OT: Wood Stove Design

[CalM]

Here is one man's improvements. All three sound modifications IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGZWx0gwRCo

Note the DOUBLE LINED fire box, Not a heat extraction fan.

The stove pipe modification is on the order of those Magic Heat units only DIY. I would NOT care to try to contain a burn through failure of that inner "heat exchanger" 5 inch pipe. Open flue flame out into the room! YIKES!

eta. Some material like well casing might be a better choice than 5 inch galvanized vent pipe;-)

I need to look into the heat of transformation for paraffin wax. (I still like the old Cast Iron radiators on my stove! ;-) That thing is pumping LOTS of heat up to the dining room right now. Must be 140F Too hot to leave a hand on for count of 20. All while the return is "chill".

[MrWhoopee]

Well said but I will add - it's kinda a catch 22 thing, Yes you can even get the lions share of combustion out of your secondary air jets but you have to be careful to not totally smother the main fire either otherwise your kinda defeating the purpose,,, You want to use the secondary air jets in conjunction with the main flame, you want to be able to taper down the main burner but not totally smother it and make it inefficient, Ideally using the secondary air as a "clean up" jet system,,,

If you let the main burner diminish too much you also run the risk of the whole ball of wax going out in the middle of the night ...

True.

On my Buck stove, the primary air control is loosely constructed. Even when the control is completely closed it allows some air in. When I first got it, I "corrected" that by shimming the slide gate so you could actually starve the fire. Then I discovered why it had been built like that. Here's what it looks like when it's settled in for the night.

[A.K. Boomer]

Sometimes you just can't help let it do it's thing,,, this was an extra dry piece of wood and this is my stove in fully closed mode, this was last night BTW,

Note the piece of firewood being consumed from the top down, in fact everywhere there's a secondary jet there's a pocket into the wood....

This was not an ideal situation,

chucked the wood onto an already raging bed of coals and should have waited about an hour, stove room got up to 84 F...

[George Bulliss]

I run a Lopi that has the upper tubes for the secondary burn. When shopping for it I was torn between the basic stoves at Tractor supply and the fancy ones at the fireplace stores. The difference in price was considerable. The Lopi heats convectively by means of an outer jacket that air can flow through. This and the secondary air supply all seemed like a lot of hype but I took the chance and am glad I did.

Compared to the Jotul stove this one replaced, my wood consumption went drastically down. It simply dumps a lot more heat into the house for a given amount of wood. The convective design worked far better than I thought. There is no more getting blasted out of the room, only to find the other parts of the house are still cold. The house is evenly heated and a side benefit to the design is the reduced clearance required, which allowed me to position it closer to the wall. Finally, the secondary combustion feature has made a huge difference on the chimney. I still clean it every year but hardly get anything out of it now. Probably could go several years between cleaning.

Although more than double the cost to purchase, I've saved far more in money and labor just in the wood savings over the years. The new tech stoves are a huge improvement over the old boxes.