30nc when to add a pipe damper

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Aranyic

Burning Hunk
Sep 3, 2015
130
Ohio
I've got a 30nc that I have been running for about a month now and I know the stove tends to run a little hot for a lot of people. I'm not sure when it gets to the point where you need to add a pipe damper to slow draft and help control it a little.

I've got about 20 feet of pipe and chimney. This morning it's about 8 degrees out which is the coldest we have had so far. Stove was about 180 when I got up and cleaned some ash out. Loaded it up and closed the door once it caught. By 350 stt I had the primary air closed to the point where half the chrome handle extended beyond the lip. Shut all the way down by 500 with secondaries strong already.

At this point the baseball sized area around the middle of the stove / slant up is all 750 to 775 and pipe probe thermometer is 750-800 also.

Already have magnets on the secondary air cutting each of them off by about 1/3 to try and see how that helped. And it did I think but I'm not sure if it's enough?
 
It did start dropping off some after an hour or after it was lit. Just not sure about pushing 800 on a regular basis during that initial startup for 30 minutes or so?
 
Try making sure the coals are burned down a little more can help as loading on super hot bed of coals makes the wood on a new load off gas too fast..
Try shutting the input air down a little quicker can help.
Try loading larger size splits can help.
Or try this if you load north south rake your hot coals over to one side of the stove so the other side of the stove your loading on just the empty bottom
of the stove, so that way only haalf your load will be sittinng on hot coals thus allowing more control for you of the stove temp.
If you load East West try raking all the hot coals forward and load on the clean bottom no coals in the back of the stove.
You can load on wood ashes and only rake hot coals one way or the other just as long as you can can load half your stove on no hot coals.

You might have to learn to load less wood so the stove is burned down more by the time your needing to load it it again. Learning stove cycles is part of the learning curve. As if your loading every 8 or so hours loading to try and get a 12 hour burn is causing you to have a large very hot bed of coals when you try to reload at 8 hours.

The NC30 is a very nice stove but I use the similar sized Drolet Myriad as it has more control on the input air for reducing the input air.
 
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I believe I'm using beech currently. It's split fairly small as it was some of the first I split about 20 months ago. I'd say it takes about 10-12 piece of it to fill the firebox up currently. As I've started getting more ahead on wood I'm splitting larger for starting fall 2018 burning but it'll take a year or two to get into it. I've also got about 1 ton of eco-bricks left from last year and some large harder woods that are split bigger as the year goes on.
 
Thats pretty small might be your issue try mixing a couple pieces of that larger stuff in as if they are just a little not season the smaller stuff will compensate for that.
 
That is pretty small, when I fill the 30 it is with 6ish pieces. I find it very controllable. If I put 10-12 pieces that filled it, it would be a runaway for sure.
 
750 to 775 and pipe probe thermometer is 750-800 also.

Sounds nice and warm, I try and do this but usually peak out closer to 700. My NC30 is very controllable and I have 19 feet of vertical pipe chimney. Your flue temps sound fine but you should be able to snuff the fire by shutting the air control. My cruise setting, attempting to hold 700 stove temps, puts the tip of the spring totally under the ash lip. Really we should be referencing the operating rod position because some folks like to thread the spring way onto the rod and some like to just barely put it on.

The way you know when you need a pipe damper is by measuring draft. The manual should call out a max draft spec.

If I could not prevent the stove from running up past 700, even with the air control fully shut, then I would be looking at a key damper. I always pack all of my stoves to the gills.
 

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