indexing a damper/choke

[jimmyb]

We love our GreenMountain 40. But one thing that would help a lot is some kind of index for the choke. Right now I kinda just fiddle with it and visually get to the right place with feel and experience. That’s fine and we can live with that, but something tells me there could be another way to optimize this and take some of the guess work out of the setting.

Has anyone tried to create an index that indicates how much choke is applied? Like for each click or notch or visual line or something that corresponds to an index of 10 steps were
each step represents 10% increments of dampening.

I’m thinking of attaching a steel rod to the stove next to the damper with lines cut into it and then attach a steel pointer perpendicular to the choke so that we can better monitor the burn rates for different wood and different times of the year.

if you have this (any stove) i’d love to see photos of what it looks like.

thanks in advance for your thoughts.

 

[wetwood4life]

I'd love to do something like this on our Castleton too. The uneven and unmarked air control makes it harder to adjust, and very hard directing someone else to adjust the air.

 

[EbS-P]

I filed marks into my my air control rod. It’s the push pull type.

 

[neverstop]

I have to stick me head underneath it to have any idea of how it's set. It's annoying.

You could make a thin sheet metal part that attaches to the knob and the screw that the air intake slides on. I'd want the "gauge" to line up with the ash lip so that viewed from above it's easily viewable at all times. The only downside is that it'll stick out an extra (how ever long the air intake throw is).

I didn't take any measurements so the below is just a mock-up of what it could look like. The second image is the air intake handle that it would attach to

 

[jimmyb]

you should patent that before Hearthstone reads this!! very cool. i’m going to look at it.

 

[neverstop]

you should patent that before Hearthstone reads this!! very cool. i’m going to look at it.

Looks like it'd be ~$100 for qty 1. So probably could get it decently cheap at qty 100