OT: Wood burning stove question

[mailbin]

I inherited a WB stove with this house, but no instructions. I lit it today for the first time and realise that I don't know how to set the controls, and without knowing the make/model I can't search for instructions. I presume they're all the same to those in the know but I'm a WB newbie. It's a small (4kW?) stove. There are 3 controls: a rotating air valve at the bottom of the door, a pushrod control beneath the ash tray and a second at the left, at approx the same level. The first pushrod seems to let air in from underneath but I don't know what the other does.

How do I set them?

[Huge]

I trawled through pictures of WB stoves on Google until I found mine, then downloaded a manual ...

The controls usually adjust amount of air admitted at the front ("air wash") and back. There's sometimes a lever to riddle the ashes without opening the doors.

And if you live in London, don't bother. You won't be allowed to use it shortly.

[Brian Reay]

If you have a wood burner you should have the chimney swept- at least once a year. A good 'sweep' will almost certainly recognise the stove - at least the make- or be able to show you the drill.

Seriously, don't neglect the chimney- wood burners deposit all kinds of 'muck' in the chimney and it is just waiting to burn.

You can do it yourself but getting it done once by a proper sweep would be a good idea- firstly you would have a clean chimney you can just give a run through yourself, and solve your other problem.

I'm not a sweep looking for work BTW but I researched wood burners- we were keen to have one. In fact we are still half considering it.

[Brian Reay]

That 'announcement' made me chuckle. It wasn't so long ago the tree huggers were preaching we should be using wood burners to reduce CO2 emissions. THEIR theory being that, while burning wood produces CO2, it isn't CO2 that has been 'locked away' for millions of years (as in the case of coal, oil, gas, etc. or energy derived from them).

I also remember, in the 1970s, when the tree huggers where trying to kill off nuclear power, they were arguing we had enough fossil fuel (especially coal) to last 300 years. Having convinced the government to stop investing in nuclear power, they invented man made global warming.

[Davey]

Very sound advice. It may also be relevant for your home insurance. And if your house happens to be thatched, be very careful of woodburners, they emit air at far higher temperatures than other stoves.

[mailbin]

I tried that for a short time but didn't spot it and other jobs took me away. Perhaps I need to persevere :-(

I wouldn't dream of living in London. Being there for a year in my early

20s was fun, and so are short visits, but I can't think of many things worse than living there (unless you can afford the "nice" bits) now.

[Huge]

We have 2. Very pleased with them. Took me a while to get used to operating them in an optimal manner, especially stopping the sitting room from being a sauna.

Agreed.

Be careful of fires, full stop. When we were looking for a house 2 years ago, Rule #3 was "No thatch". (and to preclude the inevitable questions, Rule #1 was "No neighbours" & Rule #2 "Nothing listed.")

[Davey]

I keep hearing from residents that 'the nice bits' are getting smaller and smaller, and/or are being over-run by people from other countries.

And London seems to be swelling, places that I knew growing up as being in Essex are now referred to as being in London. Woodford, Romford, for example.

[Chris Hogg]

In fact even burning wood-chip or logs increases atmospheric CO2 in the short term. It takes say 50 - 100 years for a tree to grow, slowly extracting CO2 from the atmosphere as it does so, but only a moment or two to burn wood-chip, a bit longer for logs, so the atmospheric CO2 rises in the short term. If we want to reduce our emissions of CO2, burning wood-chip or logs is not the way to go.

[Adrian Brentnall]

If it's anything like the woodburners I've known.... the 'pushrod' will be a 'riddle' - which lets you shake the ashes down into the ash-box. It'll move a system of grids, in one position you'll be able to see through the grid. For wood, they say you should burn on a bed of ashes, so close the grid.

To light, open top & bottom vents, and the door an inch or so if necessary - but don;t leave it like that unsupervised. Once it's going well, shut down the bottom vents (for wood), and control the rate of burn with the top vents, which should create a flow of air down over the glass doors to keep them clean.

Do make sure that your chimney is clear (no starlings' nests) and well-swept - as burning wood can deposit tars in the chimney that can catch fire... which you don't want.

Buy a carbon monoxide monitor, and put it near to the stove. Make sure that there's a source of fresh air for the stove to burn.

After the health warning - they're grand things, if used properly. Adrian

[newshound]

When I joined the CEGB in 1967 or 1970 (depending on your definition) the received wisdom was that we had coal for 300 years, but that oil would run out by the end of the 1980's.

[damduck-egg]

Reading through the posts so far even though you have alluded to it in your comprehensive instructions by putting(wood) in brackets the stove may be a multifuel one rather than just a pure wood burner , if the OP repeats their image search using multifuel as a search term they may find it.

A multifuel can be useful if suitable wood is not easily available for a while or you want to keep a stove in overnight . Best not to mix the two fuels more than necessary as they need different burning techniques and some say the different deposits in the flue are not a good idea.

Depending on the output of the stove and room layout you may find it is too hot near the stove and uncomfortably cool away from it unless you have unbearably hot too sit near. Stove fans that distribute some air came in to the UK approx 20 years mainly as a niche item amongst narrow boat owners etc but are now common. Some are good some not so especially cheap chinese knock off ones on Ebay. Mine is a UK made Stirling engine one , not the cheapest but interesting to watch.

Had mine for over six years so would class it as reliable. Other types can be compared here I purchased a Ventum 111 from them as it works when the stove isn't being run beyond too hard and not hot enough for the Vulcan.

Or you could just experiment with a Chinese cheapy for £30 to see if it suits or makes a worthwhile difference. obviously all these need a stove with a flat top and enough space above it.

G.Harman

[mailbin]

You, Sir, are a star! Searching with multifuel led to: Clearview Pioneer

400.

... snipped

[Huge]

Me too.

[Huge]

[36 lines snipped]

And pointless. Never heard of convection?

[mailbin]

Hmm, I've found various videos and documents that discuss the stove but (so far) nothing that describes what the left-most puch/pull control does.

[Max Demian]

"Tree huggers" makes me think of the 1993 film set in New Zealand called "The Piano" where the Maori kids "hugged" (i.e. shagged) the trees and the white girl got told off for doing the same.

[NY]

I was surprised when I saw this announcement because I though that any city that was designated a smokeless zone prohibited wood as well as coal from being burned. Evidently not, and wood (but not coal) has been permitted. I'm lucky that out in the country we can burn coal and wood and probably will always be able to.

[Brian Reay]

That was why I emphasised THEIR theory, I don't have much time for tree huggers.

[damduck-egg]

On 30 Sep 2017 17:51:11 GMT, Huge wrote:

Could you not say the same about fan heaters?*

The effect may not be as good as claimed by various manufacturers but the ones we have do project the air further forward before it convects upwards, the ventum one I can see gently moving shirts for example hung on a clothes horse a yard away,they don't move with it not in place. The older Stirling Engine one really needs a bigger stove than we have to get really get moving but then I did buy it for my mother who had such a stove before she got too frail to stoke it amongst other things and moved house at which point I reclaimed it , in truth I had bought it knowing that would eventually happen and it was a good excuse to by a Stirling Engine to look at. Her stove was installed an a large farmhouse kitchen alcove that over a century had successively held a large open fire, a 1920's range and a log fired Rayburn. A lot of the convected heat remained trapped in the alcove and into the stone work above, didn't matter when the appliances were in use all day but before she accepted she was too old to feed logs into an appliance she had a halfway stage replacing the Rayburn with an oil boiler for the radiators and then finding the house was colder than before got the wood burner installed. The fan did make a noticeable difference getting the warm air out of the alcove into the room. One day I must borrow/hire a Flir camera and see where the air flow actually goes , with ours I think it sets up a convection within the room itself with the stove on the side of it and adding from the side,some of the air flow is drawn by cooler air passing under the stove up the back and forward around the flue , in our case a rear exit one and then over the top surface by the fan. That will be happening quicker than it would be by natural convection alone so extracting some heat from the flue pipe. Obviously a flue should not run too cold or that will cause problems but if you can extract some the heat that would otherwise go up why not. I think you live in a place with high or no conventional ceiling , the effect in such a room may not be as noticeable.

*FTAOD I don't like fan heaters , noisy charmless things but safer for clumsy children an old people in the days when the radiant bar fire was common.

Our stove fans are almost silent,this laptop is noisier as is the PVR on occasions. The Stirling engine is quite nice to hear chuffing away almost imperceptibly like the ticking of a good clock.

G.Harman