Well, the wood burner flue problem wasn’t a disaster by any means, just a temporary set-back. The wood I’d left in last night hadn’t quite all burnt this morning even though the stove had become pretty cool, so I raked it around a bit and started some flames to make it give out a bit of heat while I was having breakfast. In the meantime I checked on the possibilities for flying today and decided that it wasn’t going to be on. It was quite chilly and the vis was poor and it didn’t look as though it was going to improve any time soon. So I thought it best to forget about it and sort out the wood burner instead.<\/p>\n
I was worried that the flue pipes would all become stuck together once the sticky black liquid in the joints cooled and hardened and this seemed to be the case because earlier on, I’d wiggled the pipe directly on top of the stove, and it moved, whereas later on, when it had cooled, it wouldn’t. I was all ready to use my angle grinder to cut it off off above the stove outlet when I thought I’d give it a go with the blowlamp. To cut a long story short, I managed to separate the pipe from the stove after heating the joint between them, and stand the whole flue on the platform next to the wood burner, so I knew that if I could do it with that joint, I’d be able to do the same with all of the others.<\/p>\n
Once I’d got all of the pipes separated and standing outside, I could see how bad the problem was. I tried cleaning the black stuff off with turps, but it didn’t work, so then I decided to take more drastic action and burn it off with the blowlamp. That did the job, even though it took a while and I ended up using most of the gas in the cylinder. I thought that by burning off the volatiles in the gunge, at least it wouldn’t be able to run down the pipes again when they were heated up but in fact I found that once the liquid in it had boiled away, what remained was more or less a kind of grey ash. So I then removed that with a scraper, which got the tubes back to being quite smooth again, albeit not very pretty looking. But I soon solved that, by giving them all a coat of matt black heat-proof paint that I’d had left over after doing MYRO’s exhaust silence all those months ago, back in England \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Then all that remained was to get the flue pipes back onto the wood burner, the right way up. Only one problem – they wouldn’t connect directly that way because the ‘male’ end was the same diameter as the flue outlet on the stove, so wouldn’t go in! The situation was complicated further because today happened to be a public holiday in France, so I doubt that Leroy Merlin was open. And not only that, when I checked their web site, they didn’t appear to list an adaptor or connector that would do the job. So I ended up making a connecting collar of my own by cutting just over 10 cm off the end of one of my pipes. I found that this was a very firm fit on the top of the stove and in fact needed to be hammered on as the stove outlet has a small taper, so I hoped that being so tight a fit, it wouldn’t allow any black gunge to pass through the joint to the outside.<\/p>\n
It then didn’t take long to get the flue back onto the stove and after clearing up, I was all ready to fire it up. Everything went pretty well – obviously it was now impossible for any liquid to escape from the flue pipe joints that are up the chimney, so the only place I had to look out for was the flue joint with the stove outlet. In fact, a small amount did begin to emerge at the front and then an even smaller amount round at one side. For the time being, I’m going to leave them be and see if they self-seal when the liquid dries out and turns into hard clinker inside the joint. If not, it won’t take too much effort to lift the flue off again and put some kind of high temperature sealer inside the joint, although obviously I’d like to avoid that if I can.<\/p>\n
But at least the wood burner is back in action again and I’ve got it burning pretty briskly at the moment to get some heat back into the house. Tomorrow, when it’s had time to cool down a bit overnight, I’ll see if I can clean the door using Russ’s recommended method, before getting the cycle going all over again. Hopefully I’ve now turned the corner and will be able to look forward to being awarded my wood burner’s badge quite shortly \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, the wood burner flue problem wasn’t a disaster by any means, just a temporary set-back. The wood I’d left in last night hadn’t quite all burnt this morning even though the stove had become pretty cool, so I raked it around a bit and started some flames to make it give out a bit … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5540"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5554,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540\/revisions\/5554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}