My woodburner

I’ve always regarded my woodburner as being a bit problematic, to be honest, and have always had a bit of a ‘love-hate’ relationship with it. In the very early days I installed its tubular metal flue upside-down and had to take it down again, all six metres or so of it, and reinstall it after gunge from the awful old garden wood that I burnt condensed inside it, began running down and then began exiting through all the joints because they were the wrong way round.

It made a heck of a mess of the outside of the tubes because once it had cooled it turned from a runny liquid into a thick tar-like material that took a lot of cleaning off with turps. And not having learned my lesson, I continued in my ignorance burning old ‘wet’ garden wood that eventually ended up competely blocking the flue necessitating its complete removal for unblocking once again.

I’d found out that the flue was totally blocked after smoke began to fill my living room one evening. I’d then bought a cheap chimney sweeping kit, shoved the brush up into the flue and had one of the rods in the brush set snap on me while it was stuffed into the flue leaving the brush and the remaining broken rod section somewhere up aloft high in the sooty reaches of the chimney.

You could say that the woodburner itself can’t be blamed for all these mishaps which were really more down to my inexperience and/or stupidity and I suppose that if pushed, I’d have to agree with you. However, they did colour my attitude towards it and my subsequent experiences have not helped.

I’ve got fed up with having to clean it out in the morning but that again isn’t the stove’s fault because it comes with the territory and is part-and-parcel of any wood stove. But what has annoyed me the most is that I always seem to have had problems getting it going and latterly have resorted to using a blowlamp to get the kindling and small starter logs hot enough to be able to add bigger logs that would otherwise just fizzle out.

I’ve also, I have to admit, been somewhat disappointed with the heat that it’s chucked out. There have for reasons unknown to me, been some exceptional occasions when it has done really well but these have been few and far between and as a result I’ve stopped burning oak, which should give plenty of heat but hasn’t because it has always burned too slowly, in favour of ‘châtaigne’ which is less efficient but has at least always burnt completely down to ash.

In theory, my wood burner should be really good. It’s a modern design with a lower ‘direct’ air inlet and an upper ‘convected’ air inlet. From what I’ve found on the internet, when the stove gets going, the idea is to close the lower inlet completely and control it using the upper one, but I’ve never been able to do that successfully and have always had to keep the lower one partially open even though I could hear the top one ‘breathing’ as air entered it.

But something has happened. I noticed over the summer that clinker from the flue was collecting in my woodburner’s fire box and when I decided to get things ready for the cold snap that we’re currently experiencing (a high of only 7 degrees Celsius today falling to 2 degrees by dawn tomorrow) I thought that I’d better clear it out.

There’s a sort of removable curved baffle plate inside the fire box that sits on little pegs on the back wall and is supported on its top edge in clips on the fire box roof so it forms a slanting barrier between the burning logs and the flue outlet. As the clinker had fallen down the flue and past the baffle plate I thought that I’d better remove it, not having done so for a couple of years or so, in case there was any on its top surface.

To say that there was is an understatement. Not only was there a heap of clinker, there was also a pile of brownish soot and taken together, the two materials were effectively forming a plug in the flue outlet hole. I gave the flue itself a few good bangs and even more came down, so when I cleared the whole lot away, the flue had had a pretty good clean out, for which I must really thank the hot summer for having made the flue expand and contract, loosening the clag and allowing it to drop out.

Not thinking too much more about it, I started the woodburner for the first time three evenings ago and have run it every evening since. And I’ve been amazed at the transformation. It has burst into life quicker than you can say, ‘Strike a light, mate’ just by setting a match to a bed of paper under the kindling and light starter logs and has come up to heat quicker than I’ve ever known it to before, allowing large logs, even very large ones, to be added much sooner than I’ve ever imagined.

It has also chucked out so much heat, even with the lower air inlet fully closed, that at times I’ve been unable to sit in front of it. So have I been running it all this time with a semi-blocked flue? I think that I must have been. But in any case, now that I know what’s possible I’ll have to be much more careful in the future – and I’ll also have to get a lot more wood in, because although it’s made my house more toasty warm than I can ever remember, it’s certainly getting through some wood doing so 🙂