scare with my dutchwest everburn lastnight!

[tobaccogrower]

outside temp about 28*. stove has been running for several days straight. i had the last load down to a good 2inch bed of coals. added 3 med splits in a triangle position. soon as they lit i closed the damper. everburn took right off(lucky). closed the air down to about half way and went back to my lazy-boy.

i went back to check on my girls about 20 minutes later and noticed there was no flames in the firebox. only coals on the bottom. scary thing is everburn rumble was rippin! it didnt feel like the stove was putting out any heat. stack was hotter than usual. crusing at 550-600. too hot for my comfort. i opened the bypass and tried re-arranging the splits. they would light off again but soon as i closed the damper same as above would happen. i just let it burn down to coals. at the end coals were very bright.

what the heck happned? im about ready to turn this stove into a mooring and go back to pelletts! i'm going to pull the stack pipe off today and get a good look around. how often should door seals be replaced? this is the third season i belive.

 

[Hanko]

I experience the same thing once and a while. I think every time you load it, it never acts the same way. If your hearing the rumble, the stoves working properly, you just cant see the flames. its a strange stove guy. With a new load of wood, a good hot bed of coals, and temps around 500, sounds like it working good

 

[Hanko]

After I posted to your question this morning, I did exactly what you did. Id put 3 very small splits left the damper open, I let them get cranking, stove top around 550. I added 3 more bigger ones and closed the damper (neverburn) and WOOSH, no flames. I sat there and watched and after about 5 minutes I noticed some secondary flames. Temps still aound 500 to 550. Weird Stove. Mines on its 5 th year in my shop. I have an outside air source for combustion.

H

 

[mikepinto65]

"Its a strange stove guy"
LOL the best line i've read in awhile. Exactly how I felt when I had the Vigilant.

 

[Troutchaser]

I sometimes see spikes in flue temps when things start outgassing big time. All without anything visible going on in the box. Sometimes a split crumbles and "farts" out a good deal of gas. If all of your splits were seeing a lot of the heat of those coals, you maybe had a big time sudden outgassing and big time burn going on in that combuster. Just a hunch.
Maybe stack the splits and put larger ones on top.

 

[Slow1]

Strange stove indeed - more like "strange technology" - referencing the everburn approach. It is that variability an unpredictability that bothered me enough to get rid of my Encore NC. They can burn well I know (did it sometimes myself) but I was unable to predict when it would get a mind of its own and do who knows what (generally involving high temps in the back of the stove and stove pipe, lowered temps in the stove). My opinion is that stoves should be designed such that one can reasonably know what to expect out of any given load once the controls are set.

 

[tobaccogrower]

well, figured it out last night.

my rutland temp guage is busted! it reads 150-200* above what my infared thermo reads!! i have no idea how long its been busted for. after cleaning the stove last night and starting fresh i had the same no fire experiance with great everburn happen. no heat from stove or pipe though. infared quickly settled my nerves. i actually opened the air control hlf way and stove cruised nicely right at 550 stove top/ 450 pipe. wonder how bad my chimneys crudded up from always running stove so low?

 

[tobaccogrower]

anyone out there ever get a scare from a poor temp guage?

 

[branchburner]

I can be a poor temp gauge, and I do scare myself sometimes. (More than the stove scares me.)

But I feel like I now know my stove well enough that if my thermometer was off like 200F I would know something was up. If it was off 50F or even 100F maybe I'd never know, but wouldn't care, either.

 

[certified106]

The majority of the time once you know your stove I think a temperature gauge is overrated as many times it doesn't tell the whole story. Case and point, when I have a really good bed of coals the stove is shut down tight and only about 250° on the cat gauge I know that if I load up wood and let it char quickly the cat gauge will barely budge above the 300° mark. However, I now from experience that if I shut it down the cat will almost instantly light off just from residual heat in the stove which means I am not losing heat up the chimney to unnecessarily heat the cat to 500°. All in all temperature gauges are an ok way to make general assumptions about a stove but only time and experience are what gives you efficiency in running your stove.

 

[certified106]

The majority of the time once you know your stove I think a temperature gauge is overrated as many times it doesn't tell the whole story. Case and point, when I have a really good bed of coals the stove is shut down tight and only about 250° on the cat gauge I know that if I load up wood and let it char quickly the cat gauge will barely budge above the 300° mark. However, I know from experience that if I shut it down the cat will almost instantly light off just from residual heat in the stove which means I am not losing heat up the chimney to unnecessarily heat the cat to 500°. All in all temperature gauges are an ok way to make general assumptions about a stove but only time and experience are what gives you efficiency in running your stove.

Edit: Sorry for the double the computer is acting weird