Driven to distraction

My wood burner is driving me crazy. In fact I’m now beginning to thoroughly dislike it. I know that a big part of the problem is the wood that I’ve been burning, but I’ve reached the stage when I now approach every evening with a sense of foreboding. It has a ‘stay clean’ glass door that is taking me 30-40 minutes to clean every day, a job that I now detest doing, and that’s not the worst of it. It’s filling my house with smoke every time I use it and not only does the place now smell strongly of soot whenever you come back in after going outside for any length of time, but everything in the house also has a thin film of the stuff covering it. The floors in particular are impossible to keep clean and whereas I originally looked forward to having a wood burner burning brightly and throwing out its heat during the winter evenings, the reality has become an ongoing nightmare.

I noticed several weeks ago that shortly after I’d got the stove going, a small amount of smoke was being emitted from the top air inlet slots. However, it seemed to stop after a short while, but as time has progressed, the problem appears to have got worse. I also began to notice that the atmosphere in my living room seemed to become increasingly more ‘smoky’, although I put that down to the fact that whenever I opened up the stove door to add more wood to it, smoke gushed out of it into the room. Since then things have got progressively worse, culminating in last night’s experience when I had to open doors and windows to clear the smoke from my room without ever getting the stove up to temperature and working properly. Here are a couple of shots that I took last night just after I’d lit it that show what’s happening.

I always start the stove using paper, dry oak kindling and two or three fire-lighters, so the quality of the wood shouldn’t come into it. The first shot was taken soon after I’d lit up with the top inlet slots closed and the bottom ones open to encourage a good draught, while the paper and kindling were beginning to catch alight. It shows how so little of the smoke generated was being sucked up into the flue that large clouds were finding their way out into the room through the top air inlets even though they were fully closed. In the second shot, even though the kindling had caught light and was generating enough heat to take some of the smoke away up the flue, some was still able to escape through the top air inlets. The second shot also shows that even at this early stage, the door glass was already beginning to turn brown.

Things became so bad that I actually abandoned trying to run the stove last night. Luckily the evenings are now becoming a bit warmer and I was able to use my small electric fan heater instead, although this rather defeats the object of having the wood burner in the first place. It looks as though I have a problem with either my flue or the stove itself or both. Even though I’ve been using poor quality wood, I can hardly believe that in the short space of a few months, the flue can be so sooted up that it has effectively ceased to work. But in any event, I can’t leave things as they are and like it or not, I’ll have to resolve the problems before next winter, whatever they are. I don’t however, relish the prospect of having to do so at all 😐