Draft on a cold chimney?

[Smokegetsinmyeyes]

Just had a PE Summit installed in the basement.
The stove pipe goes through the concrete basement wall into insulated stainless steel chimney pipe along the side of the house, one story high.
The stove pipe goes up about 4 feet, then there is an elbow, then it runs horizontal about 3 -4 feet to the outside. The chimney is close to the lower part of the roof, but extends 2 feet above the tallest part of the roof.
We have found it hard to get fires started, and we know the wood is dry. But, once it's going there is not much smoke at all when the door is opened. I have heard that a cold outside pipe will cause poor draft.
Can anyone explain this? How can we improve the situation?

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Welcome to the forum Smoke.

How about a real simple explanation? In the natural world, heat wants to go up and cold wants to go down. Imagine that in your stove/chimney. Also, it is not uncommon to have drafting problems with a stove in the basement.

Question about the horizontal section. Is it level? Hopefully not. It needs 1/4" rise per foot minimum. We ran ours more like 1/2" rise per foot.

Good luck.

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Cold goes to heat!

 

[thenorth]

heat goes to cold...........................
2nd law of thermodynamics...

john

 

[oconnor]

Smoke

What you have is related to stack effect - your basement is a relative negative pressure area compared to the outside air, and you are trying to overcome that and all the cold air in the flue when you start it up.

Read the link to the Guide to Residential Wood Heating in my signature block - great read for a new burner and covers exactly what you are dealing with.

 

[begreen]

Welcome smoke. Let's see if we can make this work out. Probably the best thing to remedy this situation is to eliminate the exterior horizontal jog. There is already an offset with a 90 in the basement on the connector pipe, then another 90 at the bottom of the exterior pipe, then 2 more 90s in the upper offset. Is that correct? If so, as you have found out, smoke won't go 360 degrees, especially in a cold pipe. You've got to eliminate some of these 90s.

Can you completely eliminate the horiz jog in the exterior pipe? If you can do that and perhaps connect the stove with a 45, then a diagonal connector, then another 45 going into the exterior thimble, it might behave reasonably. The exterior pipe will still need to be adequately tall. For the Summit, that is about 15 feet.

If there are complications, it's best to post a picture or two that illustrate the situation.