll assume you are talking about the videos I created, but I don't know what you are talking about since the everburn stove is working beautifully as it is supposed to in this video series:
https://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/14536/
Yea I do stack splits near my stove, a lot of people do, it drives off all moisture (even though my wood is top-covered and split/seasoned for more than a year, it still helps). They aren't there for very long. As for leaving the door open, I'm not exactly sure what you are talking about, the ash pan door? Yes, I crack it for EVERY COLD START, it gets the fire going quickly. I can start it without doing that, but it creates a lot of smoke and requires much more time. You don't see me opening the door any other time, and it's only open for a few minutes. I bet if you surveyed people that had a similar stove design, the majority of them do it the same way.
Furthermore - we COULD be comparing apples and oranges here. I noticed a bunch of new positive comments from people, especially with the encore NC (and I'm glad to see this by the way!). According to VC executives, they did some tweaking of the design, specifically to the shoe - increasing the bore hole size and also the angles to improve secondary combustion. I have NO IDEA but perhaps this could account for some of the more favorable recent reviews. On the flip side, I've also recently received email from several different people, and seen new threads - all describing many of the "same old" problems - one guys stove was overfiring and glowing, another person was having a lot of difficulty achieving consistent "everburns" another complaining about burn times, etc.
I like to be as neutral as I can be, and totally honest. I've covered all the good and bad about my stove. I thought the videos were actually very positive...
