BrotherBart said:
You think you are being ignored because 15% wood is just fine in a cat or tube re-burn stove. Ideal in fact. And nobody wants to get into a long argument about it. Ya just have to see it in action.
Hey, I don't really care if I'm ignored. Not complaining, just making note. Folks can be resistant to facts, especially when they fly in the face of apparent observation. It's much easier to go along with the crowd, but that's just not my style when I know things to be different. I like BG's sig line, it says it all.
I know the new stoves with reburn tubes, and beams, and cats, and high tech insulation in odd places, etc. can handle lots of smoke, but they can easily be overwhelmed when a ton of bone dry splits are loaded on top of a big bed of coals,
most particularly when the wood is split real small. I have friends with cat stoves and my landlord has a big QF, so I know what these things burn like. Plus, I've seen about 18 million YouTube vids showing those fabulous secondaries. Doesn't matter, because if you don't burn those things right they can be way smokier than a "smoke dragon" full of wet wood burned properly. And just because you have 30 years experience burning wood and can figure things out pretty fast, that doesn't necessarily hold true for new burners. All winter long I've been reading about folks with new stoves gunking up their flues, and all I ever see is advice to try burning a load of supermarket "kiln-dried" wood split real small. Then they panic about overfiring their $3000 investment, so they shut the air way down and pray. No wonder they are having problems.
And as long as that pipe is hot all the crap in the world could go up it anyway and it ain't gonna stick if there isn't a bunch of moisture going up with it to cool the pipe
Well, to attempt to dispel another myth, I'll repeat this for the umpteenth time so you can ignore it again: You absolutely cannot avoid lots of moisture going up the flue. Even with a load of 0% MC, oven-dried wood, burning each pound of it to completion creates
well over half a pound of water (about .54 pounds to be precise) as a by-product of combustion itself, and almost all of that water is released into the flue at the beginning of the burn when hydrocarbon gases (read that as "smoke" for these purposes) are being burned off. Another good reason to burn real hot right after reloads. What's so special about combustion water compared to water in the wood? Both leave the stove at temps well above the condensation point. Does the chimney somehow magically select for water molecules from the wood and give a free pass to the combustion water, which is twice as much as the water contained in wood at 27% MC?
After that initial burn off is done and coaling has started, nearly all of the flue gases are composed of carbon dioxide since there are no longer any hydrogen molecules left in the charcoal (basically pure carbon) to form water. At that point, an old airtight stove will burn better and give off more heat because air flows more freely through them than it does on a stove with all the contraptions stuck to it, and there is no fancy insulation to get in the way of heat transfer.
Anyway, no one is saying that wood at 15% MC won't burn well at in an EPA stove, but there is much evidence that wood below that is not ideal and too low (12%) can be bad if too much is loaded onto a nice bed of coals. When I tossed about 5 pounds of oven-dried (that's 0% MC) chunks into my stove after my moisture content experiment, they smoked like hell for about ten minutes, then they turned right into charcoal and burned fine. Could a set of reburn tubes handle that much smoke? Prolly. Can they handle 50 pounds of smallish kiln-dried splits with the air turned all the way down? Try it and tell me.
