Hi all,
I moved to a new (to me) house a couple years ago. The house came with an old pre-EPA stove and has an interior masonry chimney with 3 flues. 1 served a basement gas hot water heater, the 2nd has an outlet on the first floor for the pre-EPA stove they used, and the 3rd goes to a 2nd floor fireplace. All flues have a 7"x7" interior dimension. We enjoy the heat of the fire, and have ready access to all the wood I can cut. split, and stack; but the old stove wasn't doing that great in terms of heating us out of the house in shoulder season or more mild winter days, and a really short burn time that wasn't great for 2 working people away from the house 9+ hours a day.
After a fair amount of research here on stove options and proper steps to take, I found a good deal on a barely used Blaze King Princess (PE32), and we found a sweep to install a 6" liner and insulation in the first floor flue, which is approximately 25' from the tee to the top of the chimney, about 12' in conditioned space, 13' in unheated attic and exposed chimney on the roof. Install for both the stove and liner was done in mid-October this year, we started burning around a week later. From the start, the performance of the stove has been ok. Getting the fire started and going being the the biggest issue, as the draft wasn't awful, but not what I would have hoped for until it got up into the active zone on the cat. Other than a couple really warm days, we've kept it running 24/7 and the heat has been good and the time between reloads about 7-14 hours. A higher setting with mostly pine yields those 7 hour burns, a lower setting with oak gets us about 14 hours between reloads. All our wood has been under cover in a shed for about 14-18 months. If I split a large pine piece that is at room temp, it measures around 17% on a moisture meter, and splitting a large oak will yield around 19%, so our wood is maybe not ideally dry, but nothing I've tested has been above 20%. The only other thing that seems notable to me about its operation is that the usable range of the thermostat was only from full blast at 100% open to around 75% open, anything lower than that seemed to choke the fire out, though I didn't experiment with it too much, as within that top 25% of the dial was meeting my needs. If we left it up near full temp on the controls, the cat probe would get to 80-90% of the way to its max heat reading, and a surface temperature reading would be at 600+, so at least outwardly the stove seemed to be functioning fine.
Fast forward to yesterday, and we had a small(?) chimney fire. We had been out for a while and the cat had moved down into inactive, but there was still a healthy bed of coals, so I turned on the bypass, loaded the firebox, closed the door, and went for a shower, thinking 10 minutes would be perfect to get the cat back into the active range. When I got out, I could hear loud crackling coming from the stove pipe or flue and could see smoke billowing from the top of the chimney when I popped my head outside to look (way, way more than a normal fire starting process makes). I immediately closed the stove's air intake/thermostat all the way. Within a minute or two, the loudness of the crackling subsided, gradually, and the smoke even more gradually subsided. Based on noise level, the chimney fire must have been out or nearly out 10-15 minutes after I shut the air intake off. I was hopping between inside and outside this whole time, and at no point did I see flames or sparks coming out the top of the chimney (I saw a neighbor's chimney fire years ago and theirs looked like a sparkler at the top, which I was expecting/fearing for ours).
Since I had a brand new full load roaring when I closed the air intake, it wasn't until today that all the ashes and smoke in the firebox were done enough to remove the stove pipe and inspect (there is also snow on the roof, so I'm not going up there until it melts and is dry). Judging by the pictures online, the stove pipe had/has level 2 creosote build-up, as there was some thin flaky expanded creosote sitting off the walls of the pipe, but there was still a relatively thin layer of crunchy granola-like black stuff well-adhered to the walls. It was not at all glossy or smooth, which is what I understand stage 3 to be like. After I brushed out the stove pipe, I looked at the horizontal part of the tee connection, which looked the same as the pipe. I stuck a cellphone up to see if there was anything of note up, and just saw mostly more of the same. When I spun the phone to look down, I could see that there wasn't any cap on the lower section of the tee, just open air 15' down to the unheated basement where the cleanout is.
The last bit of information is that I had a tough time getting a chimney sweep to do this job originally. I called at least 6 sweeps in our general area, 2 wouldn't travel this far, 3+ never returned messages, and only the one we ended up having do the liner install actually came to give a quote. They came weeks after they said they would, left trash in my yard, damaged shingles and didn't say anything about it, and when they repaired some of the chimney surface and flashing they hosed a bunch of leftover concrete onto our deck and in our gutters. I'll be calling around again to have a different Sweep inspect our chimney to make sure its still safe and the original install was done correctly, but I'm worried I may have weeks of waiting to get someone out here.
With all that in mind, I'd like to know as much as I can before trying to address the issues with the original installer or a new Chimney Sweep. Is no cap on the bottom of the tee/cleanout the cause of that much creosote build-up in about 6 weeks of consistent usage? If that is the cause, Is a cap required as part of an installation, or am I just a sucker for not making sure that was part of their install? If that is the cause, is there a cap that can be installed after the fact, or is the liner going to have to be pulled up to access the bottom in order to install one? If that tee/cleanout cap isn't the problem, what should I be looking for in terms of other causes for that build-up of creosote?
Thanks in advance, sorry for the novel, but I tried to include everything of relevance.
I moved to a new (to me) house a couple years ago. The house came with an old pre-EPA stove and has an interior masonry chimney with 3 flues. 1 served a basement gas hot water heater, the 2nd has an outlet on the first floor for the pre-EPA stove they used, and the 3rd goes to a 2nd floor fireplace. All flues have a 7"x7" interior dimension. We enjoy the heat of the fire, and have ready access to all the wood I can cut. split, and stack; but the old stove wasn't doing that great in terms of heating us out of the house in shoulder season or more mild winter days, and a really short burn time that wasn't great for 2 working people away from the house 9+ hours a day.
After a fair amount of research here on stove options and proper steps to take, I found a good deal on a barely used Blaze King Princess (PE32), and we found a sweep to install a 6" liner and insulation in the first floor flue, which is approximately 25' from the tee to the top of the chimney, about 12' in conditioned space, 13' in unheated attic and exposed chimney on the roof. Install for both the stove and liner was done in mid-October this year, we started burning around a week later. From the start, the performance of the stove has been ok. Getting the fire started and going being the the biggest issue, as the draft wasn't awful, but not what I would have hoped for until it got up into the active zone on the cat. Other than a couple really warm days, we've kept it running 24/7 and the heat has been good and the time between reloads about 7-14 hours. A higher setting with mostly pine yields those 7 hour burns, a lower setting with oak gets us about 14 hours between reloads. All our wood has been under cover in a shed for about 14-18 months. If I split a large pine piece that is at room temp, it measures around 17% on a moisture meter, and splitting a large oak will yield around 19%, so our wood is maybe not ideally dry, but nothing I've tested has been above 20%. The only other thing that seems notable to me about its operation is that the usable range of the thermostat was only from full blast at 100% open to around 75% open, anything lower than that seemed to choke the fire out, though I didn't experiment with it too much, as within that top 25% of the dial was meeting my needs. If we left it up near full temp on the controls, the cat probe would get to 80-90% of the way to its max heat reading, and a surface temperature reading would be at 600+, so at least outwardly the stove seemed to be functioning fine.
Fast forward to yesterday, and we had a small(?) chimney fire. We had been out for a while and the cat had moved down into inactive, but there was still a healthy bed of coals, so I turned on the bypass, loaded the firebox, closed the door, and went for a shower, thinking 10 minutes would be perfect to get the cat back into the active range. When I got out, I could hear loud crackling coming from the stove pipe or flue and could see smoke billowing from the top of the chimney when I popped my head outside to look (way, way more than a normal fire starting process makes). I immediately closed the stove's air intake/thermostat all the way. Within a minute or two, the loudness of the crackling subsided, gradually, and the smoke even more gradually subsided. Based on noise level, the chimney fire must have been out or nearly out 10-15 minutes after I shut the air intake off. I was hopping between inside and outside this whole time, and at no point did I see flames or sparks coming out the top of the chimney (I saw a neighbor's chimney fire years ago and theirs looked like a sparkler at the top, which I was expecting/fearing for ours).
Since I had a brand new full load roaring when I closed the air intake, it wasn't until today that all the ashes and smoke in the firebox were done enough to remove the stove pipe and inspect (there is also snow on the roof, so I'm not going up there until it melts and is dry). Judging by the pictures online, the stove pipe had/has level 2 creosote build-up, as there was some thin flaky expanded creosote sitting off the walls of the pipe, but there was still a relatively thin layer of crunchy granola-like black stuff well-adhered to the walls. It was not at all glossy or smooth, which is what I understand stage 3 to be like. After I brushed out the stove pipe, I looked at the horizontal part of the tee connection, which looked the same as the pipe. I stuck a cellphone up to see if there was anything of note up, and just saw mostly more of the same. When I spun the phone to look down, I could see that there wasn't any cap on the lower section of the tee, just open air 15' down to the unheated basement where the cleanout is.
The last bit of information is that I had a tough time getting a chimney sweep to do this job originally. I called at least 6 sweeps in our general area, 2 wouldn't travel this far, 3+ never returned messages, and only the one we ended up having do the liner install actually came to give a quote. They came weeks after they said they would, left trash in my yard, damaged shingles and didn't say anything about it, and when they repaired some of the chimney surface and flashing they hosed a bunch of leftover concrete onto our deck and in our gutters. I'll be calling around again to have a different Sweep inspect our chimney to make sure its still safe and the original install was done correctly, but I'm worried I may have weeks of waiting to get someone out here.
With all that in mind, I'd like to know as much as I can before trying to address the issues with the original installer or a new Chimney Sweep. Is no cap on the bottom of the tee/cleanout the cause of that much creosote build-up in about 6 weeks of consistent usage? If that is the cause, Is a cap required as part of an installation, or am I just a sucker for not making sure that was part of their install? If that is the cause, is there a cap that can be installed after the fact, or is the liner going to have to be pulled up to access the bottom in order to install one? If that tee/cleanout cap isn't the problem, what should I be looking for in terms of other causes for that build-up of creosote?
Thanks in advance, sorry for the novel, but I tried to include everything of relevance.
