Burning a hearthstone gm 80, this years wood is white / burr oak well seasoned 1.5-2 years. Reading 20% on meter, but seems im constantly stalling cats. Glass is always clean , no sizzling etc. Checked cats there clean. Maybe something else I’m missing. I know I’ve burned wood that’s been 22-25 with better results
Is 20% too wet for a hybrid cat stove?
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That’d make sense. Maybe time to just run it in bypass. Living situation is changing in the spring and we’ll be headed back to our original farm house with a boiler, so not worth the money at this point I don’t think
May want to confirm that running long duration in bypass is recommended. I doubt it is. Good luck.
Double check that the Cat is clear of fly ash. The amount of ash that flies around in that small firebox will surely disrupt the flow of gases out of the stove, especially if it has not been cleared recently.
mdocod
Burning Hunk
How would you describe the "stalled cat" situation in your GM80? How do you know it is stalled? What's the symptom?
Being hybrid stoves, most of the wood-gas combustion takes place in the primary/secondaries in the firebox and around the front/top of baffle upstream of the cats. The wood gas combustion shouldn't "shift" to the cats until most of the wood gas has been expelled, in that transition phase of a burn cycle when the flames in the box go out but there's still gasses coming off the wood at too slow a pace to sustain active flames in the box.
When there's active flames in the firebox, the cats on these stoves are just doing a little mop-up duty to minimize emissions.
If you've been burning wet wood the last few years, I wonder if you were causing the combustion to transition to the cats a lot earlier, and basically making them work overtime, burning them out very rapidly. The cat configuration in these stoves does not appear to be well suited to handling a significant portion of the off-gassing combustion workload the way dedicated cat stoves are. There's not enough heatsink opportunity around them to run like that.
