Save the Queen: Three level chess and stove installation

Three levels of regulation exist in the stove business: a) building codes, b) fire prevention, and c) plumbing issues if you convert a sedore furnace into a boiler. And a fourth independent division of homeowners insurance and their regulations.
Many local municipalities are stuck in yesteryears strictures and by and large coal and wood stoves had only masonry without liners. Liners are standard and readily available today. Your Sedore stove comes with instructions and six inch slow drafting multi-fuel Sedores require smaller openings and less drafting volume than conventional stoves of the past.
Recently a customer complained of an all consuming or dwindling flame in his Sedore bought in 08 from VisionStone. He had 8K invested between his stove and his new masonry chimney. The builder told him that "his chimney was not designed to be lined" and that wood stoves required a 8 inch opening according to code enforcement. I equipped my customer with the knowledge that the Sedore stove is designed for a 6 inch flue. That two inch difference on a square chimney is significant especially with mighty winds blowing consistently outside. My suggestion was to put a 6 inch round 24 gauge straight pipe liner into his terracotta chimney liner. "Bob, I just spent eight thousand dollars. I don't have that kind of money for a stainless insert!!!"
I explained that for predicability and reliability of a Sedore you need the stove manufacturers specifications of a six inch and that an extra 8 to 10 feet height was simple and easy to achieve for maybe only $5/foot and self installation. Could be added in 2 foot add on sections. Add 5 feet for every elbow and to quote Bruce Wolfe, "drafting has many variables and is not an exact science.." but there are rules of thumb to follow.
Also since one of the specialities of the Sedore stove is junk wood I encouraged him to throw some unseasoned hardwood into the stove to slow down the dragon down and let the stove consume the biomass solid fuel with less intensity.
With the Democrats in power, we can expect an attempt to solve problems with more regulations and people who flash the badge and are sticklers for antiquated applications not relevant for newer innovations, my suggestion is reference federal law. It trumps state law and local ordinances. National building code says that for underwritten ULC stoves the stoves is to be installed by standards included in your manual. So if you follow those instructions you should be okay. Clearances to combustibles are printed right on the stove's rear double wall panel.
An insurance representative may not be competant or even care about national building code but he probably has a clue for instance, if the 18 inch clearance from the double wall back panel is up against wood or unburnable cinder block wall. It is mostly CYA for them.
But do it right. Most inspectors want to know if contractors are licensed and insured. Some contractors might be offended when you make improvement to their work. All those with a badge want dignity. When they are on your premises treat them like lesser deities because they are fallable even though they may very well know more than you.
My encouragement to all you potential Sedore customers is stay in the learning curve and be proactive especially with regard to safety!!

Preheating hot water

We are successfully preheating our hot water with our current Sedore (the new one is to be shipped this week :) ) There is a coil in the burn chamber that is hooked up to a water tank behind the stove a few feet. That then feeds into our electric hot water heater. For a few weeks we just preheated our hot water. Now we are leaving our elecric heater off and using the water as it is coming off the stove. It is working fine for during the day. Sometimes if we have a few showers or baths to go through in an evening for our family we will turn on the hot water heater for an hour or so to heat the water up a bit more. Not sure what we will save out of this but we seem to have been spending about $40/month on the hot water heater. This should go down substantially with this new system.

Back in operation

We lit the Sedore today for the first time this heating season. It is starting to get cold at night, although we haven't had a frost yet. Tonight is predicated to get down to 35 and the days just in the high 50's. We have ordered a new Sedore 3000 with 3 water coils to be able to heat the water in our radiators and circulate the heat that way, since we found out it didn't work with only 1 coil for us. We also have a water tank hooked up to preheat some of the water that we use and cut back on our electric hot water heater. But we have not yet gotten the new 3000 so we are using our Old Faithful! Try to post some pictures soon of the new water hookup situation.
It feels good having the stove working for us again. We have a nice pile of wood from working hard over the summer. We will try to post at least once a week again as well.

We made the newspaper.

We made the front page of our local newspaper on Saturday with an excellent article by Al Zagofsky on the Sedore Stove and our business here at VisionStone Stoves. If you would like to see it link over here.

On summer break

It is May now and we have put our Sedore to rest for the summer. Probably be starting it back up again in late September or early October. We did run it a fair amount in April. The wonderful thing about this stove is that we were able to run it very low and take the chill off, especially on a 40 degree night, but we didn't get overwhelmed by too much heat. So we continue to be pleased with our stove, especially when I read about the oil prices continuing to rise.
Have a great summer; see you back here in September.

Heating 3000 Square Feet for about $800

In calculating how much money we have spent on wood so far since we installed our Sedore in January we have spent about $400 for 3 months. Extrapolating back we figure we could have heated our house for the whole winter for $800. Now this also figures in some wood that we scrounged, but did not have to cut. In the last several months I have become a wood scrounge looking for available fire wood where ever I might be.
For this savings is huge, because up until this time we heated with oil and at $3.59/galloon there is no way we could have made even two months at $800. So for us we are easily going to recoup the cost of our stove within a year.

Day Trip and its results

Today, we took a family trip to Middle Creek Wildlife Management ARea. It is a migration spot for snow geese and tundra swans. It was a marvelous experience to see them flock in the area and float and meander on the fields. So I loaded my home Sedore figruing a 6-8 hour burn would be no problem as I have figured out the stove. Wrong!!!

I put in 1 10 inch dry hardwood girth log. A wet chuck to condition at the top on several split pieces of oak and we left. We came back about 4PM to a cold stove and 50 degrees in our house.

One of the split oak pieces fell diagonal and due to the extreme heat of the red hot coals I couldn't reach my hands down and pick it up. I loaded my other solid fuel described above on top of it figuring it would burn through soon. To get the 6-8 hour burn time I closed the air intake to a pinky finger width and drove down the road.

But my air intake should have been a thumbs width wide and it would have left me with decent heat, ie bed of coals to come home to.

When I got home I cracked the lid and left it open and in ten minutes the very dry wood ignited to an intense blaze without having to relight the fire. The little bit of char at the bottom was all the Sedore needed and we were back in business.

PS: End of the season sale on pellets should catch the eye of those of us who choose fuel based on cost.

PSS: Rest on this:
Before I go to bed tonight I will drop a 12 inch diamter chuck of aged oak 20 inches long into the top of the burn chamber. It will be frozen with a high moisture content b/c its never been covered. Unless otherwise, with either one late night or early AM, I expect it to be burning and producing a back burn heat of about 200 degrees F into 7AM.

Flapjacks, the Bobtop, and maple syrup

Well, yesterday morning was a first for us. We cooked homemade whole wheat blueberry pancakes on top of our Sedore stove. We have a custom made top on our Sedore that we call the Bobtop. It is a stainless steel top over the whole length of the stove. Today was the first that we really used it to make the pancakes. We had the stovetop up to about 350 F and those cakes cooked in good time; we were able to cook about 6-8 at a time on the top of the stove too.

Last week we did some old time maple sugaring. Some good friends of ours tapped about 8 maple trees on their property. We were involved to help tap the trees and went out to help boil down some sap as well. They went to Florida for 6 days and asked if we would like to tend the sap. So we did and one day we hit it good. We got 7-8 gallons of sap which boiled down to 1 quart of maple syrup. Yesterday we enjoyed that on our flapjacks. And it was good!!!

The stove is doing the job.

Now, two weeks later (one day short) we are finding that the stove is doing the job. It is heating our entire house and doing it consistently. It is a bit cold around the edges when it gets down to 10 Degrees F at night, but if we are more diligent with dry seasoned wood then it can keep us comfortable. In the meantime oil around here is up to $3.29/gallon, not a price we are willing to pay since we have a choice.
We did get and hook up an electric hot water heater for our water needs, as we are not equipped currently to heat the hot water with the stove. Perhaps at some point we will be. But we will also need something for the summer, as we don't intend to run the stove all year round. We will probably stop burning our stove sometime in April.

Challenges

Tuesday we started to get cold rather than hot water at the kitchen sink. I had burned the stove low and slow, feeling fine with non-intense heat, since I am a miser with logs and trying to save money. It wasn't until Tuesday night that the thought crystallized in my head that there was a problem. Pushing the reset button on our EFM 80's vintage boiler down in the basement, it would choke and burst into flame, sputter, and struggle to a stop. I checked the fuel and thought it was at 1/3 of two 350 gallon tanks. I figured maybe some debris got into the filter and clogged it. I figured I could get to that Wednesday sometime.

Wednesday I ran some errands and eventually got to changing my oil filter. My boiler still would not come on. We called the plumber. Good plumbers are busy; it is cold. He couldn't get out until Friday. The weather man was calling for 15 degrees F and we began to put more logs in and open the air intake all the way to our showroom burn unit. We started to get cool. I was getting maybe 400 degrees F out of the burn chamber and then I cracked the lid and got it up to about 600 degrees F.

My house dropped down to 64 degrees. The water coils seemed unphased by the heat and that bothered me. It seemed like the water in the system did a better job of cooling the coils running through the burn system than the fire did heating the water in the pipes. We found out that part of our wonderful warm in the radiator system was furnace heat.

Well, now the furnace heat is gone. We found out today when the plumber came that we are out of oil. The plumber also replaced the filter in the pump and replaced a clogged nozzle, after scolding me for letting it get so dirty.

The Sedore is heating our home but now only to about 65 degrees, except in the showroom where it is often up to about 70. At the moment we don't have tap water since we haven't placed an order for more oil (for the demand hot water system which was consuming much more oil that we thought.) Instead we are planning to install an electric hot water heater and continue to rely on our Sedore for our house heating.

As far as the coils go my theory is that we need to increase the amount of coils in the burn chamber in order to have the stove function more like a boiler. Not sure when or how I will get to making that change. But in the meantime the stove is saving us and we are grateful.

12 plus Hour Burn on my Sedore

Almost full chamber of split oak, mostly dry, 11:30 Friday night. I went to bed and woke up 7:30 AM Saturday, a bit worried to find only 1/3 of the wood consumed. The wood got caught up on the sides and the solid fuel was burning on the side, like a cigarette. Good heat on the top, maybe 300 degrees, lasted until well past noon. At 1:30 I put in more wood in a verticle position with lots of room to look down between the logs. Then I cracked the lid and let it rest until air rushed in from the down draft, ignited the new fuel (maybe 15 minutes), closed it, and reexamined the burn chamber about 7:00 PM. Four logs were charred in the corners and I put in two new pieces of split oak.
My theory is that I'll get more heat from wood in that if the burn heats the top and all the sides of the burn chamber without a dense mass of corn, pellets, acorns, or cherry pits insulating the sides of the top like fire bricks do in conventional stoves. If the things are not tightly packed together, more heat gets radiated, corrugated steel or not.
By the way, I've burned for 3 weeks now and I have only emptied the ash bucket twice. That should leave me time to wash my plate glass window and go to church on Sunday.

Bob

Psychology of the Sedore

We have concluded that the Sedore Stove is a split personality. It can be burnt hot and pretty much burn up all the creosote that would otherwise go up your chimney or it can be burnt warm for most efficient use of your wood in terms of BTU's, but then small amounts of creosote can build up inside your chimney.
Right now we are burning hotter since we had some cold nights. Here in PA, it was down to 0 the last two nights. We had 62 on the 2nd floor when we got up (stove is on the 1st floor and 2nd is heated by the hot water going into the heating system.) but then we have gotten it back up to 66 this afternoon, so not too bad. But 0 is nothing compared to Minnesota. I read in the paper today that it was 40 below in Minnesota where the Sedore is made. I am sure Bruce Wolfe (US manufacturer) is glad for his Sedore these few days.

Water Coils

Our Sedore 3000 has two water coils installed in the burn chamber. We have successfully hooked it up to our currently hot water heating system. We have an oil fired hot water system that heats our 3 story house with radiators. There are 2 zones and 4 coils. We have the water coils hooked into the 2nd zone and it is keeping the radiators on the 2nd floor quite warm and comfortable. It is interesting to always have them warm, in contrast to the oil system where they would be warm and then cool down and then warm again.

Above is a picture of the stove and the system.

Welcome

Welcome to the new blog for VisionStone Stoves, a family owned and operated start up business in Jim Thorpe, PA. We sell wood, coal, gas, corn, and pellet stoves, but we are really excited about our new multi-fuel Sedore stoves from Minnesota. Since we are the only dealers in PA, we would like to reach across the whole state to people who would be interested in this incredible stove.
We hooked up our Sedore 3000 a few weeks ago and have been quite toasty since then. In fact right now the temperature on our second floor is at 74 degrees, which is a bit hot for this mountains gal. Before the stove we were heating with oil and with prices as they are we kept the temperature at 62, so this is quite a switch. We have been burning only wood so far, but this stove is capable of burning corn, pellets, all types and sizes of wood, sunflower seeds, and a few other things. It is quite versatile.
I hope to post some pictures soon, but in the meantime all the info you might need is over at the website.