Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
As promised (almost), I drove down to the wood stove store today to check out the scene. I was having a little trouble with the price of the wood stove insert that I wanted and needed to see if there was anything less expensive. I also wanted to see what the free standing wood stoves looked like. We can easily put one of them in the fireplace.
When I got there, I did my typical “guy” stroll around to browse all the stoves and inserts. I see it every time. The guys walk in with their hands in the pockets making grunts and noises, like “hmmm” and “hmmph.” It’s so funny because I do it too. There is kind of a lot to take in. Good thing the sales guy walks out to put things in perspective. I must say, I really love wood stoves and stuff like that.
I saw the “Hampton HI300 Wood Insert” that I wanted. It’s just as nice as I thought it would be. If money wasn’t an issue, I would tell them to pack it up and bring it over. Since I really don’t want to drop that kind of coin, I am becoming more and more interested in a smaller free standing wood stove. Remember, we already have the pellet stove, so we don’t really need that much more heat. Just something to keep my toes warm, something that doesn’t use electricity and something that will burn all the wood I am cutting down so I don’t have to watch it rot in the woods.
The sales guy introduced me to the more “economical” line of DutchWest wood burning stoves. They are pretty good looking and don’t have a lot of frills. Here is a picture I just took from the brochure.
DutchWest free standing wood stove
It’s cute, isn’t it? It’s also about $1000 less than the other one. A large part of the expense comes from the lining of the chimney and the installation. Heck, if all I needed was the stove, I could just run over there with the trailer and pick it up. That’s not the way it works anymore. Now, you need to have a 35 foot piece of insulated lining stuffed down the entire length of the very tall chimney and attached to the stove. All of that extra stuff actually costs more than the stove itself. At least I managed to drop the price somewhat.
I am hoping to have the stove stand on the stone outside the fireplace. The stove is 17 1/2 inches from front to back and the slab of stone is about 20 1/2. If we can do this, I can still access the side door to put longer (up to 19″) pieces of wood. That would be good. Otherwise, I will have to load shorter pieces through the front and cut about two inches off the stove legs so it fits inside the fireplace.
Anyway, I’ll get into all that stuff later if I decide to get this stove. I’ll make my decision by Saturday.
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Monday, November 24th, 2008
As I mentioned earlier in the season, we had a St. Croix Prescott EXL pellet stove installed in the basement.
Before the Winter season really began, I had my doubts on whether or not the pellet stove would heat the entire house. I was worried that it’s location would hinder the airflow to all the rooms upstairs. Well, I am happy to inform you that the stove does heat the entire house. I mean, if we keep the master bedroom door shut, it does. The master bedroom is over the garage and the furthest room from the stove. It’s also the coldest room, which is why we keep the door shut. When the time hits 10:30PM, the new digital thermostat cranks the heat in that room up to 65 degrees. That’s good enough for me.
We have had some nights already where the temperature has been in the 20s. I think that’s Winter and enough to tell me that the heating situation is going to be okay. I did try burning a fire in the regular fireplace a few times while running the pellet stove. The fireplace actually made things worse. It sucked so much air out of the house, all the rooms dropped a few degrees. Fireplaces are remarkably inefficient and really shouldn’t be used, in my humble opinion. If you want to run something in your fireplace, run a free standing wood stove or a wood stove insert. Even burning a fireplace for aesthetics on a cold day will freeze out the rest of your house. Nuff said.
Okay, we are having a little issue with the pellet stove.
A few nights ago, I tried to start it up. The start up procedure really isn’t very difficult on the Prescott. It basically consists of pushing the “on” button. Once the “on” button is pushed, the room blower turns on for about 10 seconds and the auger turns until the burn pot is approximately half way full of pellets. As the auger is turning, the ignitor kicks on and the pellets light up. It’s fun to watch and I sit there almost every time I light the stove doing just that. I smile when I see that flame dancing around inside that pellet stove.
Back to a few nights ago…when I tried to light the stove this particular time, I pushed the button. The fan turned on for about 10 seconds and then the stove just shut off. I am not sure if the auger ever turned to drop pellets into the burn pot.
I tried to light the stove a few more times when I noticed the #2 light blinking on the control board. I thought this was a little strange, since I had never seen that light blink before. I pulled out the owner’s manual and looked up that error code. Apparently, a lack of negative pressure causes the stove not to light and the #2 light to blink.
What can cause a lack of negative pressure? Well, a really windy day can do it, an open pellet stove door, a fireplace burning upstairs perhaps, a clogged air feed pipe or a clogged exhaust vent pipe. I am sure there are others, but these are the ones I remember.
Since I had a fire already going upstairs in the fireplace, I chalked the whole thing up to that. I got the pellet stove going in this instance by pulling the rubber tube off the vacuum switch and lightly sucking on it. When I heard a little “click,” I pushed the on button again. From here, things were fine. I held the crimped hose for a few minutes and then I hooked it back up the proper way.
Well, I tried to light the stove again the next night. The same thing happened. Since we had no fire going in the fireplace, I thought perhaps there was a clogged area in the stove somewhere that is causing the lack of vacuum, or negative pressure.
Let’s make a really long and boring story a bit shorter and to the point.
I cleaned out the entire stove about 10 times and nothing has changed. Every night, I suck on that hose to get the stove up and running. I have been reading the owner’s manual as well as some websites that deal with this kind of situation, but nothing has helped. One website said that a clogged exhaust vent is the sure-fire problem. I got excited and took off the clean-out cap. A little pile of ashed dropped out, but nothing changed.
This afternoon, I called the pellet stove dealer. I told them that I had pretty much narrowed the problem down to a faulty pellet stove vacuum switch and that I would need the tech to come out and take a look. Before we swap out the switch, I want him to hook up a vacuum gauge to see if there is proper negative pressure. If there is, we can replace the switch…if not, we have to do a bit more digging.
I keep going downstairs to investigate this issue. It is in my blood that I try to diagnose this problem myself. The only things I don’t have are a vacuum gauge or a new vacuum switch. I guess I need those things to solve the problem.
If you have ever experienced something like this with your pellet stove, please let me know. I am racing against time here. I want to beat the repair guy and figure this out myself.
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Thursday, September 11th, 2008
It was a bit chilly last night at around 50 degrees. It wasn’t chilly enough to make a fire, but I did anyway. I wanted to see how everything worked. I mean, I know how everything works, I just wanted to see it in action.
I made a fire with some fairly green wood I took out of the woods a few weeks ago. It was a little smokey and hissed, while the moisture evaporated out of the ends of the logs. I know that kind of wood isn’t meant to be burned, but it had to be done.
After a while, the fire got going pretty good…
Fire in fireplace
I am not sure how much heat this fireplace is going to produce this Winter. From what I have been reading, not much. Fireplaces aren’t too efficient. I guess the issue is that when the fire goes out, all the heat in the house goes right up the chimney. This fireplace does have glass doors though, so I can close them before we go to sleep, stopping some of the heat from escaping the house.
I really want the Hampton Wood Insert HI300. This wood burning stove insert has a nice, glossy baked on enamel so it looks really good. It has a BTU of 75,000, an efficiency of 77%, can handle a log size of 18″ and has a burn time of 8 hours. Also, this wood stove has an optional blower, so you can really pump up the heat.
I hate the fact that I have been thinking about this wood stove so much, because that means I am most likely going to get it. I just want to get into the season a bit to see how the pellet stove does.
I like the idea of having both a pellet stove and a wood stove.
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Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Well, we found out last night.
Back when I was trying to make my decision between purchasing either a pellet stove or a wood burning stove, I heard that a major benefit of the wood stove is that it will keep burning if the power goes out. Ok, that was a factor, but not a huge one since we could probably figure out some other way to keep warm if the power went out and the heat shut off. It might suck, but I think we would figure something out. The other argument was regarding the pellet stove. Some people told me that if the pellet stove was burning and the power went out, the fans would stop and the house would fill up with smoke.
Last night, I was laying in bed having a dream about me running nude through a field of marigolds, when I was suddenly awakened by the sound of our computer battery backups beeping. I said, “Uh oh.” I jumped up to see everything pitch black. It was about 2AM. I knew the power went off because our white noise filter shut off and the neighbor’s lights weren’t on. I got out of bed and powered down the computers and checked on the pellet stove, which was humming right along a few minutes before. The pellets were kind of sitting there glowing. There was no smoke coming out anywhere, because I sealed up the exhaust pipe earlier, nice and tight, with high temperature sealer. I was walking around trying to find the flashlight, which I couldn’t. I silently blamed Laura for this until I found it on the bathroom floor this morning. I kind of left it there. Whoops. I used our oil lamp.
Anyway, when the power goes out, no smoke will escape a pellet stove, unless you open the door, like I did. I wanted to see if there was a natural draft, due to the exhaust pipe being higher than the intake pipe and the stove itself. No, there was no natural draft, which leaves me a little puzzled, because it was the manufacturer’s suggestion to set things up this way, for this particular case. I only opened the door a crack, just to see inside. The instant I opened it, I noticed a thick steam of smelly smoke floating up from the opening. I quickly closed the door, but the smoke already kind of stunk things up a bit. Not too much, but enough to smell.
I went back to bed with no further incident. There you have it. Bye.
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