So I decided to fire up the englander today with a warm up fire. Toward the end of last season it was becoming more and more difficult to keep a fire going. Yesterday I went ahead and swept the chimney 3 time to make sure it was clean and took a wire brush to the black stove pipe to eliminate the creasote left over from last year. For the warm up fire I used lath from this 125 year old house so if that isn't seasoned wood I don't know what is. The fire would only burn with the door left open. So I began to think if there were some way for the fresh air intake to become clogged. I grabbed my air hose and cranked up the psi on it. Next I shot air into the OAK intake, my wife was in front of it and told me while I was doing that the fire just continued to die down with the door closed. This was something I tried doing last year also. At that time I had the pedestal base on. This summer I removed that and put the legs on (IMO much better appearance). While I was down there shooting air into the OAK intake I noticed a small square cut out on the bottom side of stove just below the OAK intake. I decided to spray air in there and I got a lot of metal beads that came out at that time. But the fire begin to light up again at this point. I also noticed that the air control was a lot more sensitive to it's settings. My question is, does anyone know what that square hole is under the stove, and is it possible that that is also an air intake and that somehow it became plugged? I have no idea about the layout of this stove and how the air is actually delivered to stove other then the inlets and the outlets (meaning I can't tell the path the air actually takes).