The little tube on the side of the stoker inside the stove is to blow air on the glass door in a vain attempt to keep it clean. You can see it clearly in this picture:
You may want to pull the grate out and clean under it before cementing it back in because:
You say your stove is top vent, not rear vent. I don't know how the "guts" of your stove is set up, but on mine, as Greg said, the heat exchanger area gets plugged with fly ash over time and is very difficult to clean. I take a flexible washing machine drain hose and tape that to my shop vacuum hose and snake that up inside the heat exchanger above the firebox once or twice a season. It seems to work well, but it is a pain in the butt to do. When I brought the stove home (rusty and well used/neglected), in the process of moving it and tipping it on its sides, I must have knocked 10 pounds of ash out of it. I can imagine it didn't put out much heat.
Does your combustion blower run all the time? The older stoves had it wired to only run with the stoker motor. I wired mine to run 24/7 like the newer stoves. It sounds like yours does not, and with your chimney setup, I can see why your fire goes out. I doubt you have enough draft to keep the fire going without the combustion blower to help. Start with the combustion blower shutter 1/2 open. That's where I run mine and it seems to be about right. Mine is direct vent, but I adjust it for -.02 draft. At idle, I'll have about a 1" strip of burning coal. I've never run it long enough to max out the burn before my basement turns into a sauna, but I run the feed rate 3 full turns out. My idle timer box has 5 pins every 10 minutes (each pin is 15 seconds).
Hope this helps. My stove is 100% reliable. The operator of the stove...not so much....
I cover the combustion blower up prior to cleaning the glass and taking the ashes out to cool the stove for a few minutes. The other morning I forgot to take off the postcard over the blower intake and the fire went out. I came home to an ashpan full of coal....
Oh well, a couple of lumps of natural charcoal, torched it for 20 seconds, and away it went again.....
Chris
