Smokeless stove

[visionset]

Untill very recently you've not been able to get low

[Guy King]

The message from "visionset" contains these words:

Just make a stamp from a kid's toy printing set. No one will ever know.

[auctions]

Do you need an exempt appliance? Surely you just need to not produce smoke beyond the allowable limits, and using a Pioneer without the stop, but always using it with the slider in the right position, complies with the regs. You can be prosecuted for generating the smoke but not for having the appliance fitted, otherwise open fires wouldn't be allowed because you could burn non smokeless fuel!

Also, I think the adaptation is a new thing as Pioneer stoves were advertised as smoke control compliant ~5 years ago when I was looking, so unless they know the exact age of it, the smoke Police wouldn't know whether it was supposed to have one.

A

[Rednadnerb]

We went through the same thought process over that same Clearview model.

Smoke is only produced when the air is cut off to such an extent that the wood begins to smolder instead of burn, so you are paying =A3180 for a device to stop you from turning the air control knob right down.

We decided we'd rather keep the =A3180 and pay a bit of attention to what we are doing.

Brendan.

[visionset]

I was told that there was also a change to some baffle. I'm going to the shop tomorrow to investigate in person. Do you think a tamper proof fixing can be retro fitted? The last thing I want after so much deliberation is to be felled at the final hurdle by some one from the council fining me a grand.

The problem as I see it is even if you never slumber the stove there will be smoke at start up and I bet you can smell it in the air regardless. So then it only takes some slimey git to report you for you to be in position you must be able to defend.

-- Mike W

[AJH]

What do you mean by slumber?

Yes there will always be smoke at start up even using dry wood, This is to do with the thermal inertia of the wood and the bits of stove it contacts, gas and oil burners needn't suffer this so their flame can burn hot straight away. Wood has to go through three phases, drying, pyrolysis+charburning and secondary combustion of the offgas produced. The type of smoke produced relates to each of these phases and I find you need to get the flame temperature up to around 800C before you get a smokeless burn. Trouble is with batch loaded stoves is that you quench the combustion temperature each time you load it. With the pellet and chip burning stoves the aim is to run them fairly constantly and modulate output by slowing, or altering the mark space ratio of the feed. What they always do is maintain a good flame, this secondary combustion is what keeps the burn clean. Turning down air supply means most of the air gets used to burn char, the heat from this continues pyrolysis but then there may be insufficient air or temperature to maintain the clean secondary burn, hence the flue gases also contain the products of incomplete combustion, often formed on the nucleus of a water droplet. This looks like soot but contains some nasty carcinogens, hence the first noted industrial related cancer was found in young chimney sweeps ( the ones that actually entered the chimney.

So it's probably OK to "slumber" the stove once its fuel has been reduced to char, this will inevitably increase the concentration of CO in the flue. Having said that if you can see any smoke then the CO levels are too high.

AJH

[The Natural Philosopher]

Excellent and informative..thanks.