Pacific Energy Super 27 LE 1.5 year Review

[alber197]

Hello,

I thought it would be helpful for some to post about our experience with the PE Super 27 LE that we purchased at the beginning of last season. We have a full year and a half under our belt of use burning mostly full time.

Things we like:
-The stove is top of the line construction and very well built. The baffle is super easy to remove to clean and very well made. You can tell the stove with last for a long time with minimal maintenance
-North/South loading, deep firebox. Makes it very easy to safely load wood into the stove. It is a nice deep stove so if you're like us and don't have exact length splits of wood its loads nicely. We do wish the stove was a little wider for better east/west loading if we wanted to (see below).
-View Area/"flame show"-Fire always looks nice
-Tight clearances. This stove had the best clearances of any stove we looked at. This was one of the main reasons we purchased it.

Things we don't like:
-This stove gets hot and gets hot fast! This has been mentioned many times on this site that this is an "easy breather" stove. For some with short chimneys and in milder climates this is probably desired. For us, we have a 16ft chimney and it frequently gets below zero here and It is very difficult to keep the stove under control. We have plugged the "air boost" hole which helped. For us personally, this stove is very touchy and requires near constant monitoring. Many times, the fire is roaring and difficult to turn down or it is snuffed out from turning down the air intake two quickly. In our experience, there is a very, very small sweet spot of when to turn down. Miss it or turn down too early and you're playing catch up or starting over. I don't tend to agree with some on here that this stove is "super easy" to use and control as this has not been our experience.
-Could be a touch wider for better east/west loading if desired. You need to have pretty small splits if you want to load east/west with this stove. Getting pikcy here but I think that would help with the stove taking off.
-We have issues towards the end of the "reburn" with the flame going in and out completely sometimes. You can hear something inside the stove clicking/popping trying to keep it going. The stove pops and flame flares up and down over and over until we adjust the air inlet. This is after it has burned nicely for quite some time so I'm not sure what the issue is there. Maybe it has to do with the boost hole being covered.

Our house is very small (1150 square feet) and the stove sits in open LR/Dining Kitchen. I know we will constantly battle keeping the temperature from getting very hot because of the size of our home but I don't think I would purchase this stove again because I find it burns too hot and drafts too hard for our particular situation. If we had a larger space to heat where we didn't have to worry so much about keeping the stove from getting so hot the super would work very well. Overall, it is a great stove but I think it is very important to look at your chimney height and potential draft with this stove because of how well it burns.

If anyone has any specific questions feel free to reach out. Everyone on this forum was very helpful when we were learning how to use this stove. We still have some learning to do but I hope this helps someone if they are considering a PE stove.

 

[Grinnell]

Less wood and add a damper?

 

[alber197]

We definitely have to use less wood to keep the temp down. It seems to get to a point where it doesn't matter what the outdoor temp is, if you put more than 3 or 4 splits in there it will take off if you don't time your turn down perfectly. East/west loading helps a lot to slow it down but most of our splits are too long for that. When loading north south, we cannot use more than 2-3 splits. I guess I was just very surprised at how touchy it is. We had an older catalytic stove at a previous place and that was way easier to dial in where you wanted it. I think a damper would just add another thing to have to mess with when burning and make it worse but not sure.

 

[Enplater]

What species wood are you burning? I suppose my T5 would act like that if I were burning seasoned pine, but here in NH we have lots of oak, maple, locust etc as well as white pine.

 

[alber197]

We burn ash, hard maple, oak and some birch. No pine ever in the wood stove.

 

[alber197]

Does anyone have any experience using a PE stove from pre 2020 as well as one manufactured after 2020 regulations? I'm wondering if PE had to make some significant changes to their stuff to meet the emissions standards.

 

[alber197]

Today was a good example of what I experience daily in some way with this stove. I'm sure there is an operator error involved but the internal chimney temp is 850 and climbing with the stove turned all the way down. The fire was lit in a warm stove using a fire starter and 2 oak and a 1 maple split (smallish size). Once that was going, I loaded the stove fairly tight and started turning down when the fire begin touching the baffle, all splits were charred and flue temps were about 350ish (maybe 400). I continued to monitor and turned down gradually. When the air inlet was 1/2 closed on the air inlet about 3/4 of the fire went out. This was over a time frame of about 30-40 min. I had to turn it up to 3/4 open to get the fire to relight and started the turn down process over. After about an hour the fire was going nicely and flue temps were about 600-650. The air inlet was mostly closed at this point. I turned it all the way down at this point when the secondary flames were going nicely. As I wrote this the flue temp is now up to 900 and continuing to climb with the air inlet all the way closet and magnet over the boost hole. There is no way to turn this down any further. We use a lot of wood and we are loosing a lot of heat up the chimney. This occurs regardless of the amount of wood in the firebox (doesn't matter if it 1/2 full or packed). I just feel there should be more control with this stove. What ever is going on internally with the EBT makes it difficult to control. Our neighbor has a newer drolet stove that is much easier to use and was a 1/3 of the cost. Granted it may not last as long but it doesn't require watching over it for 2+ hours when adding wood or starting a fire...

 

[Enplater]

Do you have a damper in your stove pipe? I’ve had my old Englander stove act just like that before but that setup wasn’t ideal being in the basement and most likely the wood was a bit damp.