4seasons
ArboristSite Guru
So I wake up this morning to 66F in the house. Not too cold but just not the normal 70+ that I have been seeing so I rake thru the coals to knock some ashes down and load the stove back up. Outside temp is 20 so I crank the damper up to high and carry on with my morning. Check back in an hour and it is still 66 in the living room where the stove is. Something isn't right. I didn't have trouble last week when it got below 0 getting the house warm. So I open the stove door to check my burn. Not many flames, certainly not as much as normal with the damper wide open. No smoke coming thru the open door so I must have plenty of draft. As I am looking thru the open door the fire starts to come up to speed. So I am not getting enough air in, must be something blocking the damper. I'm thinking surely I don't have that much ashes piled up as I emptied them a couple of days ago. So I open the ash door and have a look, a bit more ash than I was expecting so I go to pull the tray out and it is stuck. I look deeper in the ash pit and sure enough the cast iron grate that has been cracked is now broken and part of it is hanging down into the ash pan. Not only does it have the ash pan jammed in place but it has also allowed the ashes from above to fall into a pattern that has created an air dam around the damper. I grab the poker and use it as a pry-bar to move the broken grate out of the way. Since I had just loaded the stove an hour ago there is a lot of weight from the wood above holding the grate in place. The fire is now roaring as it is getting plenty of air. I finally get the broken piece lifted back up on its perch so I can pull the ash pan out. I take the ashes out to dump them and another piece of grate falls out of the pan. So my grate is in at least 4 piece now. Really have to love this Chinese cast iron. On the bright side in the 10 minute it took to get the ash pan out the living room temp rose 4 degrees. I just don't see myself paying the $150 for a new piece of Chinese iron to fix this stove. I guess I will let the fire burn down today and put a firebrick over the gap in the grate and try to get thru winter like that. Defiantly time for a new stove or at least a full rebuild of this one. I have got some good use out of this stove for the 10 years that I have been here and I would say it got a good workout for the 19 years before I moved in. Not sure if this is the original stove from when the house was built so I can't say for sure what I think of its durability. 29 years sounds pretty good for it's cheap construction but for all I know it my have only been put in 11 years ago. It is a WonderCoal by US Stove.