Coalpail.com Forum

First time posting here.

I've been burning coal going on my 4th season.

I finally have a mystery, hope someone can help.

Like the title say's, I built a new chimney cap this year because the old one rotted away.

Now my house does not get hot. I had the stove (harman MKI) Burning at 525 degrees this weekend and my kitchen where the thermostat is one room away will not go over 70 If I were burning that hot last year it would be 76-80 degrees.

My old cap was about 8 inches from the chimney pipe to the cap top surrounded by screen mesh.

My new home made cap is Stainless tube 14 inch dia. 18 inches high with 2" holes all over it. The base plate under the cap is completely sealed. Can this make a difference in my house temp?

I closed the barometer flap to burn hotter but the house just will not heat up any higher. At this tempature in my 1600 ft.ranch house the bedrooms and bathroom are ccccold. But not the last three years.

I hope the pic works.

is it easy to remove the cap and see if that makes a defference,and go from there. Dennis

Has the new cap increased your draft somehow, so a lot of your heat is being sucked out the chimney.

Sounds like maybe your draft increased by using the new cap and the heat is going up the chimney. If you closed the barometric damper, that would only make it worse since that would increase the draft through the coal bed. Do you have a manometer to measure the draft?

Whats the temp on the flue pipe?

oops....typed too slow!!

This should open a can of worms With that MarkI I would lose the baro--or foil shut & install a MPD & keep it closed all the way to start & go from there--mine is closed all the time--warm weather,cold, whatever..Nice job on the cap.I firmly believe the baro is for poor/over drafting chimneys--if yours is good, why bother with more auto-mated stuff, which I have very little faith in.

Does the stove not reach the same temperature it did previously? ...or just the room temperature? If the stove tops out at 525 now and it used to run at 650 (for example), I would suspect that this cap has changed the draft. If the stove has always run at 525, something else has changed.

Dennis wrote:is it easy to remove the cap and see if that makes a defference,and go from there. Dennis

I agree. There is no benefit to a chimney cap during the winter.

I think you just invented the perfect swirl chamber. Make it conical and sell it as a micronizer. Tough for a newbie to see how it would function.

Rob...

I can heat my house HOT at 400-450 degrees, I cranked it up to 525 to see if there would be a difference, there wasn't.

Anyway, I just cut the pipe in half so instead of there being 5 rows of holes from top to bottom there is 2-1/2.

We'll see how this works

the best thing you can do is leave the flue open on top with NO cap.

Berlin wrote:the best thing you can do is leave the flue open on top with NO cap.

I would certainly try that But.......

Wouldn't I have to worry about Rain? Heavy Rain, a Bad storm?

Not unless it leaks into your house .... like mine did. Black spooge oozed through my white paper squares on the ceiling every time it rained. The reason is because it jogs to one side immediately after the roof line .. and the mortar will fall out if you stare at it too long. The cap fixed that problem.

pinhart wrote:

Berlin wrote:the best thing you can do is leave the flue open on top with NO cap.

I would certainly try that But.......

Wouldn't I have to worry about Rain? Heavy Rain, a Bad storm?

No. If you have a good chimney, you'll need to find something else to worry about.

pinhart wrote:I just cut the pipe in half so instead of there being 5 rows of holes from top to bottom there is 2-1/2.

My gut reaction when I first saw the cap was "Nice work, but I'll bet it doesn't have enough air flow". So.... if my gut is right, I think rather than cut it in half, I'd have doubled the holes. Or.... Spent the money for a cap made for the chimney.

Do you have a manometer? If not, you are just guessing what the draft is.

Well, making the tube shorter did not help.

Same temp in the house, and the stove is still burning hot enough to heat the entire house

I need to get a manometer.

I will try taking the cap off for a while today but I still don't understand.

Freddy wrote:Or.... Spent the money for a cap made for the chimney.

Yep, you are right, I guess there is a time and place for DIY projects and apparently this isn't one of them.

Regardless, this is still a mystery to me.

THANK YOU, to everyone who is actually offering help.

I agree with freddy. I think you cut the air flow down when you replaced the wire mesh type with this solid cylinder with holes in it. Let us know how it works with the cap totally off.

My house has never had any chimney caps. I am not adverse to them, Just never got around to ever putting any on. Never experienced any problem during rain storms.

Vin.