Now that I've been burning 24/7....

[mlasko]

Two more questions I ponder while gazing in the secondary plumes of purple flames:

1. When I burn overnight with the damper nearly closed, I get the glass boogered up. My question though is, am I coating the chimney with the same stuff?

2. I've read that moving air slowly is a better method of heating on here. Currently I blast my blower on high. Are there any advantages of running it on low or lower than high?

 

[Backwoods Savage]

You can burn too high and also too low. If the glass gets black your wood could be a little drier. Therefore, you are probably cutting your draft back a little too far.

 

[beau5278]

Occasionally,I'll have a log roll against the window in my stove that will leave it black,if your wood isn't touching the window and it's still getting black,some of that is probably going up the chimney also.When you burn your stove hotter during the day it should clean some of that off the window and also the chimney.If it happens a lot though,maybe your wood isn't as dry as you think,in that case you need to see whats going on inside the chimney.

 

[Bill]

Try getting the stove hotter before you cut back the air. I can close my damper and run the stove at 600* for hours. But if I damper it down to soon, I won't get as hot a fire. I have to then open the damper and let it rip for a while and then start to damper it down over 10 minuets or so.

 

[BJ64]

The black stuff on your glass will not form above some rather high firebox temperature. If the temps in the fire box get below that temp then black stuff starts forming on the cooler surfaces which just happen to be the glass.

With the blower running full tilt, you are pulling quite a bit of heat away from the fire box. The blower may be pulling enough heat off that the firebox temp drops below that magic temp and allows the black junk to appear on the glass.

As already posted by others, there are several things that can be done. Smokey says burn hotter and I agree that will do the trick.

 

[eernest4]

Try getting the stove hotter before you cut back the air. I can close my damper and run the stove at 600* for hours. But if I damper it down to soon, I won't get as hot a fire. I have to then open the damper and let it rip for a while and then start to damper it down over 10 minuets or so.

I have found , over & over, that what smokey says is true.

So,taking smokey's advice as a starting point, throttling down the air too much is a very rich ,smokey & sooty mixture. You have to have enough air so there is some flames on the wood. Try to find a setting that lets in more air & you will have a hotter fire with less smoke & less soot.

The fine tuning trick here is to have only enough air to keep the fire somewhat hotter, so as not to have the smoke & soot, yet not to burn up the wood too fast as you want to have some overnight burn.

You may be trying to squeze too much time out of your wood by having a cold smokey throttled down too much fire.

try to find a happy medium between a hot enough fire & a long enough burn time.