Cook stove must have a grate for the ash to fall through. You're wood stove looks like how ours looks. No where for ash to go but to suffocate coals. Not designed for extended periods of burn. Need to close off the air inlets, let it cool down, clean out the ash and charcoals then refire. 3 days and 3 nights is about the maximum burn time for ours before the fire box needs to be cleaned.
I'm thinking up a better design. I would like to go an entire heating season. But probably not feasible since you need to brush the chimney periodically.
Jesus is Lord and Christ
If you have that much coal and ash being produced, then the fire isn't efficient.
A better designed stove will burn more of the wood, leave you with zero or close to zero coals, and only a little ash.
A well designed stove forces the smoke from the fire to circulate and reburn (or has a catalytic filter to do that job). This produces more heat for the home, and also means the smoke from your chimney is cleaner.
A quality stove can run a fire for at least 6 hours before needing to be fed.
When running the wood stove 24/7 we clean out the ash from our wood stove maybe once a month. It produces more ash if we are burning a great deal of junk (magazines, mail, cardboard etc.) And it produces very little ash if we are burning only dry wood.
We always clean out the wood stove in the fall before we start it up for the season. If we are stuck burning more junky wood (wet, or green, or sappy, etc) then we will clean the chimney mid season.
We have a temperature guage on the chimney stack so if a fire starts in there we will know, and we whack the chimney on occasion to see how it is doing. If you whack the chimney pipe and hear a bunch of falling debris, clearly, it needs to be cleaned.
"Dirty" fires, or fires that are not fully burning the wood or fuel, as well as cooler fires, deposit more soot and creosote into the chimney. A good hot fire, burning in an efficient wood stove, helps to keep the chimney clean.
Of course... lots of factors are involved... the huge temperature drop from the temperature of the chimney to the outside air will cause soot and creosote to deposit on the chimney.... but the more heat that you can get to stay in the wood stove, so that the chimney is as cool as possible... will help.
