Adding a blower

[emq]

I have a homemade 2x3 wood fired evaporator and I want to add a blower
Do I mount it to the ash clean out door so it blows under the grate and will this cause the
Hot ash to blow out the stack wildly
Thanks

[billschi]

I installed a blower on my small unit as well. As it did work, as long as there is a fire grate for it to blow under the wood, I found I needed a way to control the amount of air that gets pushed in there depending on how hot the fire is. One can use a potentiometer or a simple disk over the air intake of the blower to restrict the amount of air as needed. I pivoted the disk on a screw.

[needmoremaples]

i had a 50 cfm bathroom exhaust fan blowing up under my grating on a barrel stove and it worked super well. i never emptied ash. I never seen any in the area i cooked. my pan was roughly 2x3. make sure you raise up the lower back section and insulate/firebrick. it gets very hot inside.

[buckeye gold]

I personally prefer Air over fire. I have a modified half pint arch (extended) with a Smokey Lake drop flue pan. I use an old leaf blower with a variable speed control in the shack and have it outside the shack for noise reduction. I have it plumbed into a 1 1/2 inch manifold to the front of the arch then I ran1/2 inch black iron into the firebox on each side, capped the ends and drilled small holes in the black iron to disperse the air over the fire. I can turn it up, down or off with the controller. It will make the arch rumble. I had to go to triple wall pipe though because my stack temps went up a lot. If I'm attentive to my firing and using good wood I can make the sap almost jump out of the pan. Oh I bypassed the switch on the blower so it's full power when on and rely on the controller for speed, I don't know what CFM I'm running, but I'd guess over 100. My first blower died on me mid season a couple years ago and I bought the leaf blower at a second hand shop for $15.00 as an emergency and three years later I'm still running it. I was going to get a regenerative blower, but hey why spend the money. I think I'll hit the junk shops and get me a spare leaf blower ready for when this one bites the dust. At $15.00 I can buy a bunch of them for the price of a commercial blower. I have watched yard sales and second hand store, even auctions and you can buy the blowers dirt cheap just about any time. I did see a bounce house blower in a yard sale once and wish I'd bought it for $10.00, but passed then went back and it was gone. So check shops, yard sales and auctions and you can get off pretty cheap. It takes a little modifying but you can hook the leaf blowers up to PVC pretty easy then convert to iron. I use fernco fittings like this https://www.lowes.com/pd/Fernco-2-in-x-1-84-in-dia-Flexible-PVC-Coupling-Fittings/1000075331