This is our third year with the Dauntless. I can’t say that I love the stove, but I was doing decently well with it. As a ballpark estimate, we have had somewhere between 80 to 120 fires in it. We have had it professionally installed and, after each season, had the chimney professionally cleaned.
I think we are done with this stove, though, after what I went through tonight.
We started a fire around lunchtime. The temperature today was really cold. It was around 11 degrees when I went walking very briefly around 5:30.
About 6:45, I reloaded the stove with a mixture of maple and oak, all seasoned two years. The coal bed was thick. The flames started quickly under the wood that I had loaded (I usually put a two smaller pieces on the bottom because the doors get really smoked up if I don't).
After about ten minutes, I closed the bypass damper. I do not remember the stove top temperature, but I do remember that the probe was in the middle of the damper range.
The damper made a sound like a blowtorch, which it has done multiple times in the past. I had been planning to head into the basement to clean, but the sound continued, which was abnormal. I thought something might be wrong and decided to stay upstairs instead. When I noticed that the flames were dying on and off, I opened the bypass damper.
Flames were instantly everywhere inside the firebox. I’m used to a certain amount of flame, but this was more than normal. This concerned me, so I dialed the air back. Shortly after—and I don’t know the exact amount of time, but it seemed like only a few minutes—the inside of the double-wall stove pipe started to turn orange. Smoke came from the stove and activated our smoke detector.
At this point, I was really concerned that I was about to burn the house down, so I located our Chimfex, ignited it, and placed it into the firebox. Then I called the fire department, and we evacuated to a neighbor’s house.
Thankfully, by the time that the fire department arrived, the fire was somewhat more under control. One of the firemen mentioned that the cast-iron griddle on the top was glowing, which I did not see. They let it burn for about fifteen more minutes, but when it was apparent that it was not going to die completely on its own, they removed the coals and dumped them into a snowbank.
It’s entirely possible that this is somehow operator error. I don’t know if some combination of the low temperatures today or something else made this different than all of the other times we have had fires. All I know is that tonight something went very wrong.
I don’t love my local dealer as they have been dismissive a couple of times when I have had questions after the sale, and since I made the mistake of buying a VC, I can’t contact the manufacturer.
I understand some people on here are more skilled than I am at using this stove and using stoves in general. Like I said, this could be operator error. It’s just interesting to me that nobody else I know who has a stove seems to experience these sorts of problems.
Sorry for the rant. All that I can say is that the whole experience scared the **** out of me, and I won’t be using it again.
The information on this site has been very helpful.
