Too much Coals???

[RegencyNS]

My Regency F2400 stove seems to be leaving too many coals. I seem to remember getting nice powdery ash before. Now it seems everytime I turn around, the stove is full of coals leaving not much room for new wood. What am I doing wrong?

 

[atvdave]

Riding along. I have very similar problems with my Lopi Freedom Bay. At first I had powdery white ash, now I get a lot of 1/2 burned coals. And yes I do rake the coals up front and try to burn them down more. Some times it works, and some times it don't.

 

[Hogwildz]

Wood is not as dry as you think, reloading too often before previous load is spent, or both.

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Get that draft open sooner!

Once our wood gets close to mostly coals, we open the draft full.

 

[gpcollen1]

I think hog has the cause - now just pile them up and lay one split on top and then cook at about 400 for 1 hour. Should get heat and a coal reduction. Repeat if necessary.

 

[RegencyNS]

Thanks guys... I thought that opening the draft after I got coals would send what heat I had left in the coals, right up the chimney. I'll give that a try. Thanks
One more question....when you guys are running your stove 24/7, how often are you having to clean out the ash/coals?

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Shawn, you will get more heat up the chimney but will still get good heat from the stove and it will burn those coals up nicely. Actually, we do our draft sort of in stages. When the stove is full and the wood charred and burning nicely, we draft way down. On ours (everyone is different here) it is to .25 - .50. When that wood gets about 75% burned, the draft gets opened to about 1.5. When there's nothing but coals and just a little bit of a hunk of wood, the draft gets opened full. It really doesn't take long this way to burn those coals up.

Cleaning out the ashes, of course, depends upon the stove. Ours does not have an ash pan and we clean the ashes out about once every 4th day. Maybe once every 3rd day in the heart of the winter when we're really getting heat. Less in spring and early fall.

We put the ashes outdoors and let them set until the next time we have to clean out. The old ashes then gets dumped into a barrel and the hot ashes get into the ash caddy. In spring, the ashes gets spread onto the vegetable garden and tilled in. It's called poor man's lime. It works, but does not last as long as lime does.