Did I Damage My Liner?

[linuxrunner]

We installed a new non insulated SS chimney liner this season and a few nights ago we had our wood stove going and i put in a piece that was specifically cut to just barley fit inside the stove, it was the center of a huge 3ft knot from a pine tree. was VERY dense and full of pitch some pockets as big as my fist.

about 45 seconds after i put the piece in we starting getting a pretty strong roar/rumble and i shut all the vents on the stove. it was very out out of control within about 60 seconds the stove liner and pipe started to turn red/orange and at that point i started squirting water on the logs inside and it pretty quickly went out.

My wife ran outside during this and saw a shower of sparks coming from the top of the chimney/liner.

I am now looking at the liner and am wondering if we may have damaged it getting it that hot?
It seems to have an iridescent color at the bottom where the liner connects to the stove pipe now.

It's pretty clear that i very much over fired the stove, but the sparks and roar seemed to indicate a chimney fire which is strange because this is only like the 5th or 6th fire we have had with this new pipe/liner so i don't see how we could have had any buildup yet.

 

[Nick Mystic]

linuxrunner,
I had a somewhat similar experience with my stove last winter. First, let me say I know how frightening a situation like that can be. As to lowering the stove temperature and/or roaring fire it is not a good idea to throw water into the stove or insert. The steam produced can cause serious injuries. It is better to open the stove/insert door wide open and let cool air flood the firebox. It seems counter-intuitive to feed more air to a roaring fire, but it works. The theory is the cool room air cools the extreme heat out of the stove and flue so that when you shut the doors after it looks like the fire is diminishing it will diminish even further with the stove door shut again and the primary air shut all the way down.

As to possible damage by the current event: I believe the rainbow like effect you see on our SS liner is a sign that the liner reached a very hot temperature, but it's not necessarily an indication that any actual damage was done to the connector or pipe/liner. I think just about all stoves and inserts with SS liners show some of this effect after a year or two of burning.

In my case I had just lit a fire in a relatively cold stove and got a huge flame up from N/S loading. The stove wasn't even up to 250F when the connector and SS liner started glowing orange! Your situation sounds a bit different in that you already had a fire established and your stove was already hot when you had your flare up. Do you know how hot the stove got? That would be more likely where you might have gotten some damage if some part of the stove got too hot during this time and produced some warpage. Or course, it's probably prudent to get an expert, like a licensed chimney sweep to check things out if you don't think you have enough expertise to make such an inspection.

As to the shower of sparks shooting out of your liner, I can believe that can happen during such an event even in a relatively clean flue as you describe yours as being. That much extreme heat exiting the stove through the flue has a very powerful draft. And the very high heat, as reflected in your glowing liner, could ignite even the small amount of soot and ash in your flue and convert it to sparks. Good luck and I hope everything checks out okay.