by mannytheseacow » Sat Sep 06, 2014 7:03 pm
I fired it up this morning. Sorry no pictures right now because I'm out of bandwidth.
I left 2 candles burning in it over night- one in the wall thimble and one at the far end of the bench. I put aside 3# of wood and got her going first thing this morning. Inside temp was 69*, outside temp 54*. Hot water tank was at 94* and the coil was sitting at 68* at start up.
First of all, what a behemoth! The feed on these 8" stoves is huge! I'm definitely going to burn more wood this year because I can fit like twice as much in at a time. First question- with these bigger stoves can you burn bigger chunks of wood or does it tend to creep out the feed?
Ok, anyway... Fired it up! After 15 minutes the barrel was running at 750*, and the coil was pumping 134* water. I just ran a single batch of wood through it to burn the form away and see how it worked. It quickly heated up my chilly house, but it is back in the 70's today so I didn't really want to heat the mass up much. I let the fire go out and after a while checked the water tank again and it was at 114* (before the solar panels had kicked in).
Here's a couple of thoughts: 1. Sweet! Well worth the effort of rebuilding. 2. The bypass is awesome. There wasn't a hint of smoke back even with a cold wet mass. 3. The coil seems work well despite the small size. 4. It was very interesting to me to play with the damper on the coil. First, by closing the damper on the bypass the coil temperature jumped almost 10 degrees. Second, as the plywood around the feed was burning away the stove started pumping. I opened the coil damper and it just started drawing that smoke down like crazy. 4. The color of the core is very dark, I'm pretty sure from the addition of the fire mortar added to the mix. I didn't think I added that much but the color seems to give the appearance that I did.
Anyway, I'll put some pictures up when my computer connects to the internet again. It's all done except for the top plaster coat but I want to let the mass dry out much more before plastering. Time to clean up the living room.
"Knowledge is power. Arm yourself."