Old mooki.. old stove. DOnt know what im doing...

[Blatent2ndaccount]

Hi guys

What we have here is a very old mooki with a very old stove. And one stupid operator..
Chimney was inspected 3 years ago and given all clear. Its usage since then is unknown.
In typical gung-ho fashion i opened all the flues/vents and fired this beast up with a raging beast of a fire.

Most of you will have a palm on your forehead right now .. you know what happened.

The fire draws...smoke is seen from chimney. But it also leaks.
Can someone enlighten me as to what those round things are?
They don't pull off or twist so I thought they were decorative?

Anyway like i said i got a beast of a fire going in there and smoke and tar started dripping from the highlighted
places...and my room got pretty smokey too. I cant have it inspected for 6 weeks...

Any advice? Would it be increadibly foolish to fire it up again? I got a big stack of wood... and elec is pretty darn pricey to heat this place.

[Pursuivant]

Well...

ONLY A TOTAL IDIOT FIRES UP A COLD FROZEN STOVE WITH HUGE FIRE!

...if you don't already have a cracked the chimney...

OK, so you don't open "all" the flues. The one on the stove is the oven flu? The other one is the cooking flu??

The "round things" if they look like can bottoms are chimney sweeping vents/flues. They're probably rusted stiff in their place. They have a lip and are in a piece of metal tube. Stuff coming out is condensed because the whole place is frozen.

OK, so, if you want to pry that round thing open, it will have lots of mudwater coming out. Good idea to drain it.

How you do it - you need to get the chimney warmed up. OK, so you got a good draft. Best is to start the cooking stove. Its a bit trickier, but once you got a fire there you can't do too much damage and you can enjoy sweeping the muck out of the stove vents. In the stove section theres usually two small vents on the floor you open and burn newspaper in for the draft if it starts puffing in.

Once you keep a fire in the cooking stove for a day, you can start firing up the main oven. You start a little fire and gradually put in bigger and bigger logs. Idea is, the smoke is "clear" with full burning.

The reason all the smoke and !"#¤% comes is the chimney is cold, damp and probably nobodys swept the oven.

[Pursuivant]

Also, is there a pipe hood on the chimney? If not, you have snow and water and leaves come down those 3 years your stove is full of that muck...

[Pursuivant]

If you think of the stove and chimney, they are made of clay. What is clay, fine sand. What is sand, you make glass of it. So take a glass, put it outside. In the morning boil hot water and go pour it in the cold glass. OK, so would you do that? Then imagine the chimney is made of glass. Cracking the stove/chimney is a very real hazard. Has to be done s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y... like old people boinking.

[Blatent2ndaccount]

Yup that total idiot would be me.
Heh.. im glad your around today

Re:pipe hood.. no idea. I have no ladder. Its pretty frozen up at the top


Ok.. slowly does it......

[Pursuivant]

Well-duh so theres snow melting and you're wondering why theres tarry water coming down and out of the flues you're washing your chimney from the inside. Most of that "smoke" is steam.

Yeah, those vents you need to pry open... get some newspapers and rags ready as that !"#¤% is going to come down until the top is dry.

The chimney is cold, wet (and you don't want it to freeze) so you just keep a small fire continuously. When the chimney gets hot (you loose the snow hat) and it feels warm to the hand, then you can go on with the stove - but remember, with all that water and moisture you need to be careful with it too.

[Pursuivant]

Oh, and while you're warming up, don't close the flues. Plates open. Yeah, you're going to burn through wood, but if you close the plates and you get water dripping down onto the coals, you get C0 and wake up dead.

[Blatent2ndaccount]

read and ingested.

Hot plate burning without problems.
And with that alone its a nice 20 celcius in here with elec heating now OFF.

Thanks for your help. Fire warms the soul in so many ways

[Pursuivant]

Yeah, keep the fire going - the idea is to "dry out" the chimney. If you can, keep the big stove door open as well as the flu, you will feel draft, that'll help. Maybe tomorrow you can switch to the big stove. Looks like you heat that one up properly it'll be warm for a week.

But - now that you had all the water run down to the big stove - you *must* warm it up as well. you don't want to have it full of water when you leave the mokki and freeze, as that might crack it too.

When you leave, close the flu plates. Thats supposed to keep most of the muck coming down from getting all over. You also might want to check if theres anything left of the plates, as they do rust. You can find new ones from a hardware store, but then the question is getting the right fit.

So next time you get to the mokki, even in spring, the same excersize... just remember... s-l-o-o-w-l-y

[Karhunkoski]

Ten points to Pursuivant.

[Rosamunda]

We use a hand-held gas burner torch thingy whatsit to heat up the chimney before we light the stove.

[Pursuivant]

If you have electricity, one of those car heaters works too... I had a 60's diesel-oil stove that was a bit "stiff" in the winter.