2019-20 Blaze King Performance Thread Part 1 (Everything BK)

[Poindexter]

I’m not sure why anyone really cares about having a clear plume, other than those trying to run during burn bans, I don’t think it’s really proof of anything. .. based solely on the opacity of your plume?

Factor in unknown moisture content, and plume opacity is really a useless measure. .. Is there really any requirement that the homeowner somehow monitor and prove they are operating within this window?

For the regulated burners among us, the law specifies what plume opacity we can have. I google searched a few years ago when our local one was being drafted and ours pretty much seems to follow the same template all the other regulated burner laws follow. That doesn't mean it is a true indicator of the stove's performance, or even a reasonable thing to do, but the only test equipment required is a trained and certified emissions evaluator, and no search warrant since they can see the plume from the street.

I am allowed 20% opacity during normal operation, and 50% opacity for not more than 20 minutes during cold starts when no air quality alerts are in effect. I do have a waiver to operate my woodstove during stage I air quality alerts, but when the air is really dirty, a stage II alert, I am not allowed to add fuel to my wood burning device.

Visually separating the steam component from the smoke component of a visible plume takes some experience. I am confident that when your system is fully warmed through in normal operation your plume opacity is likely zero to five percent, much the same as mine.

In theory a glowing combustor should equal a clean plume, but in practice (the usual rub) I routinely observe a dirty plume with glowing engaged combustor heating up some more. I routinely observe a clean plume right when the combustor probe indicator gets to the first white mark on the outer ring of the dial, about a quarter inch or so on the active side from the active/inactive mark.

I did try engaging early for a quicker light off, gosh two or three years ago, when I was first learning to do legal cold starts. I am, I will sheepishly admit kinda sorta a little bit tempted to fool with it again, see if I can shave off a couple more minutes.

 

[Highbeam]

Would you rather I run longer in bypass, maximizing my particulate output for a longer period, while waiting for the moment when I can engage the cat and have an instantaneously invisible plume? Is that somehow better? After all, that’s what we’re debating, here.

No, it is not. I am debating your lack of care about smoke emissions. You "couldn't care less" about it.

you honestly couldn’t find something I care less about.

I think smoke emissions are quite important and should be to all of us. How you act to minimize visible emissions is another topic.

 

[Holiday]

Would smoke emissions not be less through an active cat than just going out the bypass?
Or would bypass with open door and lots of air be cleaner during a cold start warm up period?

 

[jetsam]

You BK guys are all poindexters

I am a poindexter and I aspire to be a Poindexter.

 

[jetsam]

Burn it down to a reasonable amount of coals, rake the coals to one side, pull the plug and push the ashes down the hole. Repeat for the other side. Don’t worry about the random coals that fall in, you’ve got plenty. Get an ashhoe.

I do mine in three passes. Rake Coal Mountain as far left as possible, get ash from the right. Rake Coal Mountain into the hole on the right, get ash from the left. Rake half of Coal Mountain into the hole on the left, get ash from the center. This is about once every 2 weeks burning oak 24x7.

As often as I melt the handles of ash shovels into noodles, I should just start forge-welding them together into better shovels while they're hot.

I experimented one year with putting a fry basket in the stove and scooping everything into the fry basket and shaking out the ash for scooping. That was pretty much all bad. But I did find that a few days later once the ash bucket was cool, you can pour it through the fry basket and have fine ash for fertilizer on one side and ready-to-use charcoal left over in the basket. So if you're guilty about discarding coals, that can be your out.

 

[Jeff in Maine]

I can't imagine living where anyone pays any attention to the smoke or lack thereof coming out of a chimney. I think you could heat your home with old tires up here and no one would bat an eyelash. We don't live in a slum but the " smoke police " do not exist here. I never had a cat stove till this Princess but smoke or lack of did not even remotely figure into my choice to buy one I could not care less.
I started with a wood coal furnace abut an arm load every 2 hours or so leaky old thing, then an old Ashley cast iron and sheet metal stove, then My Old Mill back in 1984 now the BK none of my stoves smoked much I don't think , more than the BK does of course but like I said not a big issue to me back then now I see smoke as lost btu's. I always ran hot fires and dry wood so my chimney never smoked a lot I don't think.
The entire reason I went with this stove is the advertised long burn times, Size of fire box, and the height of the fire box above the floor my Old Mill was only 6" or so off the floor to low for comfortable feeding for me.
You all take this stuff way more seriously than I do,.. burn times smoke plume moisture meter ectara nothing wrong with that I guess just of no interest to me . Burning wood to me is not a novelty I cant even see my stove it sets in my kitchen no " ghost flames" for me ha ha. I burn wood to heat the house and have since I was little and lived at home. I fill the stove burn the wood , wood burns down to coals fill with more wood and repeat 12 hours or 23 I don't pay any attention mostly. I do this till I get too many ashes and coals to be a good big wood fill up for me. At that point I shovel out a big steel ash pail coals and all about 4 gallons at least (I have never attempted to use the ash pan, just a pail and shovel for me) ashes go everywhere I sweep up after no big deal and then after they sit in a cover pail outside for 3-4 days I dump it in the ditch across the road,... re-load and go again. ymmv

 

[Poindexter]

I am in favor of clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and clean dirt to grow food in.

What I have seen of local burning practices (I drive around town going from house to house for my job) is that if everyone was burning clean dry wood at or under 20% MC we likely wouldn't have to do all these other steps. Besides wet wood, a lot of folks are turning their stoves down to get long slow burns with wet wood and those of us who post here with any regularity recognize the problem without further explanation.

It is compounded by Fairbanks' unique geography. Of all the places in Alaska to put the second largest city, Fairbanks is the worst possible location from an air pollution perspective. When it gets really cold we get a firm temperature inversion layer, cold air trapped below a blanket of warm, and all the vehicle exhaust and power plant exhaust and wood stove exhaust and diesel truck exhaust, all of it collects in the cold bubble of air near the ground until the weather breaks.

EDIT: I originally had the troubling air inversion layer backwards. The troubling inversion layer for air pollution here is cold air trapped at ground level under a blanket of warm, as the foregoing paragraph now correctly reads.

 

[Woody Stover]

I don't often rum much below half swoosh. With good dry fuel and some wind I can run 1/3 swoosh, but my insulation envelope is so good on my house there isn't much point, I might as well let it burn out and light up again when the temp drops again.

Oooo, don't let the other BK guys hear you saying that; To some of them, starting a fire is something to be avoided at all costs. I guess some are just slow to master the art of the easy start.

I meant as far as just letting my stoves go out because heat demand is so low. I don't chase burn times, I just heat the house and don't worry about how long the stove burns for. My house just doesn't need much heat.

Exactly; The whole long, low burn thing is pretty much a red herring, in my book.

I read about people taking 20 - 30 minutes to get to active cat, and that's just way too long for me, if you have dry wood and reliable draft. Maybe some setups take that long

Mine takes 20 - 30, but my stove has more thermal mass to get up to heat, with the stone box, so that's a draw-back..

We call that chasing the dragon

You used to call it "chasing the heat curve." When I hear "chasing the dragon," I think of trying to get my BIL's basement stove, a 1979 VC Resolute III, to burn clean.

I have never had a failed light-off at any flue probe temp > 500dF....Usually the combustor will be glowing within 2 minutes of closing the bypass with flue probe at 500dF....see if you get instant light-off, as I typically see. If not, try 100dF higher... it will still be long before the cat probe shows active.

I like the instant light-off. I don't have an accurate cat probe yet so I go by flue/stove top temps, and looking in the box to see how much wood is involved, to tell me when to close the bypass.
If you wanna "go low" as far as stove/flue temps, keep pumping some flame heat to it, to kick off that cat.

it’s been years since I’ve cared enough to go outside and look at my stack....you honestly couldn’t find something I care less about. If the cat is active, that’s the most I can do, that’s what I can control. As to whether that active cat is able to keep the plume clear, that is up to the design of the stove.

Even though you sometimes expound on the minutia of stove operation, that statement indicates that you are unworthy of the moniker "Stove Nerd." True stove nerds, like Poiny, are always fine-tuning every aspect of the burn and emissions, in the pursuit of perfection.
QUOTE]To me, acting responsibly is installing the best appliance available, and then operating it properly. Maintaining an active cat for the maximum possible period is doing that, IMO. Would you rather I run longer in bypass, maximizing my particulate output for a longer period?
[/QUOTE]OK, maybe there's hope for you to earn Stove Nerd status, after all.
The way I see it, there's a balance when the bypass is open. I want enough flame to eat a lot of smoke, yet not have the air open so far that I'm losing too much flame heat up the flue..I want that heat absorbed by the top re-burn area of the stove so I can hopefully light the cat quicker. And if you get right parts of the load burning early, that can reduce startup emissions. I load E-W so I can pull the coals up and keep the flame mainly on the front few splits, while seating some big split in the back with no coals under them so that they don't smoke early, where that smoke would go straight to the open bypass.

For the regulated burners among us, the law specifies what plume opacity we can have.

Another factor in emissions/opacity is how much creo we are burning off the inside of the box when we have big flames, firing up a new load..creo that was deposited during the previous low burn. You obviously don't get a lot of creo in the box, since you run a hot fire most of the time.
But I remember one post by a BK burner where he asked why he was seeing smoke early in the burn, after his cat was glowing. This could be from having the air open with a lot of wood gassing, where the cat couldn't catch it all. But in this case, he was smelling acrid creo smoke. I surmise that this is box-creo burning off, and the cat can't easily catch that dense stuff either. That makes me question how clean these cat stoves really burn. When I mentioned this before, BKVP replied that the tests were done on "used" stoves, not brand new ones. But were those used stoves filled with gooey creo?
My stove doesn't have gooey creo in the box, but the dry stuff also burns off with a high fire..I can smell it outside. I guess I should do more maintenance in scraping crusty creo off the inside of the box when I get a chance to let the stove go out. This should also have the added benefit of allowing radiant flame heat to get the stove up to temp faster, and allowing more heat to transfer through into the room when cruising.
Good luck trying to do that on a BK, with the inner baffles covering the walls of the firebox.

 

[Highbeam]

I must be overly sensitive about smoke since I am one of the more regulated burners on this forum. I am certainly not a radical environmentalist but would love to have my neighbors be surprised that I ever burn since they never see or smell the pollution.

I have seen lots of smoke passing through active and glowing cats.

 

[SpaceBus]

Do cat stoves end up black inside? My defiant had a nice creo costing, but my firebrick stays pretty clean in both of my stoves. The Morso gets a nice coating of fluffy light creo and fly ash, nothing crusty or goey, on pretty much every surface after the firebox. My cooker is basically the same. It all comes off with a wipe and then vacuumed out.

 

[Poindexter]

I have seen lots of smoke passing through active and glowing cats.

Me also. When I engage right at the break point between active and inactive and just pull on my boots while rushing outdoors without lacing my boots up - I see smoke until the probe needle gets up to that first white tick mark.

 

[AlbergSteve]

I am in favor of clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and clean dirt to grow food in.

+1

 

[moresnow]

Me also. When I engage right at the break point between active and inactive and just pull on my boots while rushing outdoors without lacing my boots up - I see smoke until the probe needle gets up to that first white tick mark.

Any chance the smoke you are seeing has little to do with the point the needle was at when you engaged the Cat, but more about the time it took to move the needle to the "first white tick mark". ?
Perhaps indicating that even if you engage at a somewhat earlier point it will result in the same span of smoke. Just earlier. Gaining a bit on this early engagement idea. Hmmmm. Food for thought. Dunno. I close the bypass when the needle is close to the factory mark. Sometimes even a bit early/later. Depends on the behavior of the load.

 

[Ashful]

No, it is not. I am debating your lack of care about smoke emissions. You "couldn't care less" about it.


I think smoke emissions are quite important and should be to all of us. How you act to minimize visible emissions is another topic.

My post, to which you responded was about engaging the combustor early to minimize time in bypass. Please don’t tell me what my own post is about.

But I will admit I may have overstated the point in saying I couldn’t care less, my point was that it is out of my control. I aim to minimize the time spent burning this pig like a smoke dragon in bypass, and get to active cat as early as possible. The rest is in BK’s hands, if they designed this thing properly, as I believe they have. All I can do is ensure that cat stays active for as much of the burn cycle as possible, if I manage that, I consider it job-done. I’m not re-engineering the stove.

Would smoke emissions not be less through an active cat than just going out the bypass?

Yes, exactly. That was the entire point of my post on this subject.

Even though you sometimes expound on the minutia of stove operation, that statement indicates that you are unworthy of the moniker "Stove Nerd." True stove nerds, like Poiny, are always fine-tuning every aspect of the burn and emissions, in the pursuit of perfection.

I’m burning more wood per year than most wood burners do in a decade, and probably 3x more than 99% of the regulars on this forum. Although I really appreciate the intelligent posts by guys like Poindexter, I really don’t have time to be a stove nerd. If anyone called me that, it’s their term, not mine!

I must be overly sensitive about smoke since I am one of the more regulated burners on this forum. I am certainly not a radical environmentalist but would love to have my neighbors be surprised that I ever burn since they never see or smell the pollution.

I have seen lots of smoke passing through active and glowing cats.

Likewise, I have had some of my closest neighbors see this wood sitting in my back yard, and ask me why I never burn it. Don’t misconstrue a potential few minutes per day of un-noticed plume, if even that happens, as me smoking like the 1970’s all day and night.

 

[begreen]

I am a poindexter and I aspire to be a Poindexter.

I grew up with Pointdexter.

 

[Woody Stover]

I close the bypass when the needle is close to the factory mark. Sometimes even a bit early/later. Depends on the behavior of the load.

Yeah, there are a lot of factors at play. That's where experience and observation are powerful tools.

my point was that it is out of my control....I’m not re-engineering the stove.

As I said above, lotta factors at play. You can get better with experimentation and observation. But if you never observe your plume...
I'd love to re-engineer a stove. If my SIL's PE T5 were mine, I would immediately "hot-rod" that bad dog.

Would smoke emissions not be less through an active cat than just going out the bypass?
Or would bypass with open door and lots of air be cleaner during a cold start warm up period?

That was the entire point of my post

Yes. Even if the cat isn't glowing yet, it's still burning some of the crap, at least.
With the door open, all that air is sending your heat up the flue, and your stove will take forever to get hot enough to close the bypass.

 

[Poindexter]

My alter ego is revealed.

 

[Poindexter]

I do not know if early, on time or late combustor engagement results in the lowest overall emissions. I don't have any way to measure any of those particles, and the test equipment to do so is big dollars. I do know I am regulated on plume opacity, so I have learned to operate my one with respect to that parameter.

I so agree with @Ashful that the A30 is indeed a big fat pig on cold starts. Operationally my primary focus is keeping the needle up in the active zone so I can do hot reloads - and minimize the time I am running the fat pig in bypass. It looks cute on the showroom floor, my wife doesn't care that it weighs 500# because she knows she will never have to move it. The A30 is a beast that will run neck and neck with a BK Princess, just with a smaller fuel tank. Getting it up to temp and to a clean plume from cold takes quite a few BTUs. I can't do it in the legal allotted time with birch at 20%MC. I can do it with spruce at 16%MC and not have to salt the load with sap globs or construction off cuts.

I have thought about getting a combustor probe with numbers on it. Somewhere kicking around I have a very 1970s looking box with faux woodgrain on the case and a couple wires sticking out of the back. Thermometer on the front. I want to say my wife brought it home from a garage sale, but she despises faux woodgrain, so maybe one of the kids. I still haven't hooked that thing up. The thing is, I am getting predictable, repeatable results with the factory combustor probe.

My thinking on the matter is BK engineering spent a bunch of time on the setpoint displayed on the combustor indicator, but they were thinking about average Joes reading part of the manual and just having at it. I highly doubt @BKVP has a special combustor probe in his pocket for those of that post here regularly. He would probably have to recertify the whole stove with a different probe in it.

 

[Poindexter]

Any chance the smoke you are seeing has little to do with the point the needle was at when you engaged the Cat, but more about the time it took to move the needle to the "first white tick mark". ?
Perhaps indicating that even if you engage at a somewhat earlier point it will result in the same span of smoke. Just earlier. Gaining a bit on this early engagement idea. Hmmmm. Food for thought. Dunno. I close the bypass when the needle is close to the factory mark. Sometimes even a bit early/later. Depends on the behavior of the load.

I get the temptation and I am feeling it too. But I am resisting. If I run in bypass to the tick mark, my plume is clean faster than I can get out there to look. If I engage at the marked breakpoint and get my wife on the phone while she is in the stove room, the plume cleans up right at the tick. One data point, but it is my data point.

It has been a couple or three years since I tried but when I was fooling with engaging early back then, my plume cleaned up at the white tick mark. Back then it was faster for me to get to clean plume running in bypass and heating the whole stove (while making significant opacity) then it was to engage early and let the catalytic reactions contribute to heating the stove.

At my house with my setup, my fuel, my stove, I know when I hit that tick mark I have a clean plume.

 

[aaronk25]

I think it’s great! I move into this house, neighbor house 25’ away on chimney side, and the first day he says, do you smoke? I say nope. He said previous owner use to smoke cigarettes on the deck and he could smell them, and hated it.

I’m thinking great he is gonna hate it when I start installing a chimney for the wood stove next week.

After 2 years of 6 month 24/7 burning I asked him, do you ever smell the wood stove? He says ya for a couple mins when you first start it, but then just a hardly detectable.

It’s amazing how good these BK are! Can’t wait until I can buy a house in the woods. I have 6 neighbors within 100-150ft. Middle of town, no one knows I burn.

 

[Woody Stover]

I grew up with Pointdexter.
View attachment 253339

Hey, let's not forget about Rocket J. Squirrel!

 

[begreen]

Loved them all and bought video tapes (remember those?) of all the shows so that my kids could enjoy them growing up.

 

[Woody Stover]

Loved them all and bought video tapes (remember those?) of all the shows so that my kids could enjoy them growing up.

Home-schooled, huh?

 

[Ashful]

It was just getting light when I left the house this morning, after a fresh reload on one of the stoves. Checked the plume and it was clear! This was 10 minutes after turning down to cruise setting, after the usual 20 minutes on high.

I also got a shot with both chimneys, the one on the left was 10 hours into a 24 hour burn cycle, the one on the right was 30 minutes into a 12-hour burn cycle.

 

[Woody Stover]

got a shot with both chimneys,

Did you install the stoppers for Santa's sleigh, or were they already there?