Old stove moved to new house. Back puff and creosote questions.

[mathewc]

TL;DR I am still new to running a stove I've had for a few years and hoping to get advice on what to do moving forward...

Hey all. I recently moved to a new (to me) house and there was a large timberline stove setup downstairs. I pulled it out and installed my Warnock Hersey 24-IC because it has a catalytic combuster and served me well in my last home.

Here's the old stove and the configuration:

When I pulled it out, it was full of un-burned debris and creosote:

Here's the hole in the wall that the pipe slides into:

In addition to this, the dipshit previous owner had no chimney cap installed. I found the one he was using before he removed it for the home inspection and it was the wrong size, so he screwed WOOD onto it to make it fit.

Here's looking down the chimney:

Pretty hard to tell alignment and buildup from this picture, but it's what I have...

Behind the stove, there's a door, which, goes back, meets up with the terracotta liner, then drops down as a catch for anything that should fall. I attempted to clean that out, and found a pile of this:

So. I did my best to clean everything out, and install my stove the same way as the previous one. It drafts just fine to get started and seems to run like it did at my last house.

For grins, I put a piece of metal into the clean out hole behind the stove to catch anything falling down, and it seems that the new stove/heat is knocking a lot of creosote down:

After a day or two the accumulation stopped.

No real problems until today, when I smelled smoke, so I went to investigate and found the stove back puffing.

Here's a video:

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The way I have been running my stove has been to light it fully open, then when it's hot enough (temp on the side of the stove in the good range), I leave the intake fully open, and shut it down fully up top so that all the gas goes through the cat.

I find that sometimes I have to leave the vent up top a little open to keep the fire hot or to heat it back up, like I'm never getting enough intake.

My questions are these:

1. Should the temp gauge be on the pipe and not the side of the stove? Does it matter?
2. Is it bad to leave the top open a little to heat things back up as the cat is not fully engaged?
3. Could the back puff I experienced today be because unburned gases were lighting off in the pipe/chimney, then causing a vacuum and back drafting?
4. I know I need to clean the liner, but if you think it looks really bad please still let me know. I have the brush on order.
5. What's the story with the trap at the bottom? What's it's actual purpose at this point? How clean should I keep it?
6. Could the quality/dryness of wood be affecting/causing the backpuff? Idealy, if I had great wood, then it would burn hotter with the bottom fully open and the top shut to go only through the cat?
7. I've never found that closing down the intake helped unless I'm planning to leave the house for a while and there's no fire.

Please advise me on how to run this stove better. Thanks to all who looked/read. I appreciate you!

-Mathew

 

[begreen]

The first and most obvious problem is that the stove does not have a liner. It appears to have a 6" flue dumping into a 8x12 chimney liner with no 6" liner in it. That is going to greatly reduce the draft and cool down the smoke heading up the chimney to the point of coating it with creosote. This was the same issue with the old stove, but the old Timberline could smolder the fire and make creosote quicker. If the cleanout door is not sealing well that is going to further dilute the draft.

Note that Warnock-Hersey is a testing lab. They didn't make the stove. Do you know what make and model it is? Looks like it may be a Pleasant Hearth, but I am uncertain. It looks like a tube secondary stove, not a cat stove.

 

[begreen]

The stove pipe temp is more meaningful. Need the stove make and model to determine the proper operation of the controls. Do you have the manual?

 

[mathewc]

Thanks for the response. It's an England Stove Works 24-IC or 24-ICD.

ENGLAND'S STOVE WORKS 24-ICD INSTALLATION AND OPERATION MANUAL Pdf Download

View and Download England's Stove Works 24-ICD installation and operation manual online. Englander Stoves 24-ICD, 50-SHW25 and 50-TRW25 INSTALLATION & OPERATION MANUAL. 24-ICD stove pdf manual download. Also for: 50-shw25, 50-trw25.

www.manualslib.com

The cleanout door is not airtight, but closes and seems to seal okay.

I assume this is the next course of action?

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Another question. I hooked the pipe up with the only thing available from the store, which may have been just regular old galvanized pipe. As a precaution, I ventilated the room for a full couple of days while burning it to test everything. I know this is not ideal, but there's some back and forth on the internet as to if this is okay or not. There was only one piece of "stove pipe" at the hardware store and it was the wrong size, and was no different than the pipe I used save for the fact that the outside was painted with a heat resistant paint. No smells coming from anything after the initial burn, so, I can either paint this one or replace it with something when I do the liner.

Thanks again.
-Mathew

 

[begreen]

Ah thanks. So it is a cat stove. Just an oldie. This is more reason to get the liner in. Cat stoves tend to have lower flue temps than non-cats. The Rockford kit is fine.

Galvanized is not ok. It needs to be 24 ga black stove pipe or stainless. If the stove pipe gets up to 8-900º it will outgas zinc fumes which are not good to breath.