The most irritating thing I have found with my Jotul Kennebec C 450 is the fact that I can crumple news paper, put in 8 or 10 foot long pieces of 3/4″ by 1/2″ pine scraps, have it burning quite briskly, then when I close the door to the unit, the fire goes out.
I don’t understand why it isn’t designed so that it ill get enough air to burn with a marginal flame, rather than have either a deep bed of coals, or the kindling almost completely burned, before it is hot enough to stay going when I close the door.
I can’t seem to get the unit to heat up and have the blower come on for at least 1 – 2 hours. I tried putting 3 or 4 times the normal amount of kindling in the stove that I would use for a fire in a regular fireplace or any of the stoves I have ever had and have never had problems.
I put in several sheets of crumpled paper, the sticks of wood for kindling that I described above, 4 or 5 very dry maple branches, that were about 1 1/2″ in circumference, and it still took just under two hours before I got enough flame for the blower to start.
I am finding through many searches that other people have similar problems. I don’t know about other brands of inserts, but my guess is that they are all similar, just like the difficulty in starting an air-tight free standing stove, compared to the older stoves. The thing I don’t like about the Jotul so far is that it really does take an excessive amount of time to get heat. I also don’t feel it really gives off as much heat as it should for a stove has large and heavy.
I also find it uses a massive amount of wood for a small stove.
I am hoping my problems are “operator error” and that it will get better as I use it more.
If someone has an answer, I would really like to know how to keep the blower on the Jotul Kennebec C-450 from rattling. I have removed it many times, tried wedging it with different non-combustible things, but regardless of anything I do, it keeps returning.
I think it I should be a little kinder to Jotul stoves. I finally have somewhat gotten used to running it so I can get it started, even though I do feel it takes way more kindling than most other stoves I have used.
I can’t say I like the burn time which is substantially less than claimed, but I finally did find some better wood, I guess mine was too wet, so I do get a good amount of heat out of it for much of the burn time on a normal load of wood.
It does much better with drier wood. I still don’t think it actually comes up to my expectations, but feel I might have been expecting too much. It is a fairly small stove and is really well built, and with good wood, it really does a good job for the size even though I don’t like the difficulty getting it going or the long wait for heat. I believe it is probably because it is so heavy and is so well built, it just takes a long time to bring it up to temperature.
The rattle I can live with, but I feel sure I will end up getting something to put under it to see if I can get it to stop. Possibly it should have a slightly different way of attaching to the stove.