Bruce M wrote:Rob R. wrote:Are you running the "direct damper" with the handle in the down position? (so the flue gasses go out the side of the firebox).
Hey Rob, I have been running my stove, very similar to this one, with the diverter handle in the up position. With it in the down position it diverts the hot gasses right out of the flue without the benefit of heating the mass of metal that the firebox is. I started doing this in the really cold days when I couldn't get enough heat out of the stove to keep up. I noticed my flue was really hot 300+,and the firebox was relatively cool mid 300's.
Now when I have the stove in the exact same setting and conditions but the handle in the up position, my flue temps go way down to 210* and my stove temps go up to 412*
That diverter never made any sense to me in that why would you want to let the hot gasses escape without the benefit of its heating, I'm really not sure as to why they even have it on the stove, can you or someone enlighten me on this, am I wrong in some way. Really has been puzzling me.
theres a lot of things designed by engineers, that don't work well, and do the opposite of what was intended. I've had to straighten quite a few of these problems out over the past 35 years. the end result was the devices worked better. big picture, the Hitzer 55, 75, 82 stoves are knock-offs of old Riteway 2000, 37 stove designs. that in itself is not a bad thing, that's how technology progresses. but the old RW left a lot of room for improvement. it was a daring design for its time, but its time is not now, it is dated technology. what you found was this: you got more heat by heating up the big metal box body of the stove, then you get heating up the little combustion flue. larger surface of the large stove box will absorb more heat and radiate more heat, than relatively small surface of the combustion flue. overall efficiency = combustion efficiency + heat transfer, and only heating that little combustion flue loses a lot of transfer surface. the combustion flue is more of an emissions device than a heater. its a pseudo catalytic converter. the RW stoves were designed to smolder a big wood load for a long time, and burn the smoke as fuel in the flue rather, than quickly burn the wood in the box. I took one look at the RW37 inside and first thing came to my mind was, this stove would do way better with a huge horizontal baffle in the middle, forget the combustion flue, and run the top exhaust. a cutting edge anthracite stove it is not. someone said Hitzer has been making stoves a long time and knows what they are doing in this thread earlier. that is true, they offer a good value for the price. but these 75, 82, 55 model stoves are old Riteway designs, not original Hitzer designs. this is why we now see these RW knockoffs with heavier doors and spinner drafts on the ash and fire doors. it sure could use them. its not a "Hitzer" thermostat, its a repop of a Riteway thermostat. lets get that straight. I'll venture to say the old RW was a design that didn't really work all that well overall with anthracite, compared to some other stoves, and heated in spite of itself, by the sheer size of the firebox. a sure sign is unburned coal in the ashes, everyone who owned one said they had that issue. also fires going out, that means combustion efficiency is low. the RW designers back then got too caught up with secondary air and burning byproducts of wood. problem: with anthracite, most of the heat comes from the primary burn, not secondary burn. these flue combustors would do better with wood or bituminous coal, where theres a heavy amount of byproducts to burn and extract more BTU's from. you wont extract much BTU's from trying to reburn anthracite exhaust, it burns clean to begin with, theres not much there burn. at best it will be oxidized from the secondary air. once the methane burns off from a fresh load, there is very little byproducts to get heat from with ant coal. problem: divert half the draft to burn byproducts that don't exist or are in short supply, the main under fire draft suffers, combustion efficiency goes down. its a vicious cycle. this is why your stove ran better with the top bypass damper wide open. it got better draft and heated the stove body, and radiated more heat that way.