Blaze King King- excessive smoke out the door?

[jetsam]

Well I just ordered a brush recently so it was in my mind

As I said, it was a blockage. I have deducted that it was just really wet wood that I was forced to use as I ran out of wood last year.

I probably wouldn't even bother using wood like that ever again. I'll just fire up the furnace.

I use terrible wood in my BK sometimes too. This year has been particularly bad since I did little wood gathering last year.

Burn hot, keep the brush handy, inspect the top of the flue regularly. Don't let there be enough buildup to feed a chimney fire. And be alert for that one load where you run it too low, and the cat falls out, and it smolders all the way through.... you need to sweep after that load.

If you have somebody at the house to throw in some wood every 10-12 hours, you can generally burn terrible wood hot enough to keep the flue pretty clean. (Forget about the 24 hour burns you can have with dry wood, though.)

Right now I am burning a standing dead oak that was dead so long the bark came off and the surface went punky about half an inch in. So it's soggy on the outside but pretty good on the inside... I dry the next load in front of the stove every time and it does okay. (Would be much better if I'd stacked it topcovered for a summer, but I had stuff to build last year...)

I think part of my problem with wood gathering is that I started when I was a little kid, and we knew seasoned wood burned better, but we didn't care all that much. There was no secondary burn and crumpled up newspapers for insulation, and pretty much every fire was a rager. So I am kind of programmed to think that if I run low, I can just go out back and cut some, and it'll be fine. (Which actually does work for me, but I'd save a lot of wood and chimney crud if I just stayed ahead.)

 

[mwhitnee]

I was actually thinking that this horrible blockage I had might have been due to the combustor failing, but after sweeping the chimney yesterday I realized that it was not.

The chimney wasn't half as bad as I thought as it was going to be. In order to be safe, I had to go up there and sweep it mid-season because of last year's incident.

Given that there was only one variable that was different from the end of last year to this year, I can easily determine that it was just really green wood. It barely stayed lit- I had to work on it a lot. How is always drying out the next logs at the front of the stove.

With my new combustor, my stove is working so much better it's amazing. Next time I won't wait as long to replace it.

 

[Highbeam]

With my new combustor, my stove is working so much better it's amazing. Next time I won't wait as long to replace it.

It is not worth it to try and squeeze that last bit of life out of these cats. I've done it too and it made a mess while wasting lots of wood. New cats are relatively cheap and allow your stove to perform as intended.