She Keeps Getting Better

[Battenkiller]

I bought a new left andiron and a top load door gasket for my stove a few weeks ago, but it's been too cold to want to let the stove go out to replace them. Last night I had a bit of an inferno going on in there and I just happened to notice I could see a nice orange glow along the right side of the load door. :shut: At bedtime I only partially filled the stove and waited until this morning. I emptied out the remaining coals and ashes and dumped them out in the snow. Then I installed the load door gasket and replaced the andiron while the gasket cement was drying. Did a mid-season cleaning of the back passages as well.

What a difference! I wouldn't think that a leak like that could cool the flue down that much given that it was along the top and the flue gases exit on the bottom right when in downdraft mode. Now that I think about it, that air did nothing to feed the fire, but only added to the excess air in the stove without getting consumed at all. First time I've been able to keep the flue temps at 400ºF while burning in downdraft. When I first got the stove last year, my local VC repair place told me to keep the flue temps between 400º and 650º, but I found this impossible to maintain. Stove is cruising at 700º, flue at 400º, and it has been going like that for several hours on three huge splits of white ash.

Little by little, I am seeing the true potential of this older but elegant design.

 

[BrotherBart]

Good work. Now get busy and pay off those wedding bills and then go get a new stove. ;-)

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Good to hear you fixed it and now should get much better heat from it.

 

[Battenkiller]

Good to hear you fixed it and now should get much better heat from it.

Well, some here would preach to me that the higher flue temps would yield less heat in the room. That would be a real short lecture if we were both standing directly in front of the stove.

I really don't expect any huge improvements in usable heat, just a little more stability and maybe a slightly cleaner burn.... in theory if nothing else. It is still a 2.5 cu.ft. box. I mostly posted this to show that air leaks don't always cause a stove to overfire, sometimes they cause just the opposite. All depends on where on the stove the air is leaking in.

In my case, there is no way that the air from the top of the stove is going to feed the smoke generated at the bottom in any useful manner because the smoke never fills the upper portion of the box while the stove is downdrafting. This is the opposite of stoves that have manifolds or burn tubes (or cat combustors) at the top of the box. With my stove, not only is the air coming in at the top merely cooling the internal temps, it is also lowering the pressure differential, causing the air to come into the primary and secondary air inlets with less force than they would with the stove sealed better. A leak along the bottom of the door gasket OTOH might cause my stove to tend toward overfire because the air would be coming in directly across the coal bed.

It's funny how quickly things can change on a stove. At the beginning of the season, I checked the stove all over with a smoldering incense stick and no smoke came in anywhere. After visually detecting the air leak the other night, I did the same test and the smoke got sucked right into the stove. I guess that old gasket just up and died sometime in the last few months. I never noticed it because the stove still gave great heat. Now, perhaps, it will be a bit better.

 

[BrotherBart]

It sounds like you have it tuned up and humming.

 

[begreen]

Nice to hear that it has settled down. Depending on where they are, air leaks can actually cause a stove to run cooler. I learned that quickly with the F3CB when the top wasn't on quite right. In other areas they can cause a local overfiring, possibly damaging stove components with a blowtorch of flame concentrated in that area.