I sit here on this lovely Saturday morning typing this, it is -14C/6F outside and has been this temperature range for days. My Opel 2 is loafing along beautifully keeping my home effortlessly at 70 degrees with two or three pieces of wood every four hours or so. This was not always the case however and sad to say it took me years to figure out what was wrong with my stove and I write this story hoping to spare others the trials and tribulations that this stove has put me through over the past 7 years. This is a long story but if you have an Opel 2 I would read it in case you ever have the problems that I did. First for some background. I am not a wood burning virgin by any means but far from an expert. Growing up in NE NJ no one burned wood that I can remember. Then my parents put an addition on our home and added a back room with what was calledback then a "Buckstove". I don't remember the brand, my brother still owns our old family home so I could ask him but that is not needed for this story. Needless to say it was a boxed woodstove built into the slot where the fireplace was and it was in a word, fantastic. Getting wood at the time was fairly easy as there was a lot of growth going on and clearing was needed to build new homes and offices and there was not a demand for the wood so we were able to pick it up most of the time for free. As an early teen I did not appreciate the work involved but it was a learning and educational experience none the less. Years later after college I moved to NH, met my lovely bride, married and bought our first home which had a Integra stand-alone woodstove in the basement with vents cut into the ceiling for the heat to rise and help heat the entire home. It was a great stove, not big enough the heat the entire home when the weather dropped below say 20 deg F but still it did the job as best it could. Propane at the time was .78 cents a gallon (no that is not a typo, .78) and we converted the house to propane heat. Seven years later we moved to Canada and purchased in the spring a newer home, a three floor colonial with a Gold Trimmed Opel 2 stove on the main floor that heats the first floor and the upstairs bedrooms. I was pleased with its appearance but did notice one thing right off the bat, the wooden handles and the round wooden knob for opening and closing the air inlet were burned on the top, yes, burned, black. Hmm, strange was all I could think not knowing the stove at all.
John who built the house lived in the house for a few years but then rented for the past two to three years before I bought it off of him. I had to simply dismiss this as perhaps a bad omen for what the renters did to the house. I know firsthand that they left the kitchen in a state of disaster.
Anyway,I did some quick research on the stove and was even more pleased with what I learned about it. The backup heat was electric so as soon as I could scrape up the money I purchased three cord of wood. The guy I bought the wood from only had green wood but I had no choice. Well winter hit and I fired the stove up and the first thing I noticed is that it was a ferocious stove. It did not care that the wood was green, it burned it, no, it consumed it. I quickly learned it was impossible to burn this stove if the temperature was not below freezing if you did you could not be inside our home. I again spoke to John and he confirmed this, he actually said, "yeah a big piece of wood can push you right out of the room. (the stove is in the main living room.) Well he wasn't kidding. The colder it was outside the happier this stove was and an eight hour burn?, no way, I load it, bank it down and go to bed on a real cold night and it was burned out in four hours easy. If I did not check on it during the night, the house was freezing in the morning and I had to do a complete restart. This did not make me happy but I was too busy to care and we survived the first winter. Next year I buy four cord and have it delivered early in the Spring and it is already seasoned. The next winter comes and I have the same frustrating issues with this stove, it attempts, no succeeded in destroying every piece of wood I put in it as quickly as possible despite where I set the air intake setting. So I researched the stove again and learned of the “bi-metallic damper” that it has. This on the surface sounded great to me but in reality it brought feelings of resentment and the beginnings of intense dislike for this stove, I don’t want nor do I need my stove thinking for itself so to speak, just do what I want you to do, I am fully capable of making the appropriate adjustments when necessary.
So, season three is coming and I am not happy. Three houses down across the street is a guy who installs stoves. I talk to him about the problem I am having and he tells me that he does not install Opel’s but he would be happy to check the stove out and clean the chimney which is due. He comes and changes the door trim, cleans the chimney and “made an adjustment to the valve”. No idea what he was talking about here but I was happy that someone who at least knows something about stoves has checked it out. Next winter comes, no change, same experience and now truthfully I am trying to come up with ways to change the stove out with either another woodstove or a pellet stove or a propane insert that we had in NH that we loved. It does not take me long to realize that that is not something that I can afford, the stove has been built into the house and the cost to change it out is not something we could even consider when I priced it out with a local stove store who gave me the impression that I was crazy. So, winter four hits and I am an hour away shopping and I stop in to the stove shop were John bought the stove and I start talking to the guy there and tell him my problem. The first thing he tells me is that this is the best stove that they sell. Well that may be but that does not explain my problem. He tells me that I need to adjust my doors, they must be out of alignment. OK, I can handle that and I do. Not a difficult job, the instructions are in the owner’s manual and I took my time. No change. I simply cannot get a controlled burn out of this stove. I can’t remember if it is a couple of months later or a year, I am very busy with my life and my kids and I cannot remember exactly as this has gone on for so long. I am back in the area and I stop back in the stove shop again and talk to the same guy and again he tells me this is the best stove they sell. Yeah, got that. So this time he tells me that I need to replace the gaskets, OK, I drop the coin and buy the new gaskets and home I go to change them. I take my time and go slow, I don’t want to screw this up, I am very hopeful that this is going to fix the problem. When done the next winter comes and I fire up the stove, excited and anticipating a good experience. Nope, same thing happens again BUT, not as fast, hmm. Now I am on to something. The gasket change allowed the stove to burn properly and in a controlled fashion for a brief time but then again, it would get out of control.
I knew now that I was dealing with an airflow problem, the stove was getting too much air and burning out of control.
I honestly don’t know if it took me another winter or not but I researched the stove and realized it had its own external air vent where it could get all the air it wanted. AHA! I go out at the beginning of the winter (three winters ago now, four?) and I buy a cheap plastic four inch drain plug and I put it in front of the vent hole on the outside of my home. High up on a ladder I have to go I might add. Lo and behold the stove burns slower! YES! I have my solution! The stove is stealing air from the outside vent! So I monitor this for a while and the stove is still overturning, but it is taking much longer to do so. So back up the side of the house I go and I take some saran wrap and make it into ball and stuff it in the pipe and put the cover back on into the hole and it improves the burn again and actually I think I may have found my problem.
(As an aside we have made friends with a family in town whose father is a retired trade’s instructor at the local community college. He built his current home himself for he and his wife to retire in just recently. This gent has a reputation in town of being able to do or build anything and yes, he does masonry and can install wood stoves and has done so for his sons and daughters and for himself. He has an Opel 2 stove and we have become friends. I asked him about his experience and he told me that the stove gives off tremendous heat. I agreed. I asked him if he had trouble getting a slow controlled burn like I was with mine and it was a relief to him to hear I was having the same problem. He told me he did and that he had called RSF to complain about it and they told him on the phone that they designed the stove to burn that way to prevent creosote buildup in chimneys. Really? I told him about blocking his external air vent a bit like I did and that it helped and he told me that he was going to give it a try.)
Now comes the next part of my saga. So there I am, sitting on my couch, it’s about 11 at night and I am enjoying a glass of wine, I just loaded the stove up and I am looking forward to watching the first controlled burn I have ever had or at least watch it start and then finish my wine and then off to bed. What happens next I can’t believe. Before my very eyes the stove slowly but surely begins to churn and churn and churn and I can hear the metal ticking and ticking and ticking faster and faster as the metal heats up and before my very eyes in about 30 minutes, the stove is in a complete and total over burn again. That’s it now, I am furious, I take pictures of it, I video tape it. I am going to call RSF and rip them and send them these pictures and video and let them have it. I walk up to the stove and stand looking down at it feeling disgust and pure hatred for it with what I have been through and that I am stuck with this POS and I see something that I don’t understand so I look more closely and I see light from the stove along the entire top of the two doors. Holy crap! There is about an 1/8 of an inch gap creating an air leak along the entire top of both doors now that was not there before! I had just tested the doors again and they were paper tight and I mean THIN paper tight and then it hits me as to why when the stove gets hot over the years and why the doors close so easily when it is hot. As the stove heats up the metal of the stove is warping inwards away from the doors, the hotter it gets the greater the warping and thus the greater the air leak that keeps getting bigger and bigger as the stove gets hotter and hotter thus causing my uncontrollable over burns!
Folks, IMHO this is a build and or design flaw as is the external air vent.
So I finally realize that I am not going crazy. Now I have to come up with a solution and realize that I have to tighten up these doors so that when the stove gets hot the metal can’t pull away from them. So I go down to the local Kent’s and pick up a bunch of flat door gasket trim and slowly and carefully start building up the gaskets around both doors and I set the door handle to accommodate this at its widest setting.
Problem solved! This was towards the end of last winter that I finally figured this all out. This off season I carefully checked again and set the additional flat gaskets, I cleaned the chimney out myself, (no creosote). I had the house re-shingled this summer and they knocked my plastic cover off and it got thrown away. I went to Walmart and picked up the perfect plastic cover that fit into the vent whole and slid into the whole covering the entire opening, perfect.
Having written this I am sure there are some who are concerned about me blocking off the external air vent so here is what happened last weekend. I woke up and the temp outside was colder than I expected and perhaps it was due to the spirits the night before but I could not remember how much and when I put wood on the evening before. It was 7:20 AM and there was some nice red coals as I always have now, it was 26 degrees outside and 62 degrees inside. Whoa, my lovely bride and her mother who was with us would not appreciate this, too cold for them the kids and truthfully for me also. I put four pieces of wood on and snapped open the vent to let the stove run and went back upstairs for another hour of sleep. I got up with the alarm at 8:30 and came downstairs to a blazing red hot (controlled) burn and the internal temp was now 72. No, that is not a lie, 10 degrees in a little over an hour. Now comes the satisfaction. I poured a cup of coffee first, something I would never do in the past and then walked over and banked it down and then I sat on my couch, sipped my coffee and watched the flames and the heat drop off drop off over the next ½ hour. Priceless.
So, again, here I sit, it is now Sunday evening a week later as it took me the weekend to type this and a storm hit and then freezing rain and then it warmed up to over 40 today and my stove has been gently loafing along keeping the house at 72-74 degrees, this would have never been possible in the past, I would have had to let the fire go out and switch over to my electric heat until the temps dropped again. The temp outside began to drop this afternoon and I walked over and opened up the air vent and off the stove went and once the flame kicked in I banked it back down after the house warmed up and it is back to loafing along again. That’s the way a wood stove is supposed to work. It is a shame it took me all these years to figure this out. So now between 10 and 11 pm I put three to five pieces of wood on depending on how cold it is out. I am up at six and there is a nice red hot coal base and the house is at 68-72 degrees, I throw on some wood and we are good to go again.
I have written this to help others and I hope it does help someone at some point who is going through what I have been through these years. I have every right to be but I am not against the Opel 2, quite the contrary; this is a really nice stove. I just changed the inside brick walls and it was not too expensive and a breeze to do.
I just looked around the corner at the stove and have to smile with what I am seeing, a beautiful peaceful slow burning fire, as it should be, I look at my digital internal and external thermometer sitting next to me showing the outside temp at 36 and the inside temp at 72, perfect. Now for a glass of wine and a piece or two of wood in the coming hour and off to bed.
John who built the house lived in the house for a few years but then rented for the past two to three years before I bought it off of him. I had to simply dismiss this as perhaps a bad omen for what the renters did to the house. I know firsthand that they left the kitchen in a state of disaster.
Anyway,I did some quick research on the stove and was even more pleased with what I learned about it. The backup heat was electric so as soon as I could scrape up the money I purchased three cord of wood. The guy I bought the wood from only had green wood but I had no choice. Well winter hit and I fired the stove up and the first thing I noticed is that it was a ferocious stove. It did not care that the wood was green, it burned it, no, it consumed it. I quickly learned it was impossible to burn this stove if the temperature was not below freezing if you did you could not be inside our home. I again spoke to John and he confirmed this, he actually said, "yeah a big piece of wood can push you right out of the room. (the stove is in the main living room.) Well he wasn't kidding. The colder it was outside the happier this stove was and an eight hour burn?, no way, I load it, bank it down and go to bed on a real cold night and it was burned out in four hours easy. If I did not check on it during the night, the house was freezing in the morning and I had to do a complete restart. This did not make me happy but I was too busy to care and we survived the first winter. Next year I buy four cord and have it delivered early in the Spring and it is already seasoned. The next winter comes and I have the same frustrating issues with this stove, it attempts, no succeeded in destroying every piece of wood I put in it as quickly as possible despite where I set the air intake setting. So I researched the stove again and learned of the “bi-metallic damper” that it has. This on the surface sounded great to me but in reality it brought feelings of resentment and the beginnings of intense dislike for this stove, I don’t want nor do I need my stove thinking for itself so to speak, just do what I want you to do, I am fully capable of making the appropriate adjustments when necessary.
So, season three is coming and I am not happy. Three houses down across the street is a guy who installs stoves. I talk to him about the problem I am having and he tells me that he does not install Opel’s but he would be happy to check the stove out and clean the chimney which is due. He comes and changes the door trim, cleans the chimney and “made an adjustment to the valve”. No idea what he was talking about here but I was happy that someone who at least knows something about stoves has checked it out. Next winter comes, no change, same experience and now truthfully I am trying to come up with ways to change the stove out with either another woodstove or a pellet stove or a propane insert that we had in NH that we loved. It does not take me long to realize that that is not something that I can afford, the stove has been built into the house and the cost to change it out is not something we could even consider when I priced it out with a local stove store who gave me the impression that I was crazy. So, winter four hits and I am an hour away shopping and I stop in to the stove shop were John bought the stove and I start talking to the guy there and tell him my problem. The first thing he tells me is that this is the best stove that they sell. Well that may be but that does not explain my problem. He tells me that I need to adjust my doors, they must be out of alignment. OK, I can handle that and I do. Not a difficult job, the instructions are in the owner’s manual and I took my time. No change. I simply cannot get a controlled burn out of this stove. I can’t remember if it is a couple of months later or a year, I am very busy with my life and my kids and I cannot remember exactly as this has gone on for so long. I am back in the area and I stop back in the stove shop again and talk to the same guy and again he tells me this is the best stove they sell. Yeah, got that. So this time he tells me that I need to replace the gaskets, OK, I drop the coin and buy the new gaskets and home I go to change them. I take my time and go slow, I don’t want to screw this up, I am very hopeful that this is going to fix the problem. When done the next winter comes and I fire up the stove, excited and anticipating a good experience. Nope, same thing happens again BUT, not as fast, hmm. Now I am on to something. The gasket change allowed the stove to burn properly and in a controlled fashion for a brief time but then again, it would get out of control.
I knew now that I was dealing with an airflow problem, the stove was getting too much air and burning out of control.
I honestly don’t know if it took me another winter or not but I researched the stove and realized it had its own external air vent where it could get all the air it wanted. AHA! I go out at the beginning of the winter (three winters ago now, four?) and I buy a cheap plastic four inch drain plug and I put it in front of the vent hole on the outside of my home. High up on a ladder I have to go I might add. Lo and behold the stove burns slower! YES! I have my solution! The stove is stealing air from the outside vent! So I monitor this for a while and the stove is still overturning, but it is taking much longer to do so. So back up the side of the house I go and I take some saran wrap and make it into ball and stuff it in the pipe and put the cover back on into the hole and it improves the burn again and actually I think I may have found my problem.
(As an aside we have made friends with a family in town whose father is a retired trade’s instructor at the local community college. He built his current home himself for he and his wife to retire in just recently. This gent has a reputation in town of being able to do or build anything and yes, he does masonry and can install wood stoves and has done so for his sons and daughters and for himself. He has an Opel 2 stove and we have become friends. I asked him about his experience and he told me that the stove gives off tremendous heat. I agreed. I asked him if he had trouble getting a slow controlled burn like I was with mine and it was a relief to him to hear I was having the same problem. He told me he did and that he had called RSF to complain about it and they told him on the phone that they designed the stove to burn that way to prevent creosote buildup in chimneys. Really? I told him about blocking his external air vent a bit like I did and that it helped and he told me that he was going to give it a try.)
Now comes the next part of my saga. So there I am, sitting on my couch, it’s about 11 at night and I am enjoying a glass of wine, I just loaded the stove up and I am looking forward to watching the first controlled burn I have ever had or at least watch it start and then finish my wine and then off to bed. What happens next I can’t believe. Before my very eyes the stove slowly but surely begins to churn and churn and churn and I can hear the metal ticking and ticking and ticking faster and faster as the metal heats up and before my very eyes in about 30 minutes, the stove is in a complete and total over burn again. That’s it now, I am furious, I take pictures of it, I video tape it. I am going to call RSF and rip them and send them these pictures and video and let them have it. I walk up to the stove and stand looking down at it feeling disgust and pure hatred for it with what I have been through and that I am stuck with this POS and I see something that I don’t understand so I look more closely and I see light from the stove along the entire top of the two doors. Holy crap! There is about an 1/8 of an inch gap creating an air leak along the entire top of both doors now that was not there before! I had just tested the doors again and they were paper tight and I mean THIN paper tight and then it hits me as to why when the stove gets hot over the years and why the doors close so easily when it is hot. As the stove heats up the metal of the stove is warping inwards away from the doors, the hotter it gets the greater the warping and thus the greater the air leak that keeps getting bigger and bigger as the stove gets hotter and hotter thus causing my uncontrollable over burns!
Folks, IMHO this is a build and or design flaw as is the external air vent.
So I finally realize that I am not going crazy. Now I have to come up with a solution and realize that I have to tighten up these doors so that when the stove gets hot the metal can’t pull away from them. So I go down to the local Kent’s and pick up a bunch of flat door gasket trim and slowly and carefully start building up the gaskets around both doors and I set the door handle to accommodate this at its widest setting.
Problem solved! This was towards the end of last winter that I finally figured this all out. This off season I carefully checked again and set the additional flat gaskets, I cleaned the chimney out myself, (no creosote). I had the house re-shingled this summer and they knocked my plastic cover off and it got thrown away. I went to Walmart and picked up the perfect plastic cover that fit into the vent whole and slid into the whole covering the entire opening, perfect.
Having written this I am sure there are some who are concerned about me blocking off the external air vent so here is what happened last weekend. I woke up and the temp outside was colder than I expected and perhaps it was due to the spirits the night before but I could not remember how much and when I put wood on the evening before. It was 7:20 AM and there was some nice red coals as I always have now, it was 26 degrees outside and 62 degrees inside. Whoa, my lovely bride and her mother who was with us would not appreciate this, too cold for them the kids and truthfully for me also. I put four pieces of wood on and snapped open the vent to let the stove run and went back upstairs for another hour of sleep. I got up with the alarm at 8:30 and came downstairs to a blazing red hot (controlled) burn and the internal temp was now 72. No, that is not a lie, 10 degrees in a little over an hour. Now comes the satisfaction. I poured a cup of coffee first, something I would never do in the past and then walked over and banked it down and then I sat on my couch, sipped my coffee and watched the flames and the heat drop off drop off over the next ½ hour. Priceless.
So, again, here I sit, it is now Sunday evening a week later as it took me the weekend to type this and a storm hit and then freezing rain and then it warmed up to over 40 today and my stove has been gently loafing along keeping the house at 72-74 degrees, this would have never been possible in the past, I would have had to let the fire go out and switch over to my electric heat until the temps dropped again. The temp outside began to drop this afternoon and I walked over and opened up the air vent and off the stove went and once the flame kicked in I banked it back down after the house warmed up and it is back to loafing along again. That’s the way a wood stove is supposed to work. It is a shame it took me all these years to figure this out. So now between 10 and 11 pm I put three to five pieces of wood on depending on how cold it is out. I am up at six and there is a nice red hot coal base and the house is at 68-72 degrees, I throw on some wood and we are good to go again.
I have written this to help others and I hope it does help someone at some point who is going through what I have been through these years. I have every right to be but I am not against the Opel 2, quite the contrary; this is a really nice stove. I just changed the inside brick walls and it was not too expensive and a breeze to do.
I just looked around the corner at the stove and have to smile with what I am seeing, a beautiful peaceful slow burning fire, as it should be, I look at my digital internal and external thermometer sitting next to me showing the outside temp at 36 and the inside temp at 72, perfect. Now for a glass of wine and a piece or two of wood in the coming hour and off to bed.
Last edited by a moderator:
!! Man, betrayal again this time by a fan. I then realize that the fan originally came with the damper dial like a ceiling fan. Ahhh. I sit here shaking my head yet again. I mentioned this to my wife and she plugged it in one day when I was not home and she told me "wow that fan does make a big difference". So, to all those reading this the damper dial does make a difference as does the fan speed. This is not entirely a bad thing for the times you want the let this stove "run" and warm the house I have learned which did come up when we returned home after a weekend of hockey and soccer this month. Having said that just remember, this fan is not you friend if you are not paying attention to it.
