Well, it snowedup here in Colorado. October, 12th…dang, it’s going to be a good winter!
Anyway, what is the best position for a flue vent on a wood stove to keep it the hottest and not make it go out. Right now I have it fully open and it’s burning decently fast, should I set it half way to keep the wood burning the slowest? And would that make it the hottest?
wide open exhaust flue will burn the hottest, maybe waste heat, maybe over heat the chimney and cause a chimney fire. too low an exhaust flue may burn too cool and let creosote deposit in the flue and not fully utilize the fuel…
combustion air control offers fine control of flue temperature and fuel utilization.
best practice is to get a exhaust flue thermometer and keep it in a temperature range indicated to be safe.
We’ve got one of those…on the flue there is a thermometer, it is staying right in the 325 range, which is yellow. The first fire we had, we forgot to sweep the chimney and there was a small fire in it, it was a birds nest. But it blocked it enough to send the flue temp to 550. Not good. We let it burn out and then had it swept.
Do you mean flue or damper? Flue is the one in the chimney, damper is the one on the front of the stove. I’ve pretty much left the flue full open.
The trick is to experiment with various settings to get the optimal heat/burn time ratio. As previously stated, full open will result in the fastest and hottest burn.*
Get a fan to circulate air in the room.
*I once had a stove with a crack that worked best with the damper slightly closed.
Right, right, it is actually the Damper, not the Flue. I have the flue wide open, or Vertical. The stove is a front loading, two door large stove. The Damper is actually a lever I push or pull, that opens the way for the smoke to go up into the chimney, right now I have it wide open. On a potbelly stove it would be the damper on the front of the stove, and my experience with this is if I leave it slightly open, the wood burns slower, and longer.
Is that accurate?
I also agree with you that we need to experiment with what works best .
Mate, starting your post title with “What is the best position for…” was a great way to get a wide variety of views. My hat’s off to you.
That’s accurate. The damper usually controls how much air is getting into the stove, i.e how hot it’ll burn. On some stoves it can also control if the smoke goes straight into the chimney or through other baffles and channels to get more heat from the smoke before it goes up the chimney. Typically, leave that open, smoke straight up the chimney, until you’ve got a good draft up the chimney.
I’ve been looking at the site you linked to and that blower that operates off the head on the surface of the stove is really interesting… I wonder, if it works. Ecofan…Hmmm. I think for $127, it’s worth a try. Thanks for the info!
They’re tremendous. But what I like the most about them is that they’re fantastic little pieces of engineering. I could wax on about them, but just look into it (or ask) – if you appreciate that type of thing.
We are actually buying one…we had to look at the surface temp of our stove because it is a dual-core stove, we were worried about the surface temp, but it routinely stays between 150 and 300, which is optimal for that little fan. Can’t wait to get it!
The one thing I thought of after posting was that they do make noise…y’know, a whup whup whup like a mini-helicopter. I thought that was actually better than the whine from an electric fan, though. But I can understand that it might bother some.
