Vacuumed 12 gallons of ash

[Isaac Carlson]

I vacuumed out the kitchen queen with my dust deputy today and filled two 6 gallon buckets with ash. The crazy part? It was still burning great! This stove holds a ton of ash, absolutely insane.

The dust deputy caught 99+% of the dust and ash. The shop vac stopped the rest. No mess. There is always dust floating around when I shovel it out, no matter how careful I am. I will be vacuuming every time from now on.

The ashes were cold, so no risk of fire. The stove is as clean as a freshly blown whistle.

 

[begreen]

That's a serious amount of ash. Where was it collecting?

 

[Isaac Carlson]

Most of t was in the firebox/ash pan, with about 1/3 under the oven and less than a gallon on top of the oven.

 

[mminor]

Hi Isaac.

Do you recommend the Dust Deputy versus the shop vac? What's the difference using the two?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[SteveKG]

The vacuums designed for stove ash have finer filters to keep the tiny ash particles tamed. And I made the one-time mistake once of cleaning up some ash from around my fireplace with our regular household vacuum. I had read not to do that, but I did anyway as I had a mess. The worse mess was finding out what it did inside the vacuum and how long it took me to get it cleaned out.

After reading about them here on the forum, I purchased a Power Smith ash Vacuum. It's been very good. I cannot detect any ash floating around in the air when I use it. I want to say it was about $75 on Amazon, not sure. Wasn't much more than that.

Cookstoves collect ash around the ovens as the "smoke" travels around them to heat the oven(s). The stoves still heat up, the ovens still get warm, but the ash insulates the oven a bit and it takes longer to get them up to temperature. I have to clean the ash from around my ovens maybe twice a season.

 

[2fireplacesinSC]

Wow. That's a lot of ash

 

[xman23]

I found that I would end up with the same amount of ash after a week as I would have after a weekend. But 12 gallons dose seam extreme. When was the chimney been cleaned?

 

[Isaac Carlson]

The dust deputy goes in line with the shop vac. It is a cyclone filter. It catches 99% of the stuff and the shop vac catches the rest. There was zero dust after running the vac for 20 minutes.

The chimney was just cleaned about 3 weeks before vacuuming. I clean it about once a month just to be safe. The wood this year ismuch drier, so everything should run better.