The text is his..not the video.
The above link is for Blaze King wood stoves (with built in catalyst). This is much like the catalytic converter for your car. Except that instead of having it downstream of the engine in your exhaust pipe like a car, it sits inside the fire box for peak efficiency. There are 2 types of EPA certified wood stoves: Non-catalytic and Catalytic.
Non-catalyst stoves run clean by having lots of thermal protection in the walls of the wood stove. This keeps the fire burning hot. A fire that burns at 1000°F or hotter will burn the smoke inside the box. Resulting in a clean output up the chimney. This also means you have no wasted heat in the form of smoke going up the chimney. Because smoke is simply unburnt fuel. Now the trouble of a 1000° or hotter fire is that it burns the wood rather quickly. So you end up using more wood than you would with a catalytic model.
A catalytic stove on the other hand will have the catalyst become “active” at 500°F. This means that you can run the fire at 500-600°F and still ignite all the smoke just like you would in a non-catalyst model at 1000°F. The cooler fire results in longer burn times (as much as 40 hours continuous without adding more wood). During this time, there is no visible smoke coming out the chimney nor is there any “wood burning” smell outside your home. Because all the stuff you would see or smell is unburnt fuel in the form of smoke, of which the catalytic model (or hot running non-catalyst model) does not produce. That smoke is completely burnt up inside the box and produces useable heat instead. The chimney on a catalytic model runs cool enough that you can touch it with your hand.
The interesting part with a catalytic stove happens after it’s been running for a long time. Say 12 hours. Normally a fire would start to go out and start smoldering. Leaving you with a big chunk of ash. Smoke output would increase as the fire cools down. Not so with a catalytic stove though. As the fire cools down, it produces more smoke. But since the catalyst stays active until the fire is completely out, what happens is that the smoke from the smoldering fire hits the catalyst. The catalyst heats up and radiates the heat back down into the firebox. That then raises the heat, which ignites the smoke. The heat from the ignited smoke heats up the fire, and the fire continues running hotter and cleaner. It’s a continuous circular cycle. Not only do you get a longer run time and a cleaner run time. But you get extremely little ash left over because the fire burns the wood right down to nothing.
My Dad has a Blaze King with a catalyst in it. He uses 1/3 less wood than he did with his old wood stove. His Blaze King is listed as 82% efficient. This is a far cry from a cold drafty fireplace, which typically run about 5% efficient. With a fireplace, all the heat goes up the chimney, and they suck about 400 cfm of warm room air up the chimney. A wood stove by comparison sucks about 25 cfm of air up the chimney (very little back draft issues with a wood stove). And it’s not sucking much if any warm room air up the chimney. Since a fireplace has an open hearth to the room, they never get up to the 1000°F temps needed to ignite the smoke. So they burn gobs of firewood and smoke like crazy. You can smell them outside and see the smoke. They also leave a big chunk of ash that needs to be cleaned frequently.
Another benefit of a catalytic wood stove is that since they produce so little smoke, there is nearly no creosote produced. My Dad had his chimney cleaned after 8 years of use (wood heat is his only form of heat in his Canadian house). The chimney sweep took out about a tablespoon of creosote.
Fireplace efficiency: 5%
Wood stove efficiency (Blaze King catalyst model): 82% efficiency
Natural gas efficiency: 90%
To get natural gas, you need to frack the environment and you send a monthly bill to a corporate office someplace far away. To get wood heat, the money goes to a local person who cut down the wood and splits it for you. So the money is spent locally and it’s good exercise cutting, splitting, stacking, and loading the wood stove. Wood heat is renewable energy and carbon neutral. You cut down the wood, you hire somebody (typically college kids who spend the summer making big money) replanting trees. If all you did was cut down a few trees on your property, you cold easily replant a few trees to replace them. Carbon gets stored in wood until the wood dies naturally of old age (at which time the carbon gets expelled to the environment). Burning the wood instead also releases the carbon. Either way the carbon stored in the wood will be expelled. But with replanting, you get a new form of carbon storage.
One of the greatest benefits of wood heat is that it works when the power goes out. This can be very important in colder climates during the wintertime.
One of the most interesting parts of watching a catalytic wood stove in action is the way it burns the wood. Non-cat stoves have the typical dancing flames going on. But catalyst stoves tend to have less flame and more of a bright glowing wood action occurring. The wood glows almost like it’s nuclear. Even stranger is watching the offgassing of the wood hitting the catalyst in the top of the firebox and igniting. So you will have wood on the bottom glowing orange, no flames coming off it, but a horizontal line of fire at the top of the wood stove seemingly burning from nothing.
