New Stove just not cutting it

[StealthFarmer]

Hi all.

New to the forums here. Nice place!

I'll get right down to business. I just bought this house in May of last year and it is my first winter here.

I have a 47 year old 1100 square foot bungalow that is well insulated upstairs with all new windows and doors. Nothing really drafty. The basement is partially finished. There was an older model woodstove in the basement and selkirk chimney. After having them inspected I decided to replace the stove with something newer and more efficient. I bought a Pacific Energy Super 27.

I've been less than impressed with its performance. My wood is dry hardwood. A mix a different types but seasoned and most if it is quite dry. No hissing while burning. The draft is ferocious. On anything less than minimum/off it will make the inside of my stove glow cherry red and occasionally the top will even glow at the joint. It takes about 5-7 minutes from coals to go to a stack temperature of 1200-1400F. If I forget and go down and check in 15 minutes it will be glowing.

That being said, it is doing a terrible job of keeping the house warm unless it is running red hot. Our outside air temps this time of year range from +2C to -10C with occasional days down around -15. On the last minus 15 day if the bedrooms on the opposite side of of house are 16C or so. The room directly above the stove will hold about 20C if I keep dumping logs into it.

I added a blower to the stove and it barely helped. I have fans to circulate the air but most cold days the oil furnace has to come on periodically to keep the house at 20 and the back rooms are still cold. I even ghettoed up a hood and fan assembly to blow the air from the stove into the ducts and without that it would be useless. I have no idea what I am doing wrong here.

If I had of known it would be like this I would have saved my $2000.00 and got a wood furnace instead. My neighbour has one in his drafty old farmhouse and its 28-30C in there on the coldest days so far. In my old 2400 sq ft house I had a small fireplace insert and it did a far better job.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? I am going through far too much wood for what I am getting out of it.

Thanks

 

[michaelryba]

You mentioned a partially finished basement. Are your walls/floors covered in the room with the stove? Many people here report similar disappointment with basement installs. Maybe your heating the soil around your house. Everything else about your post--your neighbors furnace and your previous woodstove experience seem to point to that. Getting some insulation in the basement shouldn't be too difficult/expensive if your a little handy.

 

[StealthFarmer]

Two walls are insulated. Two are uninsulated cinder block. The cinder block walls have dirt behind them, one insulated wall is the rear of the house which faces the backyard.

 

[Todd]

Sounds like all your heat is going up the chimney. Are you running wide open? Anything glowing isn't good either, maybe you need to cut back the air and let the secondaries kick in and do their thing. If draft is too strong try a pipe damper.

 

[StealthFarmer]

I only run the stove wide open for the first 5-10 minutes to get the fire started. Once the logs are lit I cut it back to off or next to it. Anything higher than that causes my stack temps to go up to 1000F+ and soon after the top of the stove around the connector glows. The max I can run it is about 1 inch to the left of off and if the box is full it needs to be off or stuff will start glowing.

 

[Pagey]

I will sound like a broken record with this post, but please do take a moment to read the linked pdf: http://www.woodstove.com/pages/guidepdfs/BasementInstall.pdf

It's a short read, but it's a very eye opening explanation of why uninsulated basement installs often don't work well. I know you have 2 insulated walls, but take a minute to read the link anyway. I think you will be surprised just how many BTUs you are losing via the uninsulated portion.

 

[RNLA]

It may not matter at all but my friend has an older PE and I do not know which one but his burns the way you describe. If you do not cut it off early enough you will make it glow. I thought it was just good wood...

 

[StealthFarmer]

I will add that the previous owner was extremely cheap and according to him he managed to heat the house on 4.5 cord a year with the crappy old woodstove he was running. When I viewed the house in Feb of last year it was ROASTING in there and his oil tank was empty because he was too cheap to fill it. Somehow, his older stove seemed to do a better job than this new PE. The older stove is still sitting right beside my new one and I feel like swapping them to see if it works better.

 

[nelraq]

Get your dealer involved. Your PE sounds very dangerous to me - brings back scary memories of my PE 27.
At this point, who cares if it's not heating your house! IMHO, you should be worrying about it burning down your house

Problem points with your PE are likely one or more of the following points:
1. the ash pan is leaking air.
2. the door latch (ie. the piece screwed onto the stove) is loose.
3. the door gasket is not sealing properly

If you get the problem(s) taken care of, you should end up with a decent stove. It may not heat the house the way you would like; but at least it will be safe!

My PE finally had all the bugs worked out of it. It became a good heater, but I just couldn't bring myself to trust it anymore - so I sold it.

 

[Pagey]

I may get chided for saying so, but I personally find a big difference in the "feel" of the heat between the older radiant type stoves and today's EPA certified stoves which usually are more convection type stoves, designed to achieve lower clearances to combustibles.

I can walk into my dad's house when he's running the old Papa Bear, and it's like walking into a wall of heat. I love our Endeavor, but the fact is that it has never replicated that kind of heat.

 

[StealthFarmer]

Get your dealer involved. Your PE sounds very dangerous to me - brings back scary memories of my PE 27.
At this point, who cares if it's not heating your house! IMHO, you should be worrying about it burning down your house

Problem points with your PE are likely one or more of the following points:
1. the ash pan is leaking air.
2. the door latch (ie. the piece screwed onto the stove) is loose.
3. the door gasket is not sealing properly

If you get the problem(s) taken care of, you should end up with a decent stove. It may not heat the house the way you would like; but at least it will be safe!

My PE finally had all the bugs worked out of it. It became a good heater, but I just couldn't bring myself to trust it anymore - so I sold it.

Now I'm worried. Are there signs I should be watching for?

I paid good money for this thing. My dealer has been less than helpful. He was supposed to include the blower originally and I had to pay for it later when I realized the stove wasn't heating as it should, even on days when it was in the plus numbers. Plus I had to pay extra for more connectors and such wen originally he told me they were included.

 

[StealthFarmer]

Should I be taking pictures or video of this thing running and post it somehow?

 

[Pagey]

The PE 27 is a great stove - one of the best on the market today, in fact. I think you've just got a couple of things working against you: 1.) trying to heat from a partially insulated basement and 2.) the common but "shocking" realization that a modern EPA stove just "feels" different at first than older, radiant stoves. I've seen it time and again on here when people first switch from an old stove to a new one. I don't want to open up that can of worms for a shouting match, but the bottom line is that the two just feel different.

 

[oldspark]

It's hard to beat the old stoves for brute force, do you know what your stove top temps are, it is well documented on this site about my PE Summit troubles.

 

[begreen]

Get your dealer involved. Your PE sounds very dangerous to me - brings back scary memories of my PE 27.
At this point, who cares if it's not heating your house! IMHO, you should be worrying about it burning down your house

Problem points with your PE are likely one or more of the following points:
1. the ash pan is leaking air.
2. the door latch (ie. the piece screwed onto the stove) is loose.
3. the door gasket is not sealing properly

If you get the problem(s) taken care of, you should end up with a decent stove. It may not heat the house the way you would like; but at least it will be safe!

My PE finally had all the bugs worked out of it. It became a good heater, but I just couldn't bring myself to trust it anymore - so I sold it.

Now I'm worried. Are there signs I should be watching for?

I paid good money for this thing. My dealer has been less than helpful. He was supposed to include the blower originally and I had to pay for it later when I realized the stove wasn't heating as it should, even on days when it was in the plus numbers. Plus I had to pay extra for more connectors and such wen originally he told me they were included.

Don't get too worried, the ashpan can't leak air, it's not gasketed. You would know fairly quickly if the door latch felt sloppy.

Don't blame the stove yet. This is your first winter. The stove is cranking out the heat. Now you need to stop losses and get it upstairs if possible. How is the basement laid out? How does the heat get upstairs? What are the basement temps like?

I think you most likely are dealing with a few issues. First, the heat is not where it's needed, move the stove upstairs and it will do a great job. Second, the uninsulated basement walls are sucking away heat, perhaps up to a third of the output. Also examine the sill and any windows for leakage. This is a common area of cold air infiltration. And last, if the draft sounds so strong that it is pulling secondary combustion up the flue. To fix this you can control the air supply or control the draft on the flue. A key damper in the flue pipe will help or you can try taking some metal tape and partially cover the air intake hole at it's closed orifice size.

 

[StealthFarmer]

So I did some measurements. My basement is exactly 2/3 insulated within 2 linear feet.

My wood stove sits directly beside the stairs which lead to the kitchen. The back of the stairwell has a 24" hole to allow heat into the living area. There is also a grate about 3 feet to the side of the stairs to allow more heat up.

The basement temperature is about 21C six feet from the stove. The far side of the insulated section of the basement reads 20C.

I don't have a way to measure the stove top temp but I can hold my hand 6 inches above it without discomfort as long as I like. I filled it with wood for the night about 30 minutes ago. The damper is closed as far as it can be and the stack probe reads 900F.

I have no way to move the stove upstairs without major work. The chimney is in a bad place and there would be no proper place to attach the stove to it. It would require moving or replacing the chimney in a new area and if it came to that I would spend the money on a furnace instead. If I moved the stove upstairs I would still have to heat the basement somehow.

How can I tell if the secondary combustion is going up the chimney?

 

[nelraq]

BeGreen is correct. It is not the ashpan that is leaking air. What is prone to leak air is the "trap door" at the bottom of the ash chute. It is opened with a spring loaded latch. Any little bit of ash that manages to "hang on" when the door is opened (to discharge the ash to the pan) can cause the door to not seat correctly on the chute. This causes air to get sucked into the chute -then up the chute to the fire--and, voila - a raging inferno!

My ash chute was replaced once because the chute and the door didn't fit very well together. The 2nd ash chute leaked as well. The dealer finally siliconed it shut. That ended that problem and allowed the dealer to address the other issues that made the PE uncontrollable!

 

[begreen]

Try this. Take a regular 12" table fan or a box fan. With the cellar door open place the fan on the floor at the top of the stairs, pointing downward, into the basement. Turn it on, low speed.

You can tell if the combustion is heading up the flue by the temps. You should never be seeing those high temps in the flue. 750-800 maybe, when the fire is first starting up. But not 11-1200F.

 

[StealthFarmer]

Most of the time I do not use the ash tray. I scoop them out and put them in a bucket because most times the coals are large and very hot. I scoop them into a steel bucket and take them outside. I did notice one day that the area around the "trap door" was completely clear of ash and there were jets of flame shooting around the edges of the hole. I opened and closed it a bunch of times trying to shake anything loose that may be jamming it but it didn't seem to help much. It went away after a bit. I haven't seen it since but there is usually and inch or two of coals down.

 

[precaud]

Seems to me that 1100 sq ft, with full basement under, in Canada, is a bit much for a Super 27 to handle, no matter how hard it's pushed.

 

[StealthFarmer]

BeGreen, what will happen when I do the fan thing. What am I looking for?

Precaud, the dealer was here and inspected the house and recommended the super 27. He examined the old stove and said the 27 would heat better and use less fuel. Maybe I shouldn't have listened?

 

[precaud]

Well you can hardly blame yourself for following the dealer's advice. I just can't see a Super 27 handling 2000 sq ft comfortably, especially from a basement. That would be Summit territory in my mind.

 

[StealthFarmer]

I would have bought whatever he recommended. Now I'm angry because he recommended something I may have wasted my money on.

 

[begreen]

BeGreen, what will happen when I do the fan thing. What am I looking for?

An increase in upstairs temps.

FWIW, when I read 1000sf I assumed total sq ftg. Why wasn't the basement sq ftg included if that is part of the sq ftg being heated?

The Spectrum is a great stove. Worst case scenario, it will resell nicely next fall or you convince the store to exchange it for a Summit. I suspect the stove will cover about 80% of your heating needs, but it probably won't cover the extremes like the recent cold snap without supplemental heat. That may not be such a bad thing. Or better yet, move it upstairs.

 

[lethal dose]

Are your upstairs floors carpeted? To me, carpeted floors do give you the impression of a warmer room but also seem to insulate the basement, not allowing as much heat up.