So while waiting for the combustion fan, I went to Lowe’s a couple days ago and bought a $79 Craftsman blower/vac. Hooked it up to exhaust and let it rip. A solid 45 seconds of nothing but the blackest soot and buildup came out followed by another minute of debris before it was blowing clean. Just like the vids (I was glad I decided to add about 6’ of vent hose to the exhaust to control it and not have this giant cloud going to the neighbor’s!). Because of work, I wasn’t able to try it until yesterday morning but, no joke: it’s like a completely different stove. I fired it up and it lit in a couple minutes. At that point, I knew something magical had happened. Again, I had no frame of reference to what the flame should look like except from the St. Croix manual, but it was (and is) perfect: spikey, bright, and so far able to go up to level 3 w/o any degrading of flame, only more intense as I assume it should be.
While the fan is supposed to come today and I’ll still install it, the advice from here to try the leaf blower trick was invaluable. I couldn’t be more grateful to the members. If anyone is in same boat, do the trick. Game changer.
Thanks again to the members here for their suggestion!