Hearthstone Craftsbury Geeks?

[rjm967]

I'm a new Craftsbury owner looking for any advice from seasoned geeks out there. We've installed a new Craftsbury in the living room of our three-story, 1600 sq-ft, 1918 house in Pittsburgh. The stove sits just in front of the original fireplace area that was originally used for coal or gas. We demo'd the decrepit masonry chimney to the roofline and blocked the rest and punched a hole through the wall to run a couple feet of stove pipe from the rear exit out to a 90-degree chimney base, and then about 21 feet of exterior chimney. All Selkirk Supervent 6" installed to code. We're hoping to So far I'm happy with the install and draft and just have some fine-tuning questions.
1. Burning observations/advice. Is there a pronounced direction of burn, like front to back? Are there dead spots to avoid or definitely leave clear for airflow?
2. Loading advice. Seems like leaving ample space clear in the front helps air flow, but then how to maximize load?
3. Ideal split size. I was orginally assuming 16" loaded horizontally, but now I'm wondering if smaller lengths of 9-12", loaded straight in, might better use the space when trying to load up for the night. (I got a load of wood that was frustratingly just too long for the firebox, so took a chainsaw to it, leaving me with a pile of short splits that would be good for this.)
4. Fine tuning the air intake lever. The instruction manual says the difference between closed/"Low" ("not advisable") and "Medium Low" ("typical setting") is "a little less than 1/4 inch." Any insights on this? I can feel a free play of *maybe* a 1/4 inch between the hard-stop closed position and where some friction starts. Would that be the "Medium Low typical setting"? And then sliding further with friction is heading toward Medium? Or should I be starting that 1/4 inch when I start feeling the friction?
5. Best way and interval to remove ash while still in use.
6. Best way to keep glass clean.
7. Any other tips and tricks?
Thanks!

 

[Todd]

Many people with E/W loading stoves find loading shorter splits straight in a better option.

A thermometer on your exhaust pipe may help you knowing when to turn down your air at the right time. It looks like it may be a bit difficult to read with your install but worth a shot. Maybe a digital thermocouple thermometer from Auber?

 

[Egbert Souse']

First, congrats on the stove! I see you also went with the Basil Green which I love endlessly. I had my Craftsbury installed in January '25. I'm still dialing in settings that work for me. I will admit, my wood is not the highest quality so some of my techniques are to compensate for that. I'm about 18 months away from burning my 3 cords of good Oak but I digress.

The picture of your fire looks good! Glass is clean and I bet it's throwing off some good heat. You may want to look into a digital wired probe style flue thermometer as you won't be able to use the traditional dial style going into that chimney. I put a flue thermometer in before this burning season and I wish I'd done it earlier.

I have maybe 5 ft of double wall chimney pipe going into maybe 24ft of Class A outside. So my situation doesn't look too different from yours aside from mine being a top exhaust. If I load the stove full it will run away easily. I find it difficult to bank coals and get a slow traveling burn with the shape and size of the firebox. Perhaps with slightly more dense, dry wood and larger splits you'll have more luck.

As far as air control goes, I tend to use the ash lip as a reference point for the air control. I find that about a fingers width out past the ash lip is the best practice for me with my current wood situation. My soapstone walls tend to blacken up while I'm getting the stove going but settling into that air setting once established my glass and soapstones are fully clean by the time the stove is up to temp.

I wouldn't try to pull any ash out while the stove is hot. You'll be getting rid of your coal bed while having ash fly around your house. Ask me how I know 😂. The primary air enters the stove through that doghouse bump out by the door. With some coals and ash built up to insulate the coals from cooling off too much, I find that I can load just as much wood with the new flat "floor" of the coal bed up to the level of that doghouse.

Hope this helps.


EDIT: I find that if you get this stove nice and hot, between the soapstone and cast iron, it tends to stay hot. I like to preheat my chimney with a propane torch for at least 90 seconds or I find it difficult to get things going as I have a lot of chimney to warm up. I also highly recommend both the blower kit and the outside air kit. They have helped me tremendously.

 

[begreen]

Loading the stove N/S will allow it to be more fully loaded without worry about wood rolling up against the glass. It also allows air to more freely flow from the front airwash to the back.

Instrumentation helps guide one with the burn stages. The air control operation is not linear. A fire starting up needs much more air than a fire that is burning strongly. With that tall chimney, once it is fully warmed up and the fire is burning well, the air control may need to be set to as low as it can go.

 

[Egbert Souse']

I just tried starting a fire with some 9" sleepers laid 4 wide on the stove floor that I cut from some 18" splits which otherwise would be too long for my stove. Worked quite well. I say cut up as many as you can and try loading N/S. I'm curious to hear how it would work for a full burn cycle.

 

[rjm967]

Checking back in with some experience and data to report now. On the whole, I'm a bit disappointed and puzzled. The big issue is that the Craftsbury is not producing enough heat for us. But maybe we are just being too greedy?

• Loading short 6-8" splits N/S works really well. I would use this method every night if I could because it is the easiest way to max out the space while still allowing for airflow along the back wall and in the front and not have to worry about wood collapsing over top of the air intake and against the glass overnight. It is also the ideal build for high-temp fires because it allows air to flow the way the stove is built to channel it. The only downsides are that it requires more frequent tending if running high-temp stove and it doesn't look as nice as larger logs (in my opinion).
• The hottest I have ever gotten the stove (using IR thermometer on the top plate) is about 650. Most of the time when I am trying to run it at the hottest possible, it is topping out around 550. That is in bypass mode. Once I engage the catalyst, the exterior temp drops by about 100 degrees, as we would expect.
• The real problem is that I can run the stove at that 450-550 top range for only 2-3 hours before the coals build up so much that they occupy half of the firebox. At this point, it is difficult to load new wood without coals spilling out, and you can only load two small splits. With only two splits burning, the max temp of the stove goes down to about 400. And then as the deep coal bed loses some of its energy, the max stove temp goes down to about 350. So for much of the day, we can only get 350-400 out of the stove--unless we take the drastic course of action to shovel a bunch of live coals out of the firebox to make room for more logs.
• We are burning mixed hardwoods, all under 20% moisture, about half under 15%. A lot of it is oak, which is absolutely the worst for coaling, but it's still a big problem even softer woods like cherry.

I'm throwing around temperature numbers, but the real issue is that my family is cold in the living room that this stove should be heating. Are my expectations just too high? Should I be thinking of this stove more like a three-season decorative conversation piece, not the hearth that is going to keep my drafty family room toasty through this very cold Pittsburgh winter?

I'm very new to this whole undertaking of heating with wood. So I don't even know what I don't know. Should I be tinkering with the fires I'm building? My firewood? Or should I be trying to troubleshoot the install? Any advice most appreciated.

 

[bigealta]

That's a 1.3 cubic ft firebox correct?
That would be a small stove. It's not going to cook anyone out of your room much less the rest of your 1900 sq ft house.

That said it should be a decent supplemental heater. You will definitely have to run it hard in these frigid temps to get some good heat out of it.

Are you burning fires all day/ all night?

My jotul f400 has a 1.9 cubic ft box, and i'm burning prime 3 and 4 year old locust and oak in a smaller cape house in NJ.
At these temps (low teens at night, low 20's during the day) my stove can just barely heat the house burning almost 24/7.

At 32F at night and daytime high 30's or low 40's, my stove can easily heat the house without having to burn 24/7.

So yes the Craftsbury stove is to small for these very cold temps, but it will be nice for more moderate temps.

 

[begreen]

By the looks of things, you are doing well. It's a small stove and an E/W loader by design, which reduces the usable capacity of the firebox. It's good for a room or area heater, but not for whole house.

 

[Todd]

Checking back in with some experience and data to report now. On the whole, I'm a bit disappointed and puzzled. The big issue is that the Craftsbury is not producing enough heat for us. But maybe we are just being too greedy?

• Loading short 6-8" splits N/S works really well. I would use this method every night if I could because it is the easiest way to max out the space while still allowing for airflow along the back wall and in the front and not have to worry about wood collapsing over top of the air intake and against the glass overnight. It is also the ideal build for high-temp fires because it allows air to flow the way the stove is built to channel it. The only downsides are that it requires more frequent tending if running high-temp stove and it doesn't look as nice as larger logs (in my opinion).
• The hottest I have ever gotten the stove (using IR thermometer on the top plate) is about 650. Most of the time when I am trying to run it at the hottest possible, it is topping out around 550. That is in bypass mode. Once I engage the catalyst, the exterior temp drops by about 100 degrees, as we would expect.
• The real problem is that I can run the stove at that 450-550 top range for only 2-3 hours before the coals build up so much that they occupy half of the firebox. At this point, it is difficult to load new wood without coals spilling out, and you can only load two small splits. With only two splits burning, the max temp of the stove goes down to about 400. And then as the deep coal bed loses some of its energy, the max stove temp goes down to about 350. So for much of the day, we can only get 350-400 out of the stove--unless we take the drastic course of action to shovel a bunch of live coals out of the firebox to make room for more logs.
• We are burning mixed hardwoods, all under 20% moisture, about half under 15%. A lot of it is oak, which is absolutely the worst for coaling, but it's still a big problem even softer woods like cherry.

I'm throwing around temperature numbers, but the real issue is that my family is cold in the living room that this stove should be heating. Are my expectations just too high? Should I be thinking of this stove more like a three-season decorative conversation piece, not the hearth that is going to keep my drafty family room toasty through this very cold Pittsburgh winter?

I'm very new to this whole undertaking of heating with wood. So I don't even know what I don't know. Should I be tinkering with the fires I'm building? My firewood? Or should I be trying to troubleshoot the install? Any advice most appreciated.

Do you rake the coals forward before reloading? This helps burn them down. I think you could also burn a little hotter. 450-550 isn’t really that hot for a cast iron stove unless that is what your manual says? Sometimes with colder temps it’s better to burn smaller loads hot to keep those stove top temps up and reduce coaling. Another thing to try is increasing the air towards the end of the burn.

 

[rjm967]

That's a 1.3 cubic ft firebox correct?
That would be a small stove. It's not going to cook anyone out of your room much less the rest of your 1900 sq ft house.

That said it should be a decent supplemental heater. You will definitely have to run it hard in these frigid temps to get some good heat out of it.

Are you burning fires all day/ all night?

My jotul f400 has a 1.9 cubic ft box, and i'm burning prime 3 and 4 year old locust and oak in a smaller cape house in NJ.
At these temps (low teens at night, low 20's during the day) my stove can just barely heat the house burning almost 24/7.

At 32F at night and daytime high 30's or low 40's, my stove can easily heat the house without having to burn 24/7.

So yes the Craftsbury stove is to small for these very cold temps, but it will be nice for more moderate temps.

Yes, it’s 1.3, very small. We do burn all day; most days there is somebody home at all times and whoever is home is usually in the living room with the wood stove if they are not in the kitchen.Any summer dreams of heating the whole 1600 foot house with it quickly faded once we actually started using it in late autumn. By early winter, though, it seemed realistic that it would provide enough heat to draw the family into the living room and possibly circulate through the rest of the small downstairs if we ran fans, if we could just figure out how to make it burn hotter. Now that it has gotten truly cold and we have a steady supply of very good Firewood and feel like we understand how the stove works, we are losing hope even of making the living room cozy without running the furnace. At night time, we just run a single load on low so that we will have a good bed of coals to start the fire quickly in the morning. We don’t expect to get any significant heat out of it through the night.

Yours is a very helpful perspective. How big is the house you are heating with your Jotul and what kind of layout are you heating? How hot does your stove run on the exterior when you are trying to keep up during really cold days and nights?

 

[rjm967]

Do you rake the coals forward before reloading? This helps burn them down. I think you could also burn a little hotter. 450-550 isn’t really that hot for a cast iron stove unless that is what your manual says? Sometimes with colder temps it’s better to burn smaller loads hot to keep those stove top temps up and reduce coaling. Another thing to try is increasing the air towards the end of the burn.

I wish I could rake the coals forward, but it is so full that there is no place to rake them. They are already spilling out the front. I do need to experiment some more with burning smaller loads because I have noticed that they can produce some surprising, high temps and maybe maybe that is a pathway to some breakthroughs. I can’t increase the air towards the end of the burn because the air is always fully open just to get the temperatures that I have. It’s as if they shipped the stove with some kind of child proof lock and I can’t unlock the adult version.

 

[bigealta]

You have the air control fully open? I don't know your stove but that is usually letting to much air thru and can actually cool down the stove. Did you try closing the draft down to 1/2 or 1/4 open after it starts burning well?

 

[bigealta]

Yes definitely try smaller loads loosely stacked.

How are you measuring your moisture content? Because it feels as though it may be pretty dry but not really dry.

Very well seasoned wood like 3 or 4 year seasoned oak, locust etc will increase heat output. Same with dry softwoods like pine. It burns up fast, but can kick out a lot if heat for a short amount of time.

 

[bigealta]

Yes, it’s 1.3, very small. We do burn all day; most days there is somebody home at all times and whoever is home is usually in the living room with the wood stove if they are not in the kitchen.Any summer dreams of heating the whole 1600 foot house with it quickly faded once we actually started using it in late autumn. By early winter, though, it seemed realistic that it would provide enough heat to draw the family into the living room and possibly circulate through the rest of the small downstairs if we ran fans, if we could just figure out how to make it burn hotter. Now that it has gotten truly cold and we have a steady supply of very good Firewood and feel like we understand how the stove works, we are losing hope even of making the living room cozy without running the furnace. At night time, we just run a single load on low so that we will have a good bed of coals to start the fire quickly in the morning. We don’t expect to get any significant heat out of it through the night.

Yours is a very helpful perspective. How big is the house you are heating with your Jotul and what kind of layout are you heating? How hot does your stove run on the exterior when you are trying to keep up during really cold days and nights?

I'm basically heating 950 sq ft. in an uninsulated block cape style house with only pine paneling and the block itself as insulation. The upstairs (about 800 sq ft.) has a door at the bottom of the stairway that i keep closed so most of the heat stays downstairs. The upstairs floors are warm as i have beamed ceilings on the 1st floor with basically exposed wood flooring from the upstairs as the ceiling downstairs. Also the center large brick fireplace and chimney is exposed both downstairs and upstairs and that does a good job of keeping the upstairs 65F -68F even with the stairs door closed and in these frigid temps.

My stovetop varies but can run 500F - 650F or even a bit higher. I'm pretty much burning 24/7 when it's this cold.

The stove room (about 12x 16) only has 1 doorway and it cooks in here. Easily 80F and higher while the rest of the house can be 64-70 range.

I like it like that. i really only sometimes run 1 small 8" floor fan blowing the air around the stove as it partly sits in a large fireplace. If it does get too hot in the stove room, i'll put a 2nd small floor fan in the other room to help push cold floor air into the stove room.

 

[bigealta]

Oh yeah i see your window is open. That's obviously not helping keep the heat in. but i'm sure you know that.

 

[rjm967]

I have not tried closing the air down to 1/2 or a quarter once the fire really gets going! That never occurred to me. I will start experimenting with that!

I am measuring moisture with a digital pin moisture meter. I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it seems pretty accurate in that when I put on wood that is under 15% it takes off like crazy and if I accidentally put something on over 25%, like I was doing early on before I realized I needed to meter more often, it smolders. I’m now at the point where I can usually tell by looking at the wood and feeling how heavy it is whether it is too moist, and in that case, I will double check it with the meter. Even though we have a generally good wood supply now, there are still the occasional pieces that are over 20%.

Haha, yeah, that photo with the window open is from early fall when we were still figuring out how to start a fire without a ton of smoke. Although I’m actually getting a window guy to come look at replacing the downstairs windows because they are really old and seem to let the cold air right through, or however that works. Though it sounds like your house is at least as leaky as ours! We do have a more open stove room with a large passageway to the dining room that is a bit larger than the living room, and a medium passageway to the foyer and stairwell to the upstairs. The dining room room has a normal size doorway that opens onto the small kitchen. We have a ceiling fan in the living room that circulates the stove heat really nicely around the room and then and on warmer days we are able to run a floor fan in the dining room, pushing cooler air across the floor from the dining room into the living room to even out the temperatures across that main downstairs area. (My daughters are often baking something when they are not in school, or we are cooking dinner, so the kitchen tends to stay warm enough when everybody is home.) But once it gets below freezing outside, we just focus on keeping the living room warm, and once it gets to low 20s, that’s when we struggle to keep the living room above 64°. And these days, when its 0-15° outside, the furnace runs most of the time to keep the rest of the house at 58 or 60 and we still struggle to keep the living room at 64.

 

[bigealta]

Ok to properly test your wood you need to bring a few pieces inside and let them warm up for a day. Then you need to split it and immediately test the inside of the fresh split parallel to the grain.

If you are testing the outside of your wood you will most likely be 5-10% off.
So outside 20% would mean it could actually be 25-30%. moisture content.

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[rjm967]

Ok to properly test your wood you need to bring a few pieces inside and let them warm up for a day. Then you need to split it and immediately test the inside of the fresh split parallel to the grain.

If you are testing the outside of your wood you will most likely be 5-10% off.
So outside 20% would mean it could actually be 25-30%. moisture content.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

Good to know. Splitting some larger splits today so will try that. Thanks so much for all the help. Posting a video of concerning creosote leakage from chimney in a separate post.