hi, im fairly new to wood burning. a few years ago, while working construction, had acquired a free wood stove in good condition. it was one of those "hey can you get rid of this thing for us" type of things, which kindly obliged. the stove, which was an old blaze king, as old as i am, had what looked like new bricks, and even a new door seal in it but had not been burned in quite some time. a genuine score if you ask me. we manhandled it to my basement which i decided i was going to cut some heating bills by burning down there. so far, all is well. well when i first went to fire it up a year ago, i noticed it did not put out much heat at all. i had the thermostat cranked up all the way and you could still about touch the stove it was so cool. well after having had a friend come over to help trouble shoot, we realized that someone who had taken off the butterfly cover had put in a long sheet metal screw and it was preventing the butterfly from opening thus very little air entering. we backed out the screw a little and from there on, it put out some really nice heat.
my biggest complaint (besides wow, this burns a lot of wood) was the color of the stove. it was a butt ugly baby puke yellow-ish color. so i decided that over the summer i was going to repaint it flat black. i had some flat black 2,000 degree header paint in the rattle can in the garage i was going to use but realized it had ceramic in it and figured it would have not been a good choice so i got some stove/grill paint.
now the strange part. this year, i have noticed a difference in how hot the stove gets with its new paint job. it really bellows out the heat now. where i had to have it cranked up to '3' (the highest setting) last year with the baby puke yellow-ish color, to get a reasonable amount of heat out of it, it is now set to about 1.5 to 1.75 to get enough heat to get the house toasty warm. the wood i used last year had been dried for over a year and am burning out of the same stack as last year. has anyone had this situation happen to them? is there really that big of a difference in the amount of heat a stove radiates with the color of the stove? there really is no problem here but i was just curious if anyone had similar results.
my biggest complaint (besides wow, this burns a lot of wood) was the color of the stove. it was a butt ugly baby puke yellow-ish color. so i decided that over the summer i was going to repaint it flat black. i had some flat black 2,000 degree header paint in the rattle can in the garage i was going to use but realized it had ceramic in it and figured it would have not been a good choice so i got some stove/grill paint.
now the strange part. this year, i have noticed a difference in how hot the stove gets with its new paint job. it really bellows out the heat now. where i had to have it cranked up to '3' (the highest setting) last year with the baby puke yellow-ish color, to get a reasonable amount of heat out of it, it is now set to about 1.5 to 1.75 to get enough heat to get the house toasty warm. the wood i used last year had been dried for over a year and am burning out of the same stack as last year. has anyone had this situation happen to them? is there really that big of a difference in the amount of heat a stove radiates with the color of the stove? there really is no problem here but i was just curious if anyone had similar results.
