Quaker No. 14- tracking down leaks

If you have a strong draft cold, or with the stove running this product would be good for finding external draft "leaks." Well....unless it flammable


http://superiorsignal.com/smoke-products/smoke-ch ... gKzUPD_BwE

scalabro wrote: ↑

Mon. Nov. 06, 2017 4:59 pm

If you have a strong draft cold, or with the stove running this product would be good for finding external draft "leaks." Well....unless it flammable


http://superiorsignal.com/smoke-products/smoke-ch ... gKzUPD_BwE

That stuff might come in handy to make any tree-hugger neighbors think your eco-friendly and have a wood stove.

Paul

So...relative success! Found that the large plate on the front of the barrel (housing loading door and clinker door) had a large air leak. So I put the furnace cement to it, not pretty but functional. I also sealed the clinker door with chapstick and furnace cement for now. Going to have to grind it down at some point.

However I can now idle the stove down to 175-200ish. Hard to tell my stove thermometers are kind of trash. I have an infrared one in the mail.

Managed to dump half the fire this morning, whoops! The draw grate clinker door thing is going to take some practice.

Primary load door leaks aren't too critical. In fact some air leakage here may help burn off volatiles. Clinker and ash door leaks are critical. These will cause high fires as you've seen. Furnace cement may get brittle over time and may not seal too well. I guess time will tell. Nice numbers on the idling temps! As far as the dump grate, most of these stoves bridge nicely and there's a sweet spot when digging out the bottom of the coal bed. Too much digging and the bed will collapse on you! Like Scott says...it's a game. We like to see how much ash we can dig out before the bed collapses. Seems your on the right path.

Still fiddling around learning the stove, lots to learn. Got my new infrared thermometer, handy little thing. Its nice to not have to rely on the magnetic ones, I knew they were pretty inaccurate. Stove is running 417 on the barrel and 128ish behind the damper at the moment. Still can't idle it down super far but on the low end I can get it down to around 250. That will be fine now that cold weather is here. Might be an issue come spring, but hey not bad for a craigslist score put right into action. Coal consumption seems pretty good so far compared to the chubby. Radiates more heat too.

Some stoves just won't run slow and low. But there are alternatives.

Remember that heating a space is not just about how hot a fire the stove has, but what heat volume it can produce too. You may not be able to lower the firebed running temps and have the stove keep burning efficiently, but you can lower the heat volume and still keep a healthy firebed that burns efficiently.

Come spring you can do what some stove owners do, add a fire brick, or two to the firepot by standing a firebrick up on end in the firepot to displace some of the coal. The firebrick affectively reduces the fire pot size, and thus the heat volume that fire bed puts out. But it does not reduce the depth of the remaining firebed, which is critical to keeping control for burns that don't waste coal - such as lowering the firebed depth to lessen the heat output would cause burn control problems.

Paul