One thing I’ve really missed since setting up home in the yurt has been an oven. We have a 30 year-old camping gas stove out of an old VW campervan with two burners and a grill, plus the wood burning stove to cook on, but no oven. No fresh home-made bread. No cookies. No roasts. No oven-baked vegetables. It’s been hard …
With the stove working daily for almost two months now, it was obvious the flue was becoming obstructed with creosote deposits. When it got to the stage of smoking the yurt out every time we opened the stove door to add more wood, it was time to do something about it.
I also wanted to make a slight modification to my earlier modifications. (The upside-down flue pipe has been working perfectly. No leakage of creosote or smoke.)
Yesterday I went back and fitted the stove all over again. I wasn’t happy with the way the flue was installed, even though it was fitted the way it was designed to be.
The single skin stainless steel flue pipes, fittings and caps (chapéu) on sale here aren’t the most ideal flues from the point of view of efficient stove operation as the thin metal leads to rapid cooling of the combustion gases, causing condensation of water vapour and creosote accumulation at an accelerated rate. I’d already swapped my initial choice of 130mm pipe for 110mm before installation to increase draw and flue temperatures, but the nature of the pipe is such that 20mm diameter probably doesn’t make a massive amount of difference. (Though what do I know? I’m not a heating engineer.)
Christmas Eve. Seems a good time to get the stove finally in and working. I’d forgotten just how good this little stove is, and it draws to perfection with 3 lengths of 110mm flue pipe. At this rate I should have the yurt warm and dry and fit to move into within a reasonable time. Always providing I can source the firewood …
It’s been raining, so work is inevitably progressing at a slower pace than I’d like given the urgency in getting the yurt dried out. A couple of days’ work now has the stove stripped down, rust removed, corroded and sheared bolts replaced, and reassembled and tested.
It goes! With no leaks.
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