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We recommend employing qualified specialists to inspect and clean the flue pipe.
The flue cleaning may be done both mechanically (using special tools, ruffs, brushes, scrapers etc.) and
chemically.
Danger! Take necessary measures to protect eyes and respiratory tract from dust and soot during
mechanical cleaning of flues. Don’t forget to cover or take away furniture and easy soiled
materials.
Ruffs are selected depending on shape and size of the flue and the pipe’s cross-section size.
Attention! Read carefully and follow the recommendations of the manufacturer of chemical cleaning
agents. It is not recommended to use self-made formulations for soot burning.
MALFUNCTIONS
A properly installed stove should not smoke. If yours stove does, check the following:
Has the flue had enough time to get hot?
Is the smoke passage blocked anywhere in the stove, flue connector or flue?
Is there enough air supply?
Is the smoke flow impeded by too long horizontal section of the pipe or too many bends?
Is weak draft perhaps caused by a leaky flue, cold area outside flue, too large a diameter of the flue,
too short length, or the flue being too close to trees or higher buildings?
BASICS OF THERMOELECTRICITY
If you are curious about how your stove generates electricity, please read these brief notes.
Two basic thermoelectric effects were discovered in the XIX century by European scientists.
The first was Thomas Seebeck, who in 1821 discovered the phenomenon of direct conversion of heat into
electric power; the second one was Jean Peltier, who discovered a solid state heat pump.
In the period from 1940 through the 1950’s the Russian academic A.F. Ioffe and his colleagues synthesized
semiconductor alloys, which put these effects into practice and that enabled full scale production of
thermoelectric cooling and power generating devices for wide use in various fields of human activity.
A basic thermoelectric unit is a thermocouple, which consists of p-type and n-type semiconductor elements,
or pellets. Copper commutation tabs are used to interconnect pellets that are traditionally made of Bismuth
Telluride-based alloy.
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