Do you think your combustor plugged quickly (over days/weeks), or was your exhaust side deposits the result of 3+years of burning?
That’s a tough call. It would seem to clog (at least on the inlet face) after just one or two days of burning at wide-open throttle, but would be fine thru weeks of consecutive 12-hour burns. I also noticed that vacuuming the face was never enough to clear it, I’d also have to blow it clean with compressed air. This makes me think it may have been clogging quickly on the back side, but since I hadn’t pulled it in my 2.5 years of burning it... who knows?
I'm curious if aggressive bypass closing leads to this? I never wait for the indicator to hit active, I have a pretty good feel for when it will take off and it usually way before the needle is in the active zone.
Aggressive bypass closer, here. In my case, the tall chimney made it mandatory. If I waited for the cat needle to read active before closing the bypass, I’d almost surely melt my bypass retainers, if not my stovepipe.
Sound like an annual combustor pull and gasket replacement might not be a bad thing (at least for those of us with steel cats).
I’m hoping BKVP chimes in on this, after having a chance to look into it, but I suspect that might be the direction it’s headed. That doesn’t really bother me, it’s good maintenance, but we need to find a better source for interam gasket. I got ripped $15 for shipping on just a few feet of the stuff. Hello, Amazon?
Also, was your clog on your 24hr or 12hr load stove? Or did you pull both cats?
This was on the 12 hour stove, which is on the tall chimney. I only ever vacuumed / blown clean the other one (24 hour / short chimney) on one occasion, and that’s just because I already had the gear in the house to do the other stove, I can’t remember if it even needed it.
Opening it up occasionally might be enough to burn out the deposits before they become thick enough to require a manual cleaning.
There may be more than one thing at work, here. Cloggage would only seem to happen after an extended high burn (like ripping a full load or two on high). But of course, I had only observed the front-side cloggage, it’s hard to guess as to how this back-side cloggage relates. However, I’d be surprised if it could be “burned off”, it’d have surely burned off it it were possible, on some of my high burns.
This theory suggests that the Woodstock hybrid burn may give a higher dynamic range. Use a smaller cat, coupled with secondary burn for high outputs. Too bad they don't have good thermostatic control over combustion air.
I’ve never looked at the Woodstock hybrids, but I have measured and compared Woodstock cat stoves to the BK’s, and their combustors are sized almost identically, per firebox volume.
We have it here but I don't burn much. It is "poppy" and I thought that would stir up more ash dust in the box and clog my screen/cat faster. Plus it doesn't burn all that long..
