Wood Stove Tips - Maintenance Wood Stove Glass

If soot about the glass of your wood stove is getting you lower, here are a few tips you can use to wash things up.

Why Does Wood Stove Glass Get Sooty?

Your wood stove glass usually gets sooty since the conditions in your wood stove are not quite correct. Soot forms because either the stove temperature is as well low, not enough air is getting to the fire or a mix of both of these.

Your wood stove may be running at low temperatures for a lot of reasons. The most common of these are unseasoned or even poorly seasoned wood. Wood that has moisture content over 20% is usually considered too green to burn since it is hard to light and never burns in addition to more seasoned firewood. The cold slow smoldering fire has a tendency to give off sooty smoke which deposits on the cup.

If you close down the air too much on your stove you suffocate the fire and a lot of smoke forms which should be being burnt off. This smoke builds up on the wood stove glass door - this really is most common in overnight burns as people try to develop the fire then shut the air down for the night time. Most modern EPA stoves are not designed to do that is shutting down air to such a degree is very polluting.

While most modern stoves are designed with an "onedayglass" which helps maintain the glass door clean, older stoves rarely had this and tended to smoke up regardless of the conditions in the stove. If you have an older stove with this problem you may consider upgrading to a more modern stove - it will probably be more efficient at heating, easier to use and possess few problems keeping the wood stove glass clean.

How you can Clean Wood Stove Glass

If your stove does build up soot there are some little tricks you can use to get the doorway clean again.

Some stoves have effectively "self-cleaning glass". If you open up the air on the stove and obtain a hot roaring fire going very often the worst from the soot will burn off over the space of 30 minutes or so. The key is to use very dry wood and permit plenty of air into the firebox. This is unlikely to operate in older models of stoves as they may not reach the required temperatures or have airflows in the right places.

If this doesn't work you can test cleaning the glass by hand when the stove is actually cool. One of the old tricks for cleaning wood stove glass is to obtain a ball of newspaper, bundle it up and dip this in water. Dip the damp newspaper in the ashes in the fire and then rub the sooty glass vigorously using the newspaper bundle. The ashes act as a gentle harsh, removing the soot without damaging the glass surface. When the worst soot is removed "polish" the glass with another bit of dry bundled newspaper to remove the last smears.

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