2017-18 Blaze King Performance Thread PART 3 (Everything BK)

[Nigel459]

Okay softwood guys, is it okay to burn the splits that are coated with pitch like this? This is just natural pitch near the bottom of Douglas fir. It’s dry and pretty hard. Any special considerations?

My .02

Put it on the bottom, like pitch side down, not the top, unless you want a light show...

Neat pic: high octane wood!

 

[drz1050]

You guys are killing me.. the soapstone is bad because it's a buffer, but the cast iron is good because it's a buffer... they do the exact same thing, soapstone being better at it. The side panels of the Ideal Steel are not mounted directly to the firebox, there's an air gap just like the Ashford.

 

[Poindexter]

Okay softwood guys, is it okay to burn the splits that are coated with pitch like this? This is just natural pitch near the bottom of Douglas fir. It’s dry and pretty hard. Any special considerations?

Thats a beauty. I would save it for a hot reload under an already active cat on a cold night, no other considerations.

 

[kf6hap]

You guys are killing me.. the soapstone is bad because it's a buffer, but the cast iron is good because it's a buffer... they do the exact same thing, soapstone being better at it. The side panels of the Ideal Steel are not mounted directly to the firebox, there's an air gap just like the Ashford.

Great. Then, it will probably operate, at least somewhat, like an Ashford but I don't think it will approach the burn time and excellent thermostatic control of the BKs though. It appears other stove manufacturers are trying to catch up with the BKs performance.

 

[coutufr]

I own the Ashford and I believe it to be not only efficient but nice to look at. It is not necessarily the best stove for your application but if you need to have your stove in the room where you spend most of your time you with be glad it is jacketed.

 

[Ashful]

I own the Ashford and I believe it to be not only efficient but nice to look at. It is not necessarily the best stove for your application but if you need to have your stove in the room where you spend most of your time you with be glad it is jacketed.

I think this is the best summary point I have seen, recently. I’d love to own a King, or even a Princess, but they both lose on style points.

You guys are killing me.. the soapstone is bad because it's a buffer, but the cast iron is good because it's a buffer... they do the exact same thing, soapstone being better at it. The side panels of the Ideal Steel are not mounted directly to the firebox, there's an air gap just like the Ashford.

Hah... this is the “BK Performance Thread,” what did you expect? They’re surely trash-talking the Ashford in the Woodstock Performance Thread.

 

[AlbergSteve]

Okay softwood guys, is it okay to burn the splits that are coated with pitch like this? This is just natural pitch near the bottom of Douglas fir. It’s dry and pretty hard. Any special considerations?

I was splitting some 3' dfir rounds a few weeks ago, they had huge pitch pockets in them. It was running out in small pools on the ground... can't wait to get it in the stove next year!

 

[SuperJ]

My $0.02 on the thermal mass thing.

• I appreciate having some mass so I don't overheat the place when reloading in the shoulder season.
• Thermal mass and air gap convection are two different things (but sometime come together when you get a cast over steel stove).
• Stove mass temps and flue gas temps are two totally different things.
• With a properly built fire with dry wood and kindling, you can engage the cat way before the cast iron is up to temp. Once your flue gasses are north of 500f you can pull the trigger on the cat. I'm not waiting for my surface temps to go over 500f. In fact I would wager an Ashford might come up to temp faster than a Sirocco/Princess due to the castings actually making the inner steel firebox run hotter.
• Your cast iron/soap stone will heat up even faster after cat engagement because not all the heat is going up the chimney (like when your bypass is open).
• I haven't done the math about the specific heat capacity of the cast iron or soap stone, but I think switching some of the radiant heat output to convective is a bigger deal than the increased thermal mass. There must be some low mass convective stoves on the market (steel over steel with an air gap and top and bottom vents? or maybe that's basically a chinook?).

 

[Niko]

@Highbeam can you do me a favor when you do get your smoke spillage form reloads can you try to write down some specifics or any one else that come across this. Maybe i will go out and see if my chimney needs a cleaning and take my black pipe also. My chimney flu was 400+ this time and I just cant figure out why the smoke is coming out. My chimney top is not clogged at all from what I can see.

 

[begreen]

It could be that at times the sloped front of the stove allows a bit of smoke to spill instead of being sucked up the flue. In that case there is not too much you can do about it that you are not already doing.

 

[Ashful]

My $0.02 on the thermal mass thing.

• I appreciate having some mass so I don't overheat the place when reloading in the shoulder season.

• 
  
  I agree with your primary points, except this one. The thermal mass, within the range of values we’re discussing here (plus/minus 100 lb.), even when factoring differences in heat capacity, is going to change the thermal time constant of your stove by a small fraction of an hour. This is on a stove that could run for anywhere from 12 to 40 hours. Now, explain how changing the time it takes for your stove to change x-degrees by what amounts to several minutes, is going to keep you from overheating your house?
  
  BTU in = BTU out * efficiency. Changing the amount of time it takes your stove to reach equilibrium temperature by a half hour will have almost no bearing on how warm your house gets, once you’ve committed yourself to burning 3 cubic feet of wood over the course of a half day in that house.
  
  BTW, on your last point, soapstone does have higher heat capacity than cast iron. This is why the heat up time / heat retention time is higher than it’s mass alone would suggest, but we are not talking about differences of a half of a day, as some of the marketing would have one believe.

 

[SuperJ]

• 
  
  I agree with your primary points, except this one. The thermal mass, within the range of values we’re discussing here (plus/minus 100 lb.), even when factoring differences in heat capacity, is going to change the thermal time constant of your stove by a small fraction of an hour. This is on a stove that could run for anywhere from 12 to 40 hours. Now, explain how changing the time it takes for your stove to change x-degrees by what amounts to several minutes, is going to keep you from overheating your house?
  
  BTU in = BTU out * efficiency. Changing the amount of time it takes your stove to reach equilibrium temperature by a half hour will have almost no bearing on how warm your house gets, once you’ve committed yourself to burning 3 cubic feet of wood over the course of a half day in that house.
  
  BTW, on your last point, soapstone does have higher heat capacity than cast iron. This is why the heat up time / heat retention time is higher than it’s mass alone would suggest, but we are not talking about differences of a half of a day, as some of the marketing would have one believe.

To be clear my whole house doesn't overheat, but the room my stove is in is a little more closed off than what would be ideal making it sensitive to leaving the stove on high for too long (part of the reason why I went with a BK). I guess I'm just going off my observation that I can run my stove on high for 15-20 minutes on not overheat the room my stove is in, since the output of the stove is more or less based on a running 30-45min average of the btu output rate. I suppose if it was a low mass radiant stove you might get a more intense blast of heat when running on high after a reload, but also would get a correspondingly quicker faster cool down once you throttle.. making it a wash.

 

[Highbeam]

@Highbeam can you do me a favor when you do get your smoke spillage form reloads can you try to write down some specifics or any one else that come across this. Maybe i will go out and see if my chimney needs a cleaning and take my black pipe also. My chimney flu was 400+ this time and I just cant figure out why the smoke is coming out. My chimney top is not clogged at all from what I can see.

My flue cruises at 400 nearly all the time so at reload time I’m at or under 400 in the flue. I think smoke spillage is flow related. When the door is shut on a good cat stove not very much flow is shooting up the chimney. When you open the door the chimney is asked to increase flow rates significantly which doesn’t happen quickly in a natural draft environment. Also worth noting is that the small inlet to the bypass is nearly at the same height as the loading door top which makes the huge loading door the path of least resistance for rising smoke.

Extended time with the door cracked open seems to be the best method for reducing spillage. Trying to get that flue chooching like a vac truck.

 

[Poindexter]

My flue cruises at 400 nearly all the time so at reload time I’m at or under 400 in the flue. I think smoke spillage is flow related. When the door is shut on a good cat stove not very much flow is shooting up the chimney. When you open the door the chimney is asked to increase flow rates significantly which doesn’t happen quickly in a natural draft environment. Also worth noting is that the small inlet to the bypass is nearly at the same height as the loading door top which makes the huge loading door the path of least resistance for rising smoke.

Extended time with the door cracked open seems to be the best method for reducing spillage. Trying to get that flue chooching like a vac truck.

This. I switch to bypass and go make coffee before opening my loading door to minimize spillage. I observe a delay between opening the bypass and increased opacity at the stack outlet.

 

[AlbergSteve]

A bit of an update on our new stove install. Installed 08 December 2017 and it's been running continuously for four months now. The only time it's been shut down has been early January to install the denser gasket to stop the smoke smell at the door. Pleased to say, with some door adjustments, it has solved the smell issue for me. Thanks again to Chris @BKVP and Dennis at BK Penticton.

Today it was time for ash removal and I decided to pull the chimney down as well, just to have a look, see if there was any build up. Since I'm on a flat roof, it makes the job pretty easy.


First impressions were pretty good. I've been burning about 90% western red cedar, 10% d-fir, alder and maple. It's just what the previous owner left behind and it's all been under 20% MC. Keep in mind, it's always shoulder season on southern Vancouver Island so we tend to burn long, slow and low.

The cap was the worst, but I expected that.


I have 12 feet of insulated chimney...top, middle, and bottom sections left to right.


Once swept, I had less than a cup of fine flour-like powder, with very little hard glassy creosote.
Forty five minutes later, I'm back up and running, watching that "boring stove".

Impressions so far have been great. We're heating 2400 square feet on one level and keeping the house at 21-24C, 24 hours a day. With the cedar, we're getting 8-14 hour burns, depending on conditions, and our longest burn was 26 hours with a load of maple. With our old Regency 2400, we might get eight hours on a load of fir. If I get 3-4 years out of the combustor, I'll be a happy camper!

 

[Ashful]

To be clear my whole house doesn't overheat, but the room my stove is in is a little more closed off than what would be ideal making it sensitive to leaving the stove on high for too long (part of the reason why I went with a BK). I guess I'm just going off my observation that I can run my stove on high for 15-20 minutes on not overheat the room my stove is in, since the output of the stove is more or less based on a running 30-45min average of the btu output rate. I suppose if it was a low mass radiant stove you might get a more intense blast of heat when running on high after a reload, but also would get a correspondingly quicker faster cool down once you throttle.. making it a wash.

You might have something there, SuperJ. The added weight surely doesn’t hurt, and I don’t know your house as well as you do. But I suspect the many hundreds (possibly thousands) of pounds of framing, drywall, wiring, flooring, furniture, and appliances in that room are providing much more capacitive effect, than the extra hundred pounds this stove has over another.

Multiply that effect by a factor of 100 or more, if you live in a masonry house, where a 15 foot section of single story wall might weigh more than 30,000 lb. In the extreme example, my stoves are each installed in a masonry fireplace, one of them weighing over 100,000 lb. How much advantage might 550 lb. of soapstone have over 450 lb. of cast iron, when wrapped in 200x its own weight of masonry? An extreme example, to prove the point.

 

[begreen]

My experience is similar to SuperJ's. The difference in eveness of heat, overnight temps, and reduction of temperature swing between the Castine and the T6 was not trivial. We noticed a dramatic difference right away.

 

[Ashful]

My experience is similar to SuperJ's. The difference in eveness of heat, overnight temps, and reduction of temperature swing between the Castine and the T6 was not trivial. We noticed a dramatic difference right away.

I guess one of us got off track somewhere, begreen. It sounded to me like SuperJ was arguing that mass matters more than a convection jacket. But you're saying your experience agrees, while citing a lightweight (by comparison to soapstone) stove with a convection jacket?

My figuring stands either way, but now I'm not sure if we're in agreement or opposition, in our armchair physics.

 

[begreen]

Our stove has a cast iron jacket and weighs in at almost 600#, not a lightweight. It's almost 100# heavier than the Ashford 30.1 and a little heavier than the Hearthstone Mansfield soapstone stove.

 

[webby3650]

Our stove has a cast iron jacket and weighs in at almost 600#, not a lightweight. It's almost 100# heavier than the Ashford 30.1 and a little heavier than the Hearthstone Mansfield soapstone stove.

All the while not being hindered by the slow release of the soapstone. At least a soapstone jacket isn’t preventing the stove from releasing heat into the room and sending it up the flue like a solid soapstone stove.

 

[Ashful]

Our stove has a cast iron jacket and weighs in at almost 600#, not a lightweight. It's almost 100# heavier than the Ashford 30.1 and a little heavier than the Hearthstone Mansfield soapstone stove.

I looked it up, immediately before typing that, figuring it'd be challenged. You're at 585 lb., for a 3.0 cu.ft. stove. I also checked the Woodstock page, and found their smaller 2.8 cu.ft. Progress Hybrid weighs 700 lb.!

By that standard, and I think we can all admit Woodstock is the "standard" in soapstone, your stove is definitely a "lightweight". It's okay, begreen... mine is even lighter!

 

[SuperJ]

I guess one of us got off track somewhere, begreen. It sounded to me like SuperJ was arguing that mass matters more than a convection jacket. But you're saying your experience agrees, while citing a lightweight (by comparison to soapstone) stove with a convection jacket?

My figuring stands either way, but now I'm not sure if we're in agreement or opposition, in our armchair physics.

I wasn't quite clear, but I agree about convective action being a bigger factor than the mass (aside from being able to buffer short term high output periods like a reload due to my low mass room). I was trying to state that thermal mass and convective action are two different animals, but often get lumped together because you get both with a cast over steel stove.
When you're burning 24/7 (I have since November), thermal mass only matter for buffering short term transient changes.

I suppose if you are having ambient evening fires, thermal mass might be a bigger deal since you can run it on high for longer before over heating (maybe an extra 20-45minutes), and then get some residual heating as it dies down, but that's not how I run mine.

The convective action helps me to get a more even heat throughout the house, and avoids wasting as much heat warming up the outside walls around the stove excessively. Big difference on the temps behind the stove if I run the fans (wall is cool to touch), without fans almost too hot to touch.

 

[SuperJ]

All the while not being hindered by the slow release of the soapstone. At least a soapstone jacket isn’t preventing the stove from releasing heat into the room and sending it up the flue like a solid soapstone stove.

I'd be curious if soapstone stoves have higher flue temps or not, soapstone has decent thermal capacity compared to cast iron, but I'm not sure about thermal conduction. Woodstock stoves have a pretty good reputation, for throwing decent heat and burning longer than most stoves, so I'd be surprised if they were wasting too much heat.

Flue temps and flue flow rate both have to be considered when calculating waste, I was surprised how little was coming out of my chimney when I climbing on the roof a month ago with the stove on low. Just a gentle warm draft, I could basically stick my fingers into the gap in my chimney cap no problem. (on my Ashford). I'm really curious how nasty the top couple feet of my chimney will be since the flue temps seem to be so low, hopefully the cat is doing it's job cleaning things up first. The bottom couple feet seem pretty clean when I lift the sliding pipe from the stove.

 

[Woody Stover]

a soapstone jacket isn’t preventing the stove from releasing heat into the room and sending it up the flue like a solid soapstone stove.

When solid soapstone is up to temp, it transmits big heat, unlike the BKs with their meager top-end output. The extra sheet metal walls inside the BK firebox prevent the heat from getting out as fast as it can from solid soapstone that is up to temp. That's why the Woodstock PH (solid soapstone) is the BTU/hr. champ according to the EPA tests...much more heat out over the same period of time. Like twice the heat.
I guarantee that if you open up the air on a BK, big heat is going up the flue since it can't work its way around or through those interior sheet metal baffles very fast at all. If the stove is putt-putting along at very low output, then a lot more of that (low) heat can work its way out into the room. That's where the BKs do well..at the low end. Really, for the sake of truth in advertising, instead of Blaze King they should rename their line Smolder King. Ashful called BK the "Ferrari of wood stoves"..too bad they put a 50 mph governor on the engine.

 

[SuperJ]

LOL, Smoulder King just doesn’t have the same ring to it.