2017-18 Blaze King Performance Thread PART 2 (Everything BK)

[showrguy]

Is there any recommended method for connecting a manometer to your chimney?

BK spec’s .01 to .05 inches water column, but does not specify WHERE this is to be measured. One would assume in the stove pipe, as close to the flue connection as possible, but this could generate thermal constraints on most manometers and magnehelics.

Any recommendations on connection location? How about fittings for connecting to double-wall stove pipe? I’m thinking of boring a large hole thru outer wall, and then installing a bulkhead fitting in inner wall, but maybe someone has come up with a better method. Getting accuracy near 0.01” WC is not a trivial matter, it’s below the measurement accuracy range of most HVAC instrumentation.

Chris told me they test 32" from stove top on my King, so that's where mine is..
I drilled a 1/ 4" hole through double wall, made a pigtail out of 1/4" copper, slid it in hole, mine is hooked up full time..

 

[lsucet]

Is there any recommended method for connecting a manometer to your chimney?

BK spec’s .01 to .05 inches water column, but does not specify WHERE this is to be measured. One would assume in the stove pipe, as close to the flue connection as possible, but this could generate thermal constraints on most manometers and magnehelics.

Any recommendations on connection location? How about fittings for connecting to double-wall stove pipe? I’m thinking of boring a large hole thru outer wall, and then installing a bulkhead fitting in inner wall, but maybe someone has come up with a better method. Getting accuracy near 0.01” WC is not a trivial matter, it’s below the measurement accuracy range of most HVAC instrumentation.

Yes it should be as close to the collar as possible. the stove top adapter is a good area to connect it. Also it can be replaced if you don't want to have the hole later, but a screw should do the trick.

 

[lsucet]

Chris told me they test 32" from stove top on my King, so that's where mine is..
I drilled a 1/ 4" hole through double wall, made a pigtail out of 1/4" copper, slid it in hole, mine is hooked up full time..

That is good to know. I was told that the closest to the firebox the better. But is BK recommend 32", then that should be.

 

[WhitePlatinum]

Does anyone know if they 28 5/8" Medium shroud height measurement is exactly that when installed. I told the saleslady that 30" is my height measurement and she said the standard shroud will work. Does this sound right?

 

[gastone21]

Does anyone know if they 28 5/8" Medium shroud height measurement is exactly that when installed. I told the saleslady that 30" is my height measurement and she said the standard shroud will work. Does this sound right?

No, it won't work. I've got the standard shroud and my box is 30" and it is quite short. The installer fabbed up a piece of sheet metal that I painted with high temp paint. Looks fine, but I would prefer the larger shroud.

 

[WhitePlatinum]

No, it won't work. I've got the standard shroud and my box is 30" and it is quite short. The installer fabbed up a piece of sheet metal that I painted with high temp paint. Looks fine, but I would prefer the larger shroud.

Thank you, I wonder if I can order the larger shroud by itself.

 

[webby3650]

Thank you, I wonder if I can order the larger shroud by itself.

Yes, no problem.

 

[AlbergSteve]

I had the same problem with my Ashford 30.1's. BK has come up with a fix, which moves the pan farther aft, under the plug hole. It took me 30 minutes to swap out each of mine.

Spoke to Dennis today at BK BC. They don't have the new drawer guides on the shelf, but will send them out when they do. Good job for the summer when I've got everything pulled apart.

 

[AlbergSteve]

Or to reduce clearances to the minimum.

Sorry @webby3650 , the clearance specs I see for the 20 boxes all say 6.5 inches to the back of the stove. Is there a separate clearance spec provided with the optional shield that I don't see published that reduces that clearance?

 

[aaronk25]

I tested 18” up and through the cat thermometer hole. Both read exactly the same pressure drop reading assuming the damper at stove top is open.

Interesting thing is there is a reduction of about .05” of pressure drop by going from wide open thermostat to closed. Lots of vaccum when throttling down. It reduces some as flue cools. My 21’ insulated 6” manufactured chimney runs at
.17 on high so I have to throttle it down.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

 

[Poindexter]

Y'all fooling with manometers need to remember the firebox is a gas generator.

You put 35 # of wood in the box, you shovel out 16 ounces of ash, you generated 34# of gas.

The oxygen input from the air intake is a small portion of the gas your chimney is carrying. You are turning the carbon and hydrogen tied up as "wood" into CO2 and H2O, but wood already has a fair amount of oxygen in it. The O2 (and nitrogen) coming through the air intake is just throughput, the CO2 and H2O generated by burning wood is the net output.

If (when) I get a manometer, the first thing I am going to measure is cold stove, known conditions, bypass open/closed and throttle high/low. Four data points.

Once a fire is lit the temperature of the exhaust gas (especially at the top of the chimney) has such a huge influence on total draft that comparing manometry data among different installs gets problematic very quickly.

I am still stewing on this and will bump the chimney analytics thread when I feel like I have something useful to say.

If you got icicles hanging off your cap your exhaust gas is too cold at the top of the stack. You could throttle the stove up, shorten the stack, or chalk it up to polar vortex this year.

If you don't have icicles on your 30' stack and your burn times are too short you might start agitating for a special stove specifically designed to operate under tall stacks or with very dry (single digit MC) fuel. The Blaze King model Short Bus.

The second thing I would do with a manometer is take one of the screws out holding my double wall to the stove collar and go look for a standing wave.

I wonder if the BK Short Bus will be a princess sized stove under 1.2 grams per hour with Ashford style jacket...

 

[becasunshine]

Well, the wind on the back of the house woke me up out of a sound sleep, so I guess "bombogenesis" is upon us. =/ Definitely have snow on the ground but with the wind howling and pushing everything around, I wouldn't hazard a guess on accumulation yet.

Princess is humming quietly along on last night's load at t-stat setting 1.5. I'll poke my nose out of the front door and grab a few more splits for her presently. Outside temp is 25'F and dropping. Inside temp several feet away from the stove in the open floor plan part of the house is 68'F. It's dropped from 69'F when I first awoke and came out here. I guess I'd better put some more heat into the house to stay ahead of drop in temps coming our way.

I have a question about CAT size- again, pardon me if this is redundant.

I think it was Highbeam? I think? who pointed out that with CAT stoves, it's the CAT that generates the heat, not the firebox/mass of the stove itself. With CAT stoves, the CAT is the horsepower and the size of the firebox is simply the size of the gas tank.

When we bought our Princess, the shop owner strongly favored the Ashford 30 for our situation. I didn't think it would be enough stove for our sometimes challenging winter conditions. No, we aren't Idaho, I get that, but it's sometimes difficult to convey to people who don't live here what that NW wind off of the water feels like. Anyway. I was convinced that we needed at least the Princess and maybe even the King.

Sometimes when we are in the teens and single digits and the wind is howling off of the water, I wish I'd insisted on the King- and that we'd done whatever we needed to do with stove placement to accommodate it.

But- I'm hearing y'all say that really, it's the size of the CAT, not the size of the stove's box. So do the Princess and the King have the same CAT?

Does the volume of fire bricks in the larger box of the King make any difference at all in terms of being a heat sink and providing radiant heat?

Also, I didn't consider it at the time, but it seems that the cast iron cladding of the Ashford makes a difference in terms of heat sink/radiant heat output. Would that have made the Ashford 30 roughly equivalent to the Princess for our purposes?

We also thought seriously about a Woodstock soapstone stove for the radiant heat qualities. Woodstock fell out of contention with us because we had to have the stove professionally installed to satisfy our homeowners insurance. Now that we've lived here for a few years we could probably find a professional installer willing to install a stove that we bought from someone else, but at that time we were coming up empty on that front.

I see a lot of Ashford 30 and Princess stoves on here, and similarly sized stoves in other brands. Does anyone who is active on the forum own a King? If so, how does the King compare on a practical, daily use basis?

My guess is that it's best to buy the stove that matches with the most prevalent conditions, not the stove that accommodates the extremes...

 

[webby3650]

Well, the wind on the back of the house woke me up out of a sound sleep, so I guess "bombogenesis" is upon us. =/ Definitely have snow on the ground but with the wind howling and pushing everything around, I wouldn't hazard a guess on accumulation yet.

Princess is humming quietly along on last night's load at t-stat setting 1.5. I'll poke my nose out of the front door and grab a few more splits for her presently. Outside temp is 25'F and dropping. Inside temp several feet away from the stove in the open floor plan part of the house is 68'F. It's dropped from 69'F when I first awoke and came out here. I guess I'd better put some more heat into the house to stay ahead of drop in temps coming our way.

I have a question about CAT size- again, pardon me if this is redundant.

I think it was Highbeam? I think? who pointed out that with CAT stoves, it's the CAT that generates the heat, not the firebox/mass of the stove itself. With CAT stoves, the CAT is the horsepower and the size of the firebox is simply the size of the gas tank.

When we bought our Princess, the shop owner strongly favored the Ashford 30 for our situation. I didn't think it would be enough stove for our sometimes challenging winter conditions. No, we aren't Idaho, I get that, but it's sometimes difficult to convey to people who don't live here what that NW wind off of the water feels like. Anyway. I was convinced that we needed at least the Princess and maybe even the King.

Sometimes when we are in the teens and single digits and the wind is howling off of the water, I wish I'd insisted on the King- and that we'd done whatever we needed to do with stove placement to accommodate it.

But- I'm hearing y'all say that really, it's the size of the CAT, not the size of the stove's box. So do the Princess and the King have the same CAT?

Does the volume of fire bricks in the larger box of the King make any difference at all in terms of being a heat sink and providing radiant heat?

Also, I didn't consider it at the time, but it seems that the cast iron cladding of the Ashford makes a difference in terms of heat sink/radiant heat output. Would that have made the Ashford 30 roughly equivalent to the Princess for our purposes?

We also thought seriously about a Woodstock soapstone stove for the radiant heat qualities. Woodstock fell out of contention with us because we had to have the stove professionally installed to satisfy our homeowners insurance. Now that we've lived here for a few years we could probably find a professional installer willing to install a stove that we bought from someone else, but at that time we were coming up empty on that front.

I see a lot of Ashford 30 and Princess stoves on here, and similarly sized stoves in other brands. Does anyone who is active on the forum own a King? If so, how does the King compare on a practical, daily use basis?

My guess is that it's best to buy the stove that matches with the most prevalent conditions, not the stove that accommodates the extremes...

I’ve had a King, Ashford, and now a Princess.
The only difference that came from the King was longer burn times. They both performed very well on low settings or could really crank out the heat if needed. The difference in output was the same in my opinion.

The Ashford produced a much milder kind of heat. The cast iron jacket really softened the heat and heavily relied on the blowers to get the job done in my house. I much prefer the big heat a steel stove produces.

 

[becasunshine]

I’ve had a King, Ashford, and now a Princess.
The only difference that came from the King was longer burn times. They both performed very well on low settings or could really crank out the heat if needed. The difference in output was the same in my opinion.

The Ashford produced a much milder kind of heat. The cast iron jacket really softened the heat and heavily relied on the blowers to get the job done in my house. I much prefer the big heat a steel stove produces.

That's good to know- thank you for that.

I don't see many people on here with Kings- at least it hasn't stood out to me anyway.

The Princess is the perfect footprint for the space and place in which it's located. Even the shop owner who installed it commented that the stove fits perfectly there, like the spot was just custom made for a wood stove. It wasn't, to the best of my knowledge. The house was already built when we bought it and nobody mentioned putting a wood stove in here. But with this floor plan, the Princess fits in that spot with enough clearances to where furniture would naturally sit in the room, and it also puts the stove pretty much dead on in the center of the house. It's central to the open living spaces and sits at the end of the hallway leading to the bedrooms. It's also in a direct line to the front door, so bringing wood inside to the stove and taking ash outside is about as easy as it gets.

The King would have likely done well enough in the same space but I think the size would have been a bit more intrusive.

Interesting on the Ashford... I guess I'm used to old school thinking, when people had more chopped up houses and the wood stove was usually in the den. A gentler heat curve was desirable then when one was trying to sit in a more confined space with the stove.

Anyway, I won't waste a lot of CPUs wondering if we should have gotten the King.

 

[kf6hap]

The Ashford produced a much milder kind of heat. The cast iron jacket really softened the heat and heavily relied on the blowers to get the job done in my house. I much prefer the big heat a steel stove produces.

This is one of the main very important reasons I went for the Ashford. The ratio of radiant to convective heat favors a high degree of convective heat. With the stove angled diagonally in the corner of the stove room, the window radiates that wonderful feeling heat into the room while the convective heat (hot air) convecting out of the cast iron cladding heats the adjacent rooms well. Although I don't have the BK fans, I did get a stove top thermo-electric fan to blow hot air into the kitchen. It works very nicely. The constant drift of hot air it produces is quite effective. Some of the other all radiant stoves I have had could make the stove room scorching hot leaving the adjacent kitchen somewhat on the cool side.

I think the little thermo electric fans might last longer on a BK as the stove top temperature is much more moderated compared to an air tube unit. High heat slowly kills the generator.

The welded steel heavily cladded cast iron clad stove is a real heating winner, in my heating situation. Truly the best of both worlds.

 

[kennyp2339]

 

[Ashful]

Highbeam’s statement about the cat producing all of the heat, and the firebox being just a “fuel tank” is true in a low-burn mode. At low burn, the box is relatively cool, and the cat is the primary producer of heat.

However, at a high burn, when you are getting massive heat off the firebox, there is simply no way a King and Princess are anywhere near equivalent. If you believe it to be true, you’re fooling yourself.

The King would have a surface area roughly 28% larger than the Princess (4.0^(2/3) / 2.75^(2/3) = 128%), so at a high burn rate where you are indeed getting lots of heat off the firebox, its output has to be substantially higher. Either that, or the King has some unique inability to actually burn at a similar high rate to the Princess.

 

[Ashful]

Thanks, Kenny. Lots of info on manometer hole location, but no one offering up advice on means of connection? I’d rather not just have a loose copper tube poking thru 2 layers of double wall pipe, dangling from a 1/4” hole. I guess I could use wire harness clamps to fix it to the outer tube, and bend it to penetrate thru a hole, but I had my mind set on a positive connection via compression fitting in inner tube wall. I wonder how the officials make their connection, or the folks in BK’s testing labs?

 

[showrguy]

Thanks, Kenny. Lots of info on manometer hole location, but no one offering up advice on means of connection? I’d rather not just have a loose copper tube poking thru 2 layers of double wall pipe, dangling from a 1/4” hole. I guess I could use wire harness clamps to fix it to the outer tube, and bend it to penetrate thru a hole, but I had my mind set on a positive connection via compression fitting in inner tube wall. I wonder how the officials make their connection, or the folks in BK’s testing labs?

I'll take a picture for ya..

 

[showrguy]

I'll take a picture for ya..

Here ya go ashful..
Edit; my camera was dead, so I had the kido take this with my iPad, you can zoom, I think..

 

[Ashful]

Yeah, that’s sort of what I was thinking, when I mentioned cable clamps. Although the cable clamps could be completely hidden on the rear. So, you just drilled a 1/4” hole, and fed the copper tube thru?

I like the transition from Cu to plastic tubing, before the meter. Nice way to protect the meter from heat transfer. I assume the extra loops of copper were for added cooling, before transition to plastic.

 

[showrguy]

Yeah, that’s sort of what I was thinking, when I mentioned cable clamps. Although the cable clamps could be completely hidden on the rear. So, you just drilled a 1/4” hole, and fed the copper tube thru?

I like the transition from Cu to plastic tubing, before the meter. Nice way to protect the meter from heat transfer. I assume the extra loops of copper were for added cooling, before transition to plastic.

Yes the pigtail is cool to the touch.. The line going to the meter is rubber..
I dunno if you can see in the picture, but I have a piece of 7/8 door gasket between the copper and the stovepipe, where it is clamped..
This will all get painted flat black..
The copper protrudes abou 3/4 of an inch into/past the inner wall of the double wall stove pipe..
Hope that all makes sense ..

 

[Poindexter]

@becasunshine , the size 30 boxes and the princess are very very close together in the BK lineup. I wanted a princess, the wife insisted on either an Ashford - or shop other manufacturers. So we got an ashford.

I have no real regrets. In challenging cold conditions i am confident i could run the princess at max output for a few weeks every season, and spend more of thrle shoulders in 24 instead of 12 hour reload mode.

With just the wife and i home we consume right at 11 kwh daily of electrical average, month in and month out. Thats like running a 1500 watt hair dryer about 8 hours every day, and using no other elctricity for lighting, refrigeration or charging devices. And that same 11kwh daily is about the difference between the ashford and princess.

There is no doubt, as above, in low burn modes the combustor and convection deck are where the heat is coming from.

Also as above, at high throttle settings everythig heats up, the wood in the box, the box and the combustor.

So at low burn the wood can burn very slowly and the smoke keeping the combustor fed and warm is enough to heat a lot of homes a lot of the time.

At high tstat settings you get all the same heat out of your big hot fire as you would with any other technology, with the added benefit of the combustor getting raging hot burning up smoke particles that would other wise be wasted.

The heat from the combustor, the combustor exhaust, crashes into a steel curtain welded to the top of the firebox 3 or 4 inches from the back face of the combustor. That curtain conducts heat to the the top of the firebox, where the deck fans can strip it off and blow it out into the room. It's beautiful.

 

[MissMac]

New hypothesis about where my char smell is coming from after trouble-shooting with the installers at my place today. Draft and my chimney system have been eliminated as the issue, however when we temporarily removed the cat probe and blocked that hole, i could have sworn that my smell problem significantly decreased. Increased as soon as we replaced the cat probe in the hole. I have a convection deck on my stove. Has anybody else experienced issues with char smell coming out of their cat probe hole? Thoughts? Fixes? Seems to me if the stoves are designed to have this hole there, then i shouldn't be getting smells out of it? Is positive pressure at the probe hole even possible?

 

[becasunshine]

@becasunshine , the size 30 boxes and the princess are very very close together in the BK lineup. I wanted a princess, the wife insisted on either an Ashford - or shop other manufacturers. So we got an ashford.

I have no real regrets. In challenging cold conditions i am confident i could run the princess at max output for a few weeks every season, and spend more of thrle shoulders in 24 instead of 12 hour reload mode.

With just the wife and i home we consume right at 11 kwh daily of electrical average, month in and month out. Thats like running a 1500 watt hair dryer about 8 hours every day, and using no other elctricity for lighting, refrigeration or charging devices. And that same 11kwh daily is about the difference between the ashford and princess.

There is no doubt, as above, in low burn modes the combustor and convection deck are where the heat is coming from.

Also as above, at high throttle settings everythig heats up, the wood in the box, the box and the combustor.

So at low burn the wood can burn very slowly and the smoke keeping the combustor fed and warm is enough to heat a lot of homes a lot of the time.

At high tstat settings you get all the same heat out of your big hot fire as you would with any other technology, with the added benefit of the combustor getting raging hot burning up smoke particles that would other wise be wasted.

The heat from the combustor, the combustor exhaust, crashes into a steel curtain welded to the top of the firebox 3 or 4 inches from the back face of the combustor. That curtain conducts heat to the the top of the firebox, where the deck fans can strip it off and blow it out into the room. It's beautiful.

In your situation I would have made the exact same choice, Poindexter. I would choose Blaze King over any other brand. The Ashford is a beautiful stove. If appearance matters (and that's highly personal and very valid, I am sensitive to aesthetics also, the wrong stove in the wrong place will annoy you every day you have to look at it) then the Ashford, Sirocco and Chinook lines address that need. I think of that particular category as BK's "fashion line." As you said, the box size (and honestly, the specs and the BTU output) aren't that different between the Princess and the Ashford/Sirocco/Chinook stoves. I doubt I'd notice a difference in heat output between the Ashford and the Princess if the Princess magically morphed into an Ashford here overnight.

We are fortunate that the Princess' utilitarian looks fit right in with our house and with our location. In fact, for some odd reason (I have no explanation for this, it just is) I prefer plainer stoves to more ornate ones. When we were considering Woodstocks, we were looking strongly at the first iteration of the Ideal Steel line. We were willing to wait for the beta/field testing phase to be completed. We ended up going with plain Jane Princess and we couldn't be happier.

If I had to choose from the Ashford/Sirocco/Chinook line, I'd likely choose the Chinook or the Sirocco. So you can see how the plainer lines of the Princess don't bother me so much.

Another factor in choosing the Princess is that, at least at the time when we bought ours, we got the ever so slight size advantage of the Princess for $1000 less than the Ashford 30. For me that was a no brainer- give me the slightly bigger stove for $1000 less money.

As I said above, I was struggling with whether or not the King would be over the top in our situation. Now that I understand how well these stoves run on low burn, probably not- but we would have had one big daddy of a stove sitting in between our dining room and our living room. It definitely would have been more obtrusive.

If I had it to do over, I'd strongly consider adding the fans as opposed to the heat shield. I did not understand at the time that the fans acted as close clearance heat mitigation even if they weren't running. In all fairness, the shop owner could have explained that to me, but for some reason it didn't register. This is the first wood stove we've owned and for which we've been first person responsible (choosing it, having it installed, using it, maintaining it) and it's a pretty steep curve at first. Lots of front end loaded information. One absorbs as quickly as one can.

On the other hand, the heat shield was inexpensive, and I'm pretty darned happy with the box fan solution. I might follow, was it Ashful's? suggestion and order a smaller desk top/pedestal fan from Amazon just to have a slightly quieter fan in play near the living room. At any rate, the box fan was less than $20 at Walmart, we already own two of them, simple enough.