Might Be a Dumb Question, but Here Goes...

I burn both wood and coal and found that with a barometric damper, the wood is constantly screwing up the balance and didn't want to take it apart all the time to clean it. I got rid of it this year and it has been working great with just a Manual damper. Now that it finally got cold I am getting a reading of .4-.5 on my manometer. I don't want all my heat going up my chimney so I though about either filling in one half of the hole on the manual damper itself. (My damper is a circle with two half moon cut outs in the center of the cast iron circle) OR ,which may sound stupid, but I want to hear your comments, is adding a second manual damper. Thoughts? opinions? I know thats what a barometric damper is for, but I do not want one.

If that reading is AFTER the damper, on the chimney side, then it doesn't matter. If that's BEFORE the damper, just close the damper a bit more.

You shouldn't be using a barometric damper with wood anyway, if you have a chimney fire then you have a chimney fire on steroids.

One other thing to note if you do have creosote in the chimney based on what I have seen others post the coal will dry it out and it can come down in big chunks possibly blocking he flue.

what smitty said...
why not put the baro back and cover it when ur burning wood?

If you are burning wood, you should get rid of the barometric damper right away. A chimney fire from creosote would cause the damper to go wide open and massively fan the flames and intensify the heat of the fire. Barometric dampers are useful for coal burning because coal has no creosote.

oops....and Richard too!

Hey Muss, the only dumb questions are the one's we don't ask. Is your MPD ( same style) completely closed--that's how I keep mine, warm, cold, whichever kinda weather--my under vents do the fire controlling--the only time I open it is when filling hopper.

When I was burning wood in the Mark III during the boiler install, I put a shopping bag over the baro. I had drafts upwards of .10, but there was still plenty of heat coming off the stove, so I didn't care.

I have an unlined crumbling masonry chimney with 2 jogs in 2 different directions - just approaching chimney fire temps would be disastrous for this place. In this case, heat up the chimney is good - less creosote.

if you have a 90* going to your thimble replace it with a T and put the baro in the end of the T when burning coal and replace it with a cap when burning wood. it makes it easy to vac out the fly ash laying in the horizontal run thru the thimble too. it takes less than 10 minutes to do if you have sight marks on the baro and the T to line things up.

i know some here will not like putting the baro in that position, but if you use a manometer to set your baro weight it works just fine.

First, let's find out where the mano reading is. Between stove and manual damper?

Mano is between stove and damper. I have my manual damper complete closed and it still reads .5 sometimes

Lightning wrote:First, let's find out where the mano reading is. Between stove and manual damper?

Lightning.... I bet with all those holes on your flue pipe sealed with screws you can tell us the % impact of the mano reading from one spot to the other!!

Here are some pics of the set-up, first of the stove set-up and the second of the Mano and damper

Muss44 wrote:Mano is between stove and damper. I have my manual damper complete closed and it still reads .5 sometimes

In my opinion that is a good thing. You don't want the manual damper killing your draft, and 0.05" of WC is a pretty good (and safe) place to be maintaining it.

Lightning wrote:First, let's find out where the mano reading is. Between stove and manual damper?

I think he's their bro no baro, mpd closed, draft controls dialed down... he's seems to be pulling a lot (hence, why he wants to block out more of the MPD exposure to draft). I will use Larry's analogy here for the poster (it appears it might be a circumstance he spoke of)... If your smoking a pipe and your taking a draw (you can use your thumb to cover that pipes hot bowl of tobacco and the "draw" is still going to come 100% through the burning tobacco) AKA=MPD... if you drill a hole in the side of the stem of that pipe you are NOW alleviating the burning up of that tobacco to some degree AKA=Baro... mind you... these circumstances change drastically from stove to stove and chimney to chimney so their is NO "right" answer... only the answer that may work best for "YOU". I believe your one of the folks who needs and should use a Baro!

Obviously don't use a baro with wood (that's a no brainer!), but their are plenty folks who can give you some recommendations how to safely get around that hurdle as previously mentioned.

Woot Woot... finally got a chance to use my Corn Cob Pipe analogy