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wood burner stove help SOLVED

looking for small mom & pops maker of wood stoves.  wanting to put money into a small USA company instead of the large firms muddled with Amazon

Recently / in process of demo of our "Heatalator" system.  Apparently i am only the second documented case where one of these has been removed from a home, since the home is built around it.  There is only one vid of a guy who started it and apparently no body knows what happened to him.  His was easy sorta because his chimney was framed in stick lumber,, mine was framed with stone, debris, mortar, brick, block.

I want a free standing wood burner stove made by a small company.

looked into the EPA renditions of wood burners and it took a month of research to become turned off by the two standards below.
Catalytic- no,, dont want the extra expense every couple years.
Reburn gas tubes- thought this was the cats meow till i found out that you must use 2yr min seasoned wood otherwise your stove will remain cold enough to hand touch even after burning several hours.,, the moisture in the wood conflicts combustion chamber reburn tech and simply defeats the purpose unless i double my wood storage capacity.  we burn 3 chords on the old wood stove each year but that system was an insert-  inserted into a compromised heatalator fire box chamber system big enough to park a Yugo inside.  I now have an opening big enough to walk into for a fire place opening.  I simply want to set a new wood burner inside this opening i have made.
IN the words of the wife , "i dont want to have to deal with a bitchy wood stove, lets stick with what we know has worked well for centuries"


Needs:
large cu ft interior of 3.5 +
Glass door a must!
Ash Pan a must!
top gets hot to be used for a basic hot plate surface if desired


Just networking with fellow board members , im betting you know someone or someone who knows someone who does this for a living.

Contact Scott or Brittney Cassity at 304 772 4082 or 3411

thanks ...

looking to purchase now at this very moment.

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #1 –
Dunno nuthin' about newer wood stoves, but used to be a mfgr that sold a Sedley stove(named for Sedley Va)... I'm sure they are probably out of business 25 years ago...

I used to have a free standing Buck stove... Made so much heat I had to knock out the wall between livingroom and den so we could stand to be in den and have heat in remainder of house... Those were available with glass door inserts but unless one cleaned them every day, would smoke up till fire was barely visible...

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #2 –
little bit of learnin' here on my part.

Apparently you cant have a stove like the one i "had" because the snowflakes from the cities decided that the old way was wrong.

 a stove cant be sold in the US without a min of reburn tubes.

I was told by buck just now that thier model 94NC which is 4.2cuFt of space has reburn tubes.
when you look up inside the stove there are several tubes for reburn.  Above that there are two fire boards, above that there is a insulation blanket from NASA technology for earth re-entry to the earth, above that are are a few more conflicts as well. 

Buck says thier model 94nc gets to be about 250deg on the top surface.
I asked them that since i want to depend on radiant heat, how is 250 to 300deg supposed to translate across my whole home.
they said you must use the blower.

what about when there is no power?

they said "you wont get as much heat like the old stoves because of all the insulation.

i asked them ,, "then whats the point"?

The dumb A@@ actually said "I dont understand the question"
she went on to say,, "your going to have to learn how to burn fire wood sir, its always been like this".
I said, no it hasnt.
yes it has she said, "as long as ive been alive... aparently she's an old fart!--not

I inquired about cleaning..........
me- i used to simply go atop the chimney and drop in my sweep, then clean out the ash.
her- no, you cant do that, you have to dis-assemble the inside top of the stove to remove the blanket, fireboard and tubes otherwise you void your warranty.

I inquire about burning....
her- you have to re-learn how to burn wood
me- You mean i have to spend more time getting the reburn / gassification going and depend on everyone in the house learning this as well which is more time babysitting a fire.
her- yes
me- I used to add wood, get the fire going, close the door, once in a while check the damper.
her- with a wood stove you must start off checking the stove often and insure your bed of coals is good , once you have a very small bed, you add progressively larger wood, if you add too large of wood too early, your stove will actually put out the fire.
me-at this point im just hearing jiberish and not too very interested in much more from this person.

i talked about burn time....
her- you can actually see as much as 8 hours on this stove which is unheard of!
me- my old stove i got a full consistent 12hours on one load and its been around since 1974 and ran us out of the house many time.
Her- no your mistaken, this is the finest burn time ever... what brand is your old stove?
me- Forester
her- never heard of it.
me- what brand stove is yours?
her - Well "buck" of course!
me-  never owned one but your company is simply on life support if you continue to offer a product that doesnt make heat when there is no power.
me- can i buy one of your old cast iron stoves you used to make without all the EPA stuff?
her- not sure what you mean

I am so frustated right now ...................

I did find out the top plate is 5/15'' steel,, sounds good to me.

i told them "i'll buy your stove because of the interior cubes,, then i will gut it and then i will make good radient heat.



everytime i turn another corner in my life, it seems someone has figured out a way to make a "efficiency claim" only to find out its not that , infact it takes more time to achieve the same old results and costs consumers more money to get less and less.

why was i born a type A personality and a virgo!!!!!!!!!!!

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #4 –
learning more than i wanted to know about EPA stoves.

apparently the target chimney updraft temp to EPA stds is to maintain less than or as closely to as possible 150degF.

I was told yesterday i have "too much" chimney.  I have a 10'' setup.

I was told that gettng updraft is the key to making these stoves work and maintaining the updraft is critical.

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #5 –
Curious where you're at with this Scott, friends shop had a pump failure on his outdoor boiler and it ended up about how you would expect. Small bang, big fire. Helped him lay geothermal and he hasn't looked back, but that doesn't address the power consumption.

With that said, he was having trouble dumping heat, heating his house/barn and garage (all radiant loops, and radiant panels for retrofit applications) he would regularly have to open his attached garage door to dump heat. The system was happiest when all that volume was ~74 degrees.

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #6 –
I wish i would have updated this thread...
it is at a conclusion.

I am going to post this in a way that random people who search will stumble across my experience.
I attemped to write an intuitive review but was not able to and keep it less than 4000 characters.

We purchased this from Northern Tool.
Vogelzang Ponderfosa High-Efficiency Wood Stove — 152,000 BTU, EPA-Certified, Model# TR007

It is a fire brick lined single layer steel box.. not double layer.
**DO NOT spend your money on the blower,, it is offensively stupid!!! thats all i have to say... dont waste your money.
This is the only negative.
It has a very different damper system that you have to totally relearn how to burn wood.
No Smoke out the chimney at all when you get coals going.
Fire flips upside down and burns from the cieling instead of flames coming off the wood.
Basically it burns the wood gas if you select that particular damper.
Its a creepy looking flame,, it will remind you of watching a Lava Lamp.
When the "high burn" pinhole stainless steel tube oxegen source is selected, the flames move from the wood and flip upside down and burn from the roof of the interior,, like a outdoor gas grille.
the flame colors are blue / white / org ,, and mostly blue when the game is on for real.
outside you wont see any smoke, and you dont even see any wiggle in the background objects on the top of the chimney,, its like nothing is happening.
You will go from counting "how many loads" it takes a day to "how many pieces".

Our results..........
we went from 6) 5 piece loads a day to 10 to 12 pieces of wood a day worse case with outside air at about 20degF.
I tested two pieces of wood and damped it all the way back,, i was able to resurect coals back to a fire after 15 hours. my stove was still at 215degF.
Odd house floor plans,,, no problem,, and i am not guessing!!!!
For some reason this heat travels everywhere it never got before.
I am using an antique low noice desk fan made maybe in the 40's to push air from the house towards the stove, air archs around the back of the stove and thows heat out. 
a couple other fans move air around,,, we all know the fan game when using wood stoves so just do what you normall would do.
The point here is that I am the perfect example of the worse floor plan ever for a wood stove appliacation.  My wife is running around with less chothing on,, thats a good sign, now to turn up the heat!
When you buy this stove, you hit a large chamber volume with 24'' length capability.
Your interior height is choked off by all that EPA stuff but beware.. do not remove it,,, i will tell you why later.
When you see the "EPA" stuff , dont think of it as the EPA now took over your living room... that is what i was thinking.,, and ended up being my first mistake.
Although the EPA rules that went into affect Jan1 2017 were recended in july 2017 and the due date was now pushed out to 2020.. the wood stove makers toiled with this new EPA mandate during the years 2013 through 2016.  Many of them settled on Catalytic or Gassfier tech.  The catalytic systems may end up being eliminated from the gene pool, they have a very costly replacement module like whats in the catalytic of a car.  the Gassifier types, is what i am speaking to now.
When you purchase this stove, you are going to have to relearn how to burn wood.  Pay no attention to thier mositure warnings... we are 30yr vets of burning wood and i have not seen the problems they speak of.  The wood stove makers , some doing poorly at it while others excelling all had good intentions of EPA compliance.  Some took the rules to mean one thing while the good makers focused on compliance and keeping the heat!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ,, this is what the vogelzang tr007 does.
Its simply put,, a new wood stove design totally.

When you get this stove, you will be stepping into a hybrid of something like a "mircale" and "science fiction"... thats how i describe it.
The interior fire box gets up to about 1600degF , yet the flue remains very cool, like just 12'' up from the colar of the stove the flue is only 300degF!!!  Its freaking magic.
I never undstood what they meant when they said,, we make high fire box temps and keep the chimney flue really cool. 

now to my thoughts.............

PURCHASE IT POST HASTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

price is under 1k turnkey,, nothing to assemble.

Step 1, unload all parts you can to make it lighter and handle getting in the door.

Step 2, start a fire inside it outside to heat up the bare inside and outside metal so you dont have to deal with the gas off of fumes inside... this is normal for anyone buying a new wood burner.

Step 3, install it.

Step 3, do not do what i did...........
I called BS on all the EPA stuff up inside it. 
your first gut feeling is that this epa stuff takes up about 4'' of space you want to make use of with sticks of wood.
If you have a 6'' stove chimney, you should be fine, but we have a 10'' and ran into what i call "tech support problems" with "over heating.
Here is where my story begins.

I get the stove,
i demo out all that EPA stuff but something tells me to save it back in the garage.
I remove the bricks, door and anything to lighten the object to muscle it inside the house.
I install the stove and connect to my 10'' flue and put everything back together.
i start a small fire,, impressed so far.
Play around with the dampers,, wow thats neat, ( had a very intimate study of these two fancy dampers prior to installing, had to understand what all was going on).
I said to hell with all that epa suff, this works just fine.
like normal,, i loaded up the fire box to the gills with as much wood as possible but,, as luck would have it, we watched the remaining part of Oak Island which kept me up another hour.
Fire is roaring ,Main air inlet damper is closed, high burn tube damper all the way open.
Its freaking 85deg in the living room and about 78 everywhere else in the house., did i say we have a difficult floor plan,, yes i did.
I glance over and notice something jumping off the top of the stove.,, what was that?
I get  up and the colar of the stove is glowing orange, there are white sparkler sparks jumping off the top steel plate.
The interior tubes have went past salmon color to something i cant even identify.  Salmon = 1600Deg.
I am standing there at 12:15am wondering how to handle this problem,, i am about to melt my stove down.  I wondered if the fire dept should be called.  I then wondered about what they would do,, use water, how to cool down something like this,, what would it take.  I decided to pull out an old 120year old Peerless floor fan and just add air, damp down the fire dampers and open some doors and window.
The surface temp of my stove was at 980degF.!!!!!!!!!!!
finally the wood burned off some, temps came down.  We got lucky.
-------- disadvantage alert--- this stove top plate needs to be thicker for safety reasons incase the EPA NASA orbit re-entry heat shields fail... in my current situation,, brilliant me had none installed so i brought this down on myself.

Next day i install all the epa stuff back in.
I start a fire, all is well.
I load up the fire box as much as i could ,, a tad bit disgruntal that i had to use that stupid stuff...............
around 11pm that night fire is good, i turn on the high burn oxegen source,, fire flips upsidedown and im making excessive heat.  I start to worry because the top of the stove is around 850degF.
I sleep down stairs worrying over the stove for the night. 

Next day i get tech support on the phone, with pics and vids sent to them to see my renovation of my previous fire place to accomodate this stove, and to try and understand why the stove is what they call, over charging.
To this day, even up to the design group, they can only conclude that I have "too much chimney",, they were at a brick wall with me and what to do to help me manage around this possible safety issue.  These are very great people by the way and super smart on this gassification tech. 
him- since you have a 10'' flue,, this may be the problem.
him- you might be one of those customers that needs a barometric damper installed in the flue
me- thats crazy,, thats like demo the chimney to install,  its creeping up on cold weather...
him- yeah i know.....
him-wait Mr Cassity, maybe we are over complicating things........
him- how long did you say you got out of a couple sticks of wood.
me- about 8 hrs stretching it.
him- well then,,, how about stop loading it up all the way, just add less wood.
me-  was dumbfounded,  the answer was right there.
him- there's no net gain in burning a full load or just one or two pieces.
me- umm, yeah thats pertty simple.
him- call back if you need any more help.

Thats all been about 2 months ago, at this point i add a couple pieces of wood at a time.
This stove also has the unique ability to burn extra large in size wood ,, you all know the look,, "yeah i better split that", well this stove seems to chissel away at even large pieces.

As for the ash clean out,,, as stupid as you think it is,, its actually Perfect, odd design but works just fine.  its design allows you to move ash to a huge pan below yet keep coals to start up the next round.  You let the coals finish off just below the stove and dump them later.
I am now dealing with ash maybe once a week!!!!!!!!!!

im out of breath,,, sorry so long but yes, get this stove.  top gets very hot and useful for cooking once you learn how to make the kind of heat that pushes the limits of its design.

good luck, hope someone finds this useful... and pls call with questions,, scott cassity 304 772 3411.

pics of completed project.... next posts will be of "how i got here" , the amazing story of the Heatalator demo!!

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #7 –
July 2017

Patient, this has to come out, a wood burner insert.
Im about to discover more than i wanted to know about something i did not know was there.

Wood stove got a crack inside the fire box, bandaid from 2016 winter held us over.
Wife wants all the stuff in between the upright logs torn out.
My oh my what wonders are in store for me.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this a 9 on difficulty level.  I have no idea actually how I did it now that I look back on it.

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #8 –
well , i finally skooched it out ,, but wait,,
whats this other thing,
its like a metal box.

did i have a metal box inside a huge other metal box.
welcome to researching "how to remove a Heatalator".  aparently there are not many people at all who have done this since actually the house "is built around" the heatalator.

with the heatalator comes an ash door at the bottom, which i can access from outside at grade via a cast iron door.
there is a tiny 1' tall by 30'' wide x 30'' deep tiny room underneath this ash door.

With that being said,, now i have to solve not compromizing the floor of my fireplace due to my new unit be about 500lbs.  I will solve this later with load plates which will appear at the final photos.  the load plates will span wide enough to catch good structural cmu block work from below

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #9 –
so i start,,
its amazing how much material keeps on coming out of this opening.
I am revealing the heatalator.
Apparently early on when the house was built, someone (probably the wife) threatened to move out if the hubby fails to make her warm in the winter.
I am speaking from personal experience here,, no i'm not guessing.

So someone compormized the heatalator to accomodate a wood burner insert.
weeks of work are to follow.

id rather be working on my memory seat module problems than to do this,, or perhaps take a beating

the bright shinny has worn off, i am no longer having fun.

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #10 –
and of course the "new thing" or new hap's need investigated by the cats

There's always been little harmless ring neck snakes that turn up around the fire place.. im about to find out more about this and make it stop.
the wife tells me often how lucky i am to have found her, no other wife would put up with snakes in her house.

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #11 –
more demo and discouraging discovery... so worried about the structure of the chimney now.
gotta be careful... think it though,, have a method of procedure.

seems like this metal box goes wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy up high.

it took sooooooo much work to get to this point,, but the work has just begun.

I have me a rigged up exhaust fan blowing up the chimney to move dust out.. didnt take me long to figure out that was a good idea.

the 45deg overhead is really flakey, they used s block as fill to transition the chimney tapper ,, seems dangerous now, i gotta solve that with a safe permanant solution later.
I install my lental to hold up the block along the front edge i want to stay in place.

next to demo the heatalator box.

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #12 –
time to phone a friend with a plasma cutter.

at this point i am really starting to question what i got myself into,, but i got my desert storm face on and kept on getting it.

i had to pull in a temp 60amp 240v ac circuit and have an air supply hose from the garage ready for my pal.

in trade for his time and work, i gave him some really expensive air hose for his plasma cutter and bought his metal roofing material for his parking garage he is building.

he asked me how long i thougth it would take to wreck out the metal box, i told him 3hours.  he pulled up at 10am, he pulled out the driveway at just a tad before 1pm.

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #13 –
I begin serious deep thougth of how to engineer a plan to deal with the fragile overhead where the original block layer tossted in job site s to shape the 45deg angle of my chimney.

plan drawn up in my head so i begin with this.

I sought masons in my area and none would touch this part of the project, they said its impossible to remediate and you gotta start with a new chimney.

Well, ive solved more complicated chanllenges than this...

wood burner stove help SOLVED

Reply #14 –
the next challenge was to figure out how to inject concrete into a shape that would ultimately end up being shaped like a wedge with no overhead access.

solution.....
calibrated cut plywood to perfectly fit and on door hinges,,,,,,,,, jack it up level, start tossing in cups of concrete till you hope the void is full enough, then jack up the plywood until it bottoms out.  with the plywood all the way up, the rebar is still suspended and surrounded by concrete.  the excess would ooze out which is cleaned up.
lets see how this plays out......