Hello Hearth!
My wife and I have been enjoying a new Mansfield 8013 Hyrbid stove through the later part of last burning season and the beginning of this burning season as one of the centerpieces of our new custom home in Black Forest Colorado.
We have been very happy with the stove. I'll probably do a more thorough review with photos and such some day, but for now I have a question about wood, specifically, those occasional pieces that are hiding a ton of filthy black smoke that leaves residue all over the interior of the stove and plugs up the cats!
We burn almost exclusively ponderosa, most of which has been split and stacked for many years, downed from trees killed in the forest fire we had almost a decade ago here. Problem is... when a tree is killed by a forest fire, the standing trunk does weird things. The "pitch" of the tree all seems to drain back down into the lower parts of the tree, so the bits from the top, dry out nice and have a nice "hollow" ring to them. Those burn clean. The bits from the middle have a bit more pitch in them, but they usually burn pretty clean too as long as they are given enough air and make a ton of heat. The lower parts of the tree, especially in knotty sections, can sometimes be so heavy with pitchy/resin, often "hiding" in the wood, that it completely plugs up the cat and coats the entire inside of the stove with black sooty stuff. The chunks of wood that are the really bad offenders are pretty rare, but we've run across a few now that are a mess! When one of these logs is burning, you can watch it just spewing streams of heavy black sooty smoke. It reminds me of the black smoke that comes from burning plastics, which often needs much hotter fire and a lot more air to burn off cleanly than would be appropriate for a wood stove. (smelting temps will burn this stuff off pretty clean...)
I usually try to set aside pieces that I expect are going to be troublesome, to burn mixed with other "cleaner" logs on top of a bed of hot coals in a lighter load, with the air intake running more open, so that it can burn off all that black soot and make useful heat, but sometimes one of these buggers sneaks into the stove without proper preparation or situation to deal with it or is just so heavy with resin that it doesn't matter, the result is an unexpectedly plugged cat, and a bit of smoke spewing out between some of the top-stones on the stove (as I understand, these aren't cemented, rather, just sitting on a grid up there, so the positive pressure from the now plugged exhaust stove forces gases out between the stones?) The smell of that black nasty smoke in the house is sometimes our first clue that things have gone pear shaped. At that point I'll bypass the cat and turn up the air to let it finish out the dirty burn, but the cats at that point are totally plugged.
It's not too hard to "fix." I just wait for the coals to burn down, prop up the telescoping section of stove pipe, and lift out brick-shaped cat sections and vacuum all the soot out of them, as well as the soot on the walls of the stove, secondary inlets, top of the baffle and bypass.
Have you had similar experiences burning resin-rich woods? How do you contend with this particular challenge? Any tips or tricks you have learned along the way to minimize the negative impacts from these chunks of nasty wood? Any way to recover without having to wait for the stove to cool down and clean it out manually? Do you have a trick to spotting and separating these pieces of wood? At the end of the day this is just one of the hazards of burning junk wood, but I have probably 20 cords piled up here that I intend to use over the next many years... Hopefully I get better at it!
Thanks!
-Eric
My wife and I have been enjoying a new Mansfield 8013 Hyrbid stove through the later part of last burning season and the beginning of this burning season as one of the centerpieces of our new custom home in Black Forest Colorado.
We have been very happy with the stove. I'll probably do a more thorough review with photos and such some day, but for now I have a question about wood, specifically, those occasional pieces that are hiding a ton of filthy black smoke that leaves residue all over the interior of the stove and plugs up the cats!
We burn almost exclusively ponderosa, most of which has been split and stacked for many years, downed from trees killed in the forest fire we had almost a decade ago here. Problem is... when a tree is killed by a forest fire, the standing trunk does weird things. The "pitch" of the tree all seems to drain back down into the lower parts of the tree, so the bits from the top, dry out nice and have a nice "hollow" ring to them. Those burn clean. The bits from the middle have a bit more pitch in them, but they usually burn pretty clean too as long as they are given enough air and make a ton of heat. The lower parts of the tree, especially in knotty sections, can sometimes be so heavy with pitchy/resin, often "hiding" in the wood, that it completely plugs up the cat and coats the entire inside of the stove with black sooty stuff. The chunks of wood that are the really bad offenders are pretty rare, but we've run across a few now that are a mess! When one of these logs is burning, you can watch it just spewing streams of heavy black sooty smoke. It reminds me of the black smoke that comes from burning plastics, which often needs much hotter fire and a lot more air to burn off cleanly than would be appropriate for a wood stove. (smelting temps will burn this stuff off pretty clean...)
I usually try to set aside pieces that I expect are going to be troublesome, to burn mixed with other "cleaner" logs on top of a bed of hot coals in a lighter load, with the air intake running more open, so that it can burn off all that black soot and make useful heat, but sometimes one of these buggers sneaks into the stove without proper preparation or situation to deal with it or is just so heavy with resin that it doesn't matter, the result is an unexpectedly plugged cat, and a bit of smoke spewing out between some of the top-stones on the stove (as I understand, these aren't cemented, rather, just sitting on a grid up there, so the positive pressure from the now plugged exhaust stove forces gases out between the stones?) The smell of that black nasty smoke in the house is sometimes our first clue that things have gone pear shaped. At that point I'll bypass the cat and turn up the air to let it finish out the dirty burn, but the cats at that point are totally plugged.
It's not too hard to "fix." I just wait for the coals to burn down, prop up the telescoping section of stove pipe, and lift out brick-shaped cat sections and vacuum all the soot out of them, as well as the soot on the walls of the stove, secondary inlets, top of the baffle and bypass.
Have you had similar experiences burning resin-rich woods? How do you contend with this particular challenge? Any tips or tricks you have learned along the way to minimize the negative impacts from these chunks of nasty wood? Any way to recover without having to wait for the stove to cool down and clean it out manually? Do you have a trick to spotting and separating these pieces of wood? At the end of the day this is just one of the hazards of burning junk wood, but I have probably 20 cords piled up here that I intend to use over the next many years... Hopefully I get better at it!
Thanks!
-Eric
