Stove Cleaning

Around 10pm the other night, after burning wood in the wood stove almost all day, the smoke alarm went off in one of the rooms adjacent to where the stove is.  The smoke alarms are all connected so this caused an awful din throughout the house while I ran from room to room making sure this wasn't a false alarm. (Six year-old Ramon slept soundly through the whole ordeal--scary thought.)

I suspected that the alarm was set off by smoke from the stove.  There's often a little that escapes whenever you open the door to feed it, and because I had closed the damper some to make it burn slower there was less of a draft to speed the exhaust through the chimney.  Nevertheless, a smoke alarm that goes off in a house with a wood stove is cause for concern.

There's a strange pull that occurs between saving your family and getting a smoke alarm to shut up, but I went with the former before the latter, and once I was satisfied that there was no fire in the chimney or anywhere else, I was able to concentrate on getting the blasted alarms to stop sounding. (Ours includes, besides an incredibly loud beeping, an urgent woman's voice shouting "FIRE! FIRE!"  She shouts "DANGER! CARBON MONOXIDE!" if she senses that. What a dear.  And despite her urgent tone, she somehow manages not to be shrill, though this could simply be relative to the ear-splitting beeping.)

Well, the fact that there was enough smoke floating around to set off the alarm meant that I better give the stove and chimney a good inspection and cleaning if necessary.  So today, I relied on the oil furnace to heat the house, and kept the stove cold.

The first step to cleaning the stove is shoveling out the ashes, (which we usually have to do twice a week anyway). Then you can remove the inserts and plates as needed depending on your stove.  This allows you to clean up debris that's found its way outside of the firebox.  With my stove, a Jotul F100, you need to remove all the inner plates if you want to inspect and/or clean the chimney.

With all the inserts out of the way, you can then take a bright flashlight or task light and shine it around while looking at the outside of the stove to see where light might show through.  Use furnace cement repair leaks where old cement has degraded, and replace any cracked parts.  If you do spot leaks, it's time to get a user/service manual and follow the manufacturers recommendations.

You can also use the light and a mirror for inspecting the chimney.  Or you can do the wood stove limbo and stick your head in the stove while facing upwards. (I prefer the mirror method though it takes patience to get the light and the mirror working together to actually view the inside of the chimney.)

If soot has accumulated in the chimney to a thickness of a 1/4", you must get the chimney cleaned.  In order to tell how thick the soot is, you'll have to reach up and wipe the inside of the chimney.  Many people simply  get their chimney clean every year to stay on the safe side, and if you're not interested in getting dirty just to find out whether the chimney needs cleaning or not, I highly recommend that you get it cleaned once a year.  I cleaned my chimney at the beginning of the season last year after two winters of use.  On inspecting it today, I'm confident it doesn't need a cleaning now.  If I wasn't working alone today, I might take the half-hour to go up on the roof and get busy with the brush, but it's not critical.  I'll inspect it again half-way through the season to be sure.

You can check the door gasket by closing a dollar bill in the door and then pulling it out.  If the bill slides out with little resistance, you should replace the door gasket.  Perform the test in several places around the opening.  I you're rich, and it makes you feel better to use a higher denomination, feel free.

I did find a place that needed attention.  Where the chimney meets the stove, the installers failed to line up a screw properly which caused the sleeve to be misaligned, leaving a small crack where smoke could escape.  This is probably what caused the smoke alarm the other night. Especially with the damper half closed, the smoke would be even more likely to leak.

I was able to straighten out the sleeve and get the screw properly aligned so now there's a tight seal at the base of the chimney. Hopefully I won't be faced with the moral dilemmas posed by smoke alarms with computerized voices anytime soon.

handyman

Comments

[Muskego Jeff]

It's not uncommon for kids to sleep through smoke alarms. The voice kind are supposed to increase the odds that kids will wake up, but that obviously doesn't work for all kids.

The smoke alarm closest to the stove could also be more sensitive. In our previous home the alarm closest to the kitchen got extremely sensitive over time and eventually would go off almost any time I opened the oven - even when I didn't burn anything. I don't know if it was the heat or very light smoke created from old "burnings", but something set it off all the time. Eventually I just swapped it with a detector from another part of the house and things got normal again.

[The Handyman]

Thanks for the tip. That could very well be the case because we have a little fan near the ceiling (opposite wall from the smoke detector) that blows warm air (and probably smoke if there's any) into that room. There could even some fine particulate (dust/soot) that's accumulating there.

By the way, good luck with the Cutlass! --http://72cutlassconvertible.blogspot.com/