Problems with new Portway Arundel stove, smoke in room

[Poindexter]

If you find big holes and airflow in the basement, can you install a reasonably airtight door at the top of your basement stairwell so your neighbor can keep posting cooking videos to youtube?

I don't fully understand the role of "the council" as a local government entity in the UK, except that I often have one eyebrow raised in a quizical way when I hear about things "the council" has done. We don't have "the council" around here, though, well, never mind politics. First we have to figure out the problem, then come up with a way to solve it that we can get away with in the eyes of the law.

 

[philt]

I may have missed this but have you had a chimney draw measurement performance test done ?

No we haven't, unfortunately our installer doesn't own a testing device, we'll have to bring someone else in to do one

 

[philt]

What I see with my local stuff, on a freshly split face, is i will have the lowest moisture readings at the ends and along the pointy bit of the length, with the highest moisture content to be measured anywhere on the freshly split face will be in the middle of the length and down close to the edge where the bark is/ used to be. I don't know why that is, but I see it consistently in both birch and spruce.

I am not at all worried about the moisture content of the bark itself, you have much bigger problems than trying to figure the MC of your bark. Should be zero percent by the way, sort of like trying to measure blood flow in the dead cells that make up the outer layers of your skin, there is nothing there.

Interesting, I have put a few pieces in with the bark on and seen quite clearly smoke trickling out from between the bark and the wood.

 

[Poindexter]

Interesting

If you are sticking the pins in parallel to the grain and the highest MC you can find is 19% your fuel is dry enough. That is the good news.

The bad news is 80% of the folks that register here every winter with a burning problem have wood that is greater than 20% MC. You are in the 1:5 that has some other problem that requires thinking and logic and speaking a foreign language. I look forward to sharing a pint with you in front of your good running stove some day if I ever get to Birmingham.

 

[philt]

I think this is exactly the problem as well. Nice of your installer to share pics with you.

The way I see it you have:

A reasonably modern stove with the up to date UK DEFRA cert.
Professional install that looks (from two pictures after two pints) to have been done in a workmanlike manner
You don't have to go up on the roof
Fuel under 20% MC (yay!!, good for you)
plenty of stack height. 8-9 meters, no elbows, is 26.24 to 29.5 feet. You should have excessive draft

But when the wind blows, you can see it affecting your fire in the stove at the bottom of the pipe in a bad way, and when you open the loading door you get smoked out regularly.

And when you lit a fire in the bare fireplace you did not have good draft, though you had more better draft when you opened a window.

You said you have no through the wall appliances like a clothes dryer or venting fan over the cook stove in the kitchen running. Other than the chimney for your word burner, is there anything else in the house that pumps air from inside the house to the outdoors? Anything at all? I have two courtesy fans in my house, one in each bathroom, but they don't move enough air to affect my wood burner, even with both of them running.

What about your common wall neighbor? It has to be asked. If your neighbor is a professional chef with an enormous range hood moving a lot of air he _might_ be applying suction to any airleaks in the common wall. Maybe. Are they any holes in the wall, check the basement/ cellar too? Can you feel air moving through the hole? Are you allowed by code or common sense to block the hole, if you find one?


1. Do not add a bunch of stack height trying to get out of your local downdraft. If you take your chimney up to 45 feet/ 15 meters and it starts drawing good you will melt expensive things.
2. What fuel is burned in the other side of the semidetached with the different cowl on it? Is that a standard cowl for say natural gas or something?
3. Trees 25 meters away and only 5 meters taller than your stack are most likely not the problem. They might be. What about dirt piles like ridges or scarps or hills? Which direction, how far, how tall are they? Where does the prevailing wind blow from in your area and has it been deflected by the hill/ridge on your lot?
4. How many houses/ blocks/ miles would you have to walk from your house to find another wood burner? Are they operating with a funky cowl on top of their chimney? Have they been burning long enough to know what they are doing?

I honestly enjoy puzzles like this one. The time zone difference is a bit of bother. Catch you tomorrow.

From what I know (very little) about our common neighbour, we've only had the house for 2 months, they don't have a wood burner, I'm guessing the cowl on top of there's is purely stopping birds getting in. It's a rented house so I'm not sure they'd know for sure. Whether they are professional chefs or not I don't know, I've not heard much action coming from their kitchen.

We have no basement, solid concrete floors throughout the ground floor, we have a garage which is open to the elements slightly but is sealed off nicely from the house. We have cavity walls with insulation and double glazing throughout. We've had the floorboards up in the upstairs bedrooms that are on the shared wall and cannot see any gaps through to next door or feel any draughts. Our loft space is knee deep in insulation but our building survey did note there is no ventilation up there. Ventilation wise through the rest of the house there is an air brick in each room with an adjustable vent, all of which have been open so far.

Hills are only little, we're not talking mountains, say 300m tall, top of which is probably about half a mile in a direct line north west from our house, over the other side of the woodland, that's the general direction we get wind from. The other set of hills are about the same height approx two miles south west. We don't notice particularly bad weather but we have noticed that the general area retains the cold, when we have snow, and I'm talking pathetic amounts compared to what I imagine you get, it definitely gets more than surrounding areas and it sticks around for longer.

I do have a colleague who lives about a mile away who has a wood burner, it's an old small burner which she has no problems with, standard bird cage on the chimney. My fiancé's parents also live about a mile away, they also have an older smaller stove but no special cowl, no problems with theirs either. It feels at this point that the major difference is that we have a tall shallow stove with a huge door whereas theirs are short and deep.

With regards to the stove, it's been mentioned already that due to the design it will need more tlc so I've come to accept it's not going to perform in the same way as others. It does just seem to be far too restrictive in it's baffle design but as Begreen mentioned, if I modify that then I take away the eco aspect of it.

One installer my Dad spoke to has mentioned he fits a 6 inch flue liner as standard even with a stove with a 5 inch collar, will the extra inch of flue diameter really help increase draw?

Reassuring that you think the install looks tidy, I can live with that if it just needs a bit of modifying to suit our area etc.

Incidentally our local bottle shop used to import Alaskan Smoked Porter, my Dad would stockpile it when it came in but I think he must've been the only person who bought it so they stopped getting it, sad times.

Thanks again for the help!

 

[Poindexter]

No worries. I don't personally care for the smoked porter from the Alaskan brewery down in Juneau, but their Baltic Porter, in the years they don't pump it full of walnut/cherry/ pomegranite toro poopoo, is an excellent Baltic Porter. Their winter ale, with the spruce tips in it, is very very good, but more than two tonight will have you tasting turpentine tomorrow for most of the morning. I really enjoyed their now discontinued basic pale ale. Like may US brewers they are currently making stupidly bitter IPAs and customers are buying them. Their Kolsch is style correct with no significant flaws, the yeast they use on their amber gives me migraines. I basically keep an eye on the store shelves to see if they pumped any crud into the Baltic Porter this year. Should be out soon this year actually, thanks for the reminder.

At this point I pretty much have to defer to @bholler , our local chimney expert. My sense of the thing is you have a local downdraft that is messing with your chimney function.

Your stove has a 5 inch collar, and you have a 5" uninsulated liner, 25-30 feet of it. If you put a reducer on the stove collar and put in a 6" liner, I don't know what that would or might do for you. Nor do I know what could go wrong.

I have seen several "special" cowls or chimney tops for tricky air flow situations, but I don't have experience with any of them.

I imagine you don't own the woodland beyond your back fence and cannot take down the 50 meters of trees closest to your home.

The only thing I can think of that you can do in the meantime is open the air controls to wide open for a few minutes (like 5-10 minutes) before opening the loading door. Go feed the cat or the dog. Go pee. Dance with your wife for three minutes. Ply your troth. Go make some tea. Then come back and open the loading door for a quick reload.

There was an article in The Guardian some months ago that comes up regularly when I internet search on terms like "wood stove indoor air quality." The particulates and VOCs they imply are found in UK homes are simply mind boggling to me. I am running two of the Dylos DC 1100pro and 4 more AQ meters with the plantower 5003 sensor. I simply cannot duplicate the AQ numbers implied by The Guardian without using tongs to stack a soccer ball sized lump of live coals on the hearth in front of my wood burner while reloading, and stopping for a cigarette during the reloading process, before shoveling the live coals back into my wood burner.

Besides visible light and palpable heat, burning wood, oxidizing wood, combining it with oxygen, emits fine particulates like PM2.5 and PM10 and some VOCs, Volatile Organic Compounds. Your DEFRA stove is supposed to deal with the particulates and VOCs with the door closed and blah blah, but if you open the loading door early you will get some bad actors into your living space even with good draft.

On the one hand, it is ideal to let the last load burn down to " a few embers" before reloading, but i have a day job. I also have a much deeper stove than yours, I can load wood 18" long in there, see the end grain of the wood and close the door. In reality, when I get up in the morning there is whatever left, I open up the air intakes, go pee, make some coffee, deal with the cat, and then open the loading door, get the reload over with, close the door and get on with my day. In regular weather I reload morning and evening. In cold (local) weather I reload morning, right away home from work and again at bedtime. When it is really cold I will get up in the middle of the night to reload the stove a fourth time daily.

What I am getting at is the new stoves aren't like the old ones. My grandpa (God rest his soul) taught me to open the loading door about every half hour and get in there with a stick of metal to stir things up and throw in whatever more wood would fit. With the old technology that worked good. Now that I have a modern stove, the hardest thing for me to learn to do was to leave the dang loading door closed until the current load was burnt down to embers, and then reload the whole thing all at once - and leave it alone until it is burnt down to a few coals again.

Look for how few coals do you need remaining for an easy reload. How far can you let the last load go and still get the next load lit off easily without smoking out the lounge? Don't forget to ply your troth with great regularity, it is one of the responsibilities and rewards of running your wood burner effectively. Just saying.

 

[philt]

No worries. I don't personally care for the smoked porter from the Alaskan brewery down in Juneau, but their Baltic Porter, in the years they don't pump it full of walnut/cherry/ pomegranite toro poopoo, is an excellent Baltic Porter. Their winter ale, with the spruce tips in it, is very very good, but more than two tonight will have you tasting turpentine tomorrow for most of the morning. I really enjoyed their now discontinued basic pale ale. Like may US brewers they are currently making stupidly bitter IPAs and customers are buying them. Their Kolsch is style correct with no significant flaws, the yeast they use on their amber gives me migraines. I basically keep an eye on the store shelves to see if they pumped any crud into the Baltic Porter this year. Should be out soon this year actually, thanks for the reminder.

At this point I pretty much have to defer to @bholler , our local chimney expert. My sense of the thing is you have a local downdraft that is messing with your chimney function.

Your stove has a 5 inch collar, and you have a 5" uninsulated liner, 25-30 feet of it. If you put a reducer on the stove collar and put in a 6" liner, I don't know what that would or might do for you. Nor do I know what could go wrong.

I have seen several "special" cowls or chimney tops for tricky air flow situations, but I don't have experience with any of them.

I imagine you don't own the woodland beyond your back fence and cannot take down the 50 meters of trees closest to your home.

The only thing I can think of that you can do in the meantime is open the air controls to wide open for a few minutes (like 5-10 minutes) before opening the loading door. Go feed the cat or the dog. Go pee. Dance with your wife for three minutes. Ply your troth. Go make some tea. Then come back and open the loading door for a quick reload.

There was an article in The Guardian some months ago that comes up regularly when I internet search on terms like "wood stove indoor air quality." The particulates and VOCs they imply are found in UK homes are simply mind boggling to me. I am running two of the Dylos DC 1100pro and 4 more AQ meters with the plantower 5003 sensor. I simply cannot duplicate the AQ numbers implied by The Guardian without using tongs to stack a soccer ball sized lump of live coals on the hearth in front of my wood burner while reloading, and stopping for a cigarette during the reloading process, before shoveling the live coals back into my wood burner.

Besides visible light and palpable heat, burning wood, oxidizing wood, combining it with oxygen, emits fine particulates like PM2.5 and PM10 and some VOCs, Volatile Organic Compounds. Your DEFRA stove is supposed to deal with the particulates and VOCs with the door closed and blah blah, but if you open the loading door early you will get some bad actors into your living space even with good draft.

On the one hand, it is ideal to let the last load burn down to " a few embers" before reloading, but i have a day job. I also have a much deeper stove than yours, I can load wood 18" long in there, see the end grain of the wood and close the door. In reality, when I get up in the morning there is whatever left, I open up the air intakes, go pee, make some coffee, deal with the cat, and then open the loading door, get the reload over with, close the door and get on with my day. In regular weather I reload morning and evening. In cold (local) weather I reload morning, right away home from work and again at bedtime. When it is really cold I will get up in the middle of the night to reload the stove a fourth time daily.

What I am getting at is the new stoves aren't like the old ones. My grandpa (God rest his soul) taught me to open the loading door about every half hour and get in there with a stick of metal to stir things up and throw in whatever more wood would fit. With the old technology that worked good. Now that I have a modern stove, the hardest thing for me to learn to do was to leave the dang loading door closed until the current load was burnt down to embers, and then reload the whole thing all at once - and leave it alone until it is burnt down to a few coals again.

Look for how few coals do you need remaining for an easy reload. How far can you let the last load go and still get the next load lit off easily without smoking out the lounge? Don't forget to ply your troth with great regularity, it is one of the responsibilities and rewards of running your wood burner effectively. Just saying.

I like your style, always good to find a fellow beer aficionado! We are spoiled for choice for great examples of Baltic Porters here in Europe, but have the same issue with beer in general being pumped full of things that make it well, not really beer any more. I tend to brew my own mostly these days anyway. Brewed a spruce beer once actually, I said never again but I used whole branches to infuse my brewing water, not the nice fresh citrussy tips, that was foul.

Appreciate your thoughts on this, I think 'new stoves aren't like the old ones' really hits the nail on the head with everything I'm being told. My Dad has a much older stove, no doubt a polluter but it burns well with no additional restrictive baffles slowing things down from getting up the chimney. I have to resign myself to the fact this stove needs a little more TLC than his.

I actually ended up taking the restrictive baffle out to try it last night, much better. Still a little smoke but we didn't get the stove hot enough and we have lost our ash bed in the process, resulting in an empty space under the grate. Stupid me put the ash in a bag ready to put back in and it got thrown out with a load of other rubbish. We still have a baffle/throat plate so I'm hoping nothing will get damaged and that it's just a small drop in efficiency we've caused. It's not like we use it all the time, our weather isn't cold enough to warrant that. It's more of a lets turn the heating off and watch the stove instead of putting the telly on.

Bit of TLC and a lot of practice I'm sure we will get there. Cheers again

 

[RyanFlynn]

Hi, can I ask did you swap your stove in the end? And if so, have you eliminated the problem in doing so? I have the same stove and the same problem. I know of others with this stove also experiencing the same issue. I don’t believe it is fit for purpose.

 

[philt]

Hi, can I ask did you swap your stove in the end? And if so, have you eliminated the problem in doing so? I have the same stove and the same problem. I know of others with this stove also experiencing the same issue. I don’t believe it is fit for purpose.

Hi, yes we did get it switched out, Portway were very good to be fair with troubleshooting and helping us resolve the issues but to no avail so we did manage to get them to take it back in the end. We replaced with a Fireline Woodtec 5 Wide and had the flue liner insulated and it works great, although we did find the chap who fitted our Portway had done a botched job which probably contributed to some of our issues in the first place.

Interestingly the guys at Portway told us that for optimal operation we'd need 17-18 Pa draught despite the manual saying I believe 12 Pa?

Hope that helps.

 

[mallinder]

Hi, yes we did get it switched out, Portway were very good to be fair with troubleshooting and helping us resolve the issues but to no avail so we did manage to get them to take it back in the end. We replaced with a Fireline Woodtec 5 Wide and had the flue liner insulated and it works great, although we did find the chap who fitted our Portway had done a botched job which probably contributed to some of our issues in the first place.

Interestingly the guys at Portway told us that for optimal operation we'd need 17-18 Pa draught despite the manual saying I believe 12 Pa?

Hope that helps.

We are having the exact same problem with this same Portway Arundel XL multifuel stove. Fitted autumn last year (2022), newly installed flue and fireplace with it. It regularly fills the room with smoke. Not too bad once it's up and running but the first 10-15 mins are grim - comes out of all the vents even with the door closed.

Can I ask how you got Portway to take it back? How long was it since you'd had it installed? Any advice really appreciated.

 

[joop]

I think the manufacturer knows the problem as they tell u not to reload until you have embers. i think its just poor door design ,too big

 

[philt]

We are having the exact same problem with this same Portway Arundel XL multifuel stove. Fitted autumn last year (2022), newly installed flue and fireplace with it. It regularly fills the room with smoke. Not too bad once it's up and running but the first 10-15 mins are grim - comes out of all the vents even with the door closed.

Can I ask how you got Portway to take it back? How long was it since you'd had it installed? Any advice really appreciated.

Wow ours wasn't that bad, nothing came out when the door was closed, sounds like the stove is defective. We contacted Portway customer services who were great to be fair to them. Explained the issues and they tried to help resolve it with new baffle plates etc. until we had no option but to return as unfit for purpose. They did require a commission sheet from installer to prove draught was more than the recommended figure in the manual first. We had it installed in the November and was returned the following Feb.

I think to an extent it's just a common issue on the new Defra approved stoves with the large doors, even the new Woodtec 5 we have, which is still much better than the Portway, will release a little smoke into the room if we burn anything higher than 20% MC to begin with, which is unfortunately all we seem to have thanks to some dodgy sellers but that's another story.

Good luck!

 

[mallinder]

Thanks @philt. That's helpful. I'll contact Portway and start that process. We may need to get the draught test done - no idea if this was done by the installer or not when fitted? Will report back if I find out anything useful!

 

[philt]

Thanks @philt. That's helpful. I'll contact Portway and start that process. We may need to get the draught test done - no idea if this was done by the installer or not when fitted? Will report back if I find out anything useful!

Should be on the commission sheet if the installer filled one out. We had a bit of a nightmare with our first installer as he only filled in a basic certificate of compliance which Hetas told me are now obsolete, so they made him come back and do it properly. I feel there may be a breakdown in communication between Hetas and registered installers though because our second installer only did the basic sheet too.

 

[mallinder]

Great. Will dig out the fitters paperwork and see what we have recorded (if anything!). Thanks @philt 👍

 

[mallinder]

Great. Will dig out the fitters paperwork and see what we have recorded (if anything!). Thanks @philt 👍

Update. So we’ve had the chimney draught tested. 12-18 reading on start up and 30-42 when fire was up to temperature. That doesn’t feel like it’s the issue. Wondering if the next step is talking to Portway?!? Any advice?

With the knowledge that it’s less likely to be the chimney and perhaps the stove design we tried taking out the throat plate and lighting it to see what difference it made. Worked a treat with virtually no smoke into the room - it feels like the plate pushes the smoke right to the front of the stove next to the door and vents. That said I’d imagine most of the heat went straight up the chimney..! Not particularly comfortable leaving it like this. Are there any modifications people do to stoves to aid venting?

Any thoughts anyone?!?

NB. Here’s an image from a few weeks ago of it smoking into the room until it starts motoring…

 

[joop]

thats alot of smoke ,did you check door gasket

 

[mallinder]

thats alot of smoke ,did you check door gasket

Think thats fine (It’s a brand new stove). The smoke is pushed out the the vents along the top face of the stove above the door mainly. It’s weird. It’s foxed the chimney / stove fitter.

The fact that the chimney draught stats look ok, are people’s thoughts that this is a stove design / manufacturing flaw? That’s where we are leaning but thought I’d get advice.

 

[stoveliker]

I think this is a classic draft cold chimney with a reversed draft.
To avoid this, you could take a propane torch and aim it up the flue (as best you can) for a minute or so. That should get the draft going in the right direction.

It's just that there is cold air in the flue that sinks down, pushing the smoke into the room.

And yes, check the gaskets. But it's possible the smoke is coming out of the air intake with the door closed as well.

 

[mallinder]

I think this is a classic draft cold chimney with a reversed draft.
To avoid this, you could take a propane torch and aim it up the flue (as best you can) for a minute or so. That should get the draft going in the right direction.

It's just that there is cold air in the flue that sinks down, pushing the smoke into the room.

And yes, check the gaskets. But it's possible the smoke is coming out of the air intake with the door closed as well.

Ok thanks. Appreciate the reply.

We tried an electric heater pointing upwards in the grate with the door closed for 10 mins the other day and that did help. Didn’t get rid of all smoke but def better. But seems bonkers to do this every time we want to light a fire. We have another stove in the house which lights perfectly every time - not a whiff of smoke.

Good call on checking the gaskets. How would I do this?

 

[stoveliker]

Chimneys differ. E.g. internal vs external etc. The fact that the heater helps suggests that is is indeed the cold air in the chimney that is the culprit.

Check the gaskets with the dollar bill test, or in this case a pound, I presume. Put the bill between the door and the stove where the gasket is. Close the door fully latched. Pull out the bill. It should need some force, some resistance otherwise it's too leaky.

 

[mallinder]

Chimneys differ. E.g. internal vs external etc. The fact that the heater helps suggests that is is indeed the cold air in the chimney that is the culprit.

Check the gaskets with the dollar bill test, or in this case a pound, I presume. Put the bill between the door and the stove where the gasket is. Close the door fully latched. Pull out the bill. It should need some force, some resistance otherwise it's too leaky.

Thanks @stoveliker - helpful tip for testing seal. Will try that. 👍🏼

Other developments. As mentioned above we tried it earlier without the throat plate. While that fixed the smoke problem it lacked heat and kept going out. We’ve since tried putting throat plate back in and taking out restrictor plate. That seems to have helped massively. No smoke, quickly up to temp, all good. This was a test - are we allowed to keep it this way or is it illegal or dangerous in any way?

 

[stoveliker]

I don't know... In the US, appliances are certified (e.g. by the Underwriters Laboratory, UL) for operation as fabricated. Change something and the UL listing is not valid anymore.

I don't know how that works in the UK. CE labels are mfgs self-certifying that the appliance meets regulations (including safety requirements). ETL labels mean it really has been tested.

I am not sure what the function of the restrictor plate is, but making the flow into the chimney more linear might put more flame up there, creating a higher risk for a chimney fire.

If the role is for emissions purposes, then surely the authorities won't like you changing it.

So, I don't know, but given that the general idea about these things does not vary much from country to country (even if the implementation does), I suspect this might now legally be allowed. And it could decrease the safety as speculated on above.

Can you contact the mfg, telling them the symptoms, asking for advice, and asking what the role of the restrictor plate is?

 

[joop]

bunch up a sheet of newspaper put it as far as u can to flue then light it up then start fire it helped with draft might help you.lit up my dovre near end of shoulder season no draft smoked up the house lit some paper bam draft,u could hear it being sucked up

 

[FPX Dude]

that's horrible, you need to make sure flue is drafting before you light, search on ways to do that.