Wood stove - smelly puddle on the floor

boatbuilder

Well I've had this Stanley "Fionn" wood stove for a couple of years now and have burned thousands of ash logs in it with no problems. I decided last week to sweep the chimney because it was never done since the house was built 2 years ago, so I bought a set of brushes on ebay and swept it mysef last weekend. I took the stove out to do it so I could tape up the opening to stop dust getting out into the room. There was about a bucket full of "crunchie" type black stuff, almost like a honeycomb texture.

Anyhow, I put the stove back in and lit her up and everything was fine.
Then the next morning (about 7am and it was very frosty outside) I lit the stove again and within 30 minutes, there was a steady dribble of dirty extremely SMELLY water dripping down out of the flue liner onto the floor behind the stove. I would say there was enough to fill one or two cups.
I went to work and my wife reported that it stopped dripping about an hour later.

At this stage, I should point out that the chimney is lined with standard clay flue liners and the metal stove pipe is shoved about 3 feet up into the clay liners and packed around the metal pipe with rockwool.

Can anyone offer an explanation for this? It has never happened before.

My house still stinks really badly from this stuff.

10-10-20

Sounds like a water/cresote mix.
If the wood was damp, or it was burning 'cool', you may have caused condensation in the chimney, especially with the frost. This condensation mixed with the freshly disturbed residue in the chimney, and on rolled down.
Did the stove get up to temperature when you lit if after cleaning it?

Once you brought the stove up to working temperature it drove off the dampness and stopped the run.

By the way, if you got 2 buckets of sweepings from the chimney, I'd hazard a guess that you're possibly burning either too much fresh or damp wood, or are backing the vents off too much. It will possibly need to be swept more often to prevent a very hot chimney fire.

boatbuilder

Any idea how to avoid this happening again?
When I lit the stove, she was going with all the vents fully open for the first 10 mins or so and she was blazing away. The wood wasn't particularly wet.

10-10-20

I suspect it happens every time you light the fire, but it must have pooled elsewhere prior to the clean.
Burn it hot initially, getting it up to temperature quickly and use dry wood to start.

boatbuilder

I tried it again tonight.....cleaned out the stove and wiped up the congealed gloopy cresote off the floor. I lit the fire with dry wood...dry as in kiln dried.
It lit fine and blazed up for about 5 minutes. Then I put one small ash log on it and left the vents open a good bit so it was still burning hot. Within 5 more minutes there was stinking water trickling down the pipe and it took 10 more minutes for it to stop.
Is there any other solution to this as we just can't stand the smell. The entire house reeks of burning creosote and seems to linger forever. I won't be lighting it again until I get something sorted...really bad timing as our heating oil is about to run out as well:eek:

Grannysha

We have a similar problem, 15 mins after lighting our stove brown smelly water drips down the flue.It drys up after a while but then starts up again. How did you resolve it? we had so much water we thought our chimney was leaking

jameshayes

I recently had this problem and it was actually solved by putting one of those Chinese hats on my chimney

boatbuilder

jameshayes wrote: »

I recently had this problem and it was actually solved by putting one of those Chinese hats on my chimney

In the end it just mysteriously stopped happening, I'm guessing because enough soot built up inside the flue to absorb the water and stop it trickling down. My next step was going to be one of those metal hats on the chimney pot.

btb

You should really have lined clay flue with a flexi flue, or a minimum got a increaser which matched your clay flue to your flue from stove and bedded it with fireclay to the clay liner. This would mean that all creosote would run back down into your stove and be burned off in it.
A flexi flue backfilled with vermiculate would prevent the flue gasses cooling too quickly and condensing.

The main culprit is the wood that you are burning is wet. Ideally wood should be seasoned properly and kept dry before you use it.