Holy Smoke batman!

[Slow1]

Ok.. I've been amazed this year with how little smoke my Fireview has put out. I've never really seen any from the pipe and figured it must be one lean mean clean machine. For whatever silly reason I decided to take a look today when it was 11* outside to see what it looked like during a re-load. Now, mind you this may well have been an unusual re-load but wow! Talk about some major smoke pouring out of the chimney! It could well be that the cold weather was making the steam exaggerate things quite a bit, but I couldn't believe the volume of smoke spilling out of there. I came back into the house and engaged the cat, then took another look - within 30 seconds or so it was down to just a small bit of what I assume to be steam flowing out and dissipating a couple feet from the cap.

Now what made this reload a bit unusual is that it was a very packed stove that was quite hot to begin with. I had loaded and burned hot already once (first load) and was loading before heading to work so I put the largest pieces I could and filled in as much as possible. The load was roaring before I could finish filling the box. I wanted to wait 10 minutes before engaging the cat so I had turned air down to less than 2, maybe 1.5 range so perhaps that was generating the excess smoke. Once I engaged the cat it was glowing like mad and the temps went up very fast too...

So - I plan to keep an eye on the smoke when I reload. I don't want to me smoking out the neighborhood even for 10 minutes on reloads. Anyone have any general suggestions on how to minimize smoke during this time?

 

[mellow]

Cat disengaged = Non EPA stove

Other than burning hot while the cat is disengaged not much you can do to curb the smoke, all secondary burning stoves will smoke at some point during the burn cycle.

 

[daveswoodhauler]

I think some smoke when reloading is pretty normal, and I don't think there is much you can do about it.
If you are throwing in split #589 ...its going to have some surface moisure on it and should smoke a lille bit. (Seems like when I reload, I get about 5 minutes of smokier stuff coming out my chimney, then its basically a clean burn)
If it were smoking for a good 15-20 minutes after you reload, I would be more curious.
Good luck

 

[Slow1]

Sort of hard to burn hot while it is just starting the load - although it was rather hot in the box to begin with.

It was only smoking for 5-10 minutes. Full box was charred so I engaged the cat (surface temp was 350 or so before I reloaded so not really a good indicator of 'ready' in any case). I just was surprised at the volume of smoke. I should have taken a picture of it - the sort of smoke that gives burners a bad name you know? ICK! I hate to think that I'm doing this at all even for short periods of the day as my neighbors would likely only remember those few 10 minute bursts of smoke and think I'm stinking up the whole neighborhood all the time. At least I only load 3-4 times a day.

 

[Lanningjw]

If your cat is in the engaged, why would you by-pass the load? With the blaze king cat which is made by the same company as yours, you can add wood anytime w/o bypass mode (waiting for the wood to char up) if the cats up to temp. Seems like a waste of wood allowing it to bypass for 10 minutes and losing and that energy in the fist part of the burn cycle.

I do let it by-pass if the cat is not up to temp, I also do a high burn once a day to clean things up.

Why waste wood and smoke out the guy next door?

 

[Backwoods Savage]

The reason for that Lanning is because all wood has some moisture in it. Moisture is the big enemy of cats. Also, the 10-15 minute is a blanket because manufacturers have no way of knowing how wet or dry your wood is and we all know very well that new wood burners (at least 99% of them) do not have good dry wood. Therefore, they need to evaporate the moisture and send that out the flue rather than running it through the cat. If not, you will be replacing the cat every year or more often.

 

[stoveguy2esw]

The reason for that Lanning is because all wood has some moisture in it. Moisture is the big enemy of cats. Also, the 10-15 minute is a blanket because manufacturers have no way of knowing how wet or dry your wood is and we all know very well that new wood burners (at least 99% of them) do not have good dry wood. Therefore, they need to evaporate the moisture and send that out the flue rather than running it through the cat. If not, you will be replacing the cat every year or more often.

absolutely correct savage,

adding wet wood to a hot fire creates steam which if forced through the cat will cause thermal shock (kinda like using hot water to melt a frost off your windshield (though in reverse the same principle applies) rapid temp change can literally shatter a cat. this happenig 1 time will not make it crumble completely and just fall out, but repeatedly can do just that. bypassing teh cat protects it from this thermal shock and in some cases where a cat stove may not draft as easy also allows loading with less smokeback during reloads.