Yup finally got one. It's been warm here so the Harman has been idling along about 250 and only needing to be shook down and reloaded once a day. Since it's supposed to turn cooler this week, I thought I would liven things up and run the temp up to the mid 300s for a couple of hours tonight. Opened the ash door to liven her up, shook her down, emptied the ashes and started filling her up. Guess I put to much coal in to fast cause the insert cooled down below 280 pretty quickly even though I left a pretty good area of glowing coals exposed. The fire under the coal must have been a lot smaller than I thought because it took almost an hour to bring the fire back to life after loading her up except for the exposed area. I has left the main feed door cracked to allow air in so the volatile gases could burn off and the ash door was open a few inches for good air flow. After a while I noticed that even though I was building a nice thick bed of burning coal the blue ladies hadn't made their appearance yet. It wasn't five minutes after that I heard a nice whoooooomp and got a whiff of sulfur.
Ahhh there's the blue ladies.
The cat was stretched out sleeping in front of the insert and turned into an orange and white streak that vanished into the bedroom when it happened. He's still hiding under the bed and won't come out. Guess he'll be sleeping there tonight.
I'm really glad that I had just emptied the ash pan cause that saved me from having to clean up a mess of fly ash.
Thanks to all the information I've read here, the insert has been going for over a week on one match. I started getting some dead areas in the front and back of the stove up against the firebrick, but a little poking and prodding through the coal bed cured that. BTW, do I get to join the one match club if I can keep this thing running until the end of the heating season?
