Pyroceram experience

[peakbagger]

I have to on occasion spend time looking into large wood boilers through side ports and generally prior to doing this we inevitably have to change out the glass that is in place on the ports. The local maintenance staff usually send out for new glass and I suspect that it some grade of glass far lower than pyroceram. Usually after a couple of hours the inner glass surface is hazed out and no matter what we try to do to clean it, I expect the glass is pitted. As my home wood boiler and stove do not have glass I wanted to get collective feedback from those who use pyroceram or equivalent in their stoves.

What I am particularly interested in if the surface of the pyroceram pits and gets rough over use or does it just get some sort of solids build up? I can usually find something to dissolve the build up or scrape it off with a razor blade but once it get pitted, there is no way of cleaning it.

If there is another type of "glass" that has worked better for others , I am all ears.

Thanks in advance!

 

[webby3650]

This problem must have something to do with the way the boiler operates. On stoves, this does not happen unless the user never cleans the glass. Over time the ashes will etch the glass, but it takes a while. Like a entire season. If the glass gets cleaned bi-weekly, etching will not take place on a wood stove.

 

[branchburner]

I clean my stove glass about once a month (with ash) as it generally stays fairly clean, meaning not blackened. But I am always impressed at how much better it looks when freshly cleaned and the layer of fine ash is removed.

Even when cleaned, my glass never achieves the perfect crystal-clear look of window glass (the stove was a year-old when I bought it). The glass has always had a faint, hazy cloudiness to it that is more pronounced towards the perimiter. To the naked eye this does not appear as pitting or etching, but as a slight buildup of solids that cannot be removed no matter the effort. Since this haziness is very slight, it is not really noticeable or bothersome during the normal course of viewing the fire.

 

[peakbagger]

These boilers put out 160,000 pounds per hour of steam and the grate is about the size of a living room. The boilers run negative and in theory there are air ports in the viewing ports so that the flames don't lick back into the wall boxes but it appears to be mostly radiant heat. I usually get a suntan looking in the ports and a probably a fair dose of CO. After a few hours, the glass has a distinct black haze and it looks sandblasted.