Hello, first of all many thanks for the great pictures and lots of interesting information. I have a Demon70 stove and am not yet completely satisfied. The pump delivers quite a lot of paraffin, so it burns too high for a short time and it smells a bit like soot. Does anyone have any experience with the adjusting nut? -Michael
Adjusting nut? Can you provide a photo of what you mean? I was unaware that adjustment of the burner output is possible. Confirm that excess fuel can return to the tank by checking that the outlet tube is not blocked.
I mean the adjusting nut on the manual pump. But maybe it is only used to adjust the hand pump. It was mentioned here: Ditmar Demon 70 paraffin stove/heater Thank you for the hint, the pipeline is free. The only problem is that during yesterday's test run there was always too much slosh of petroleum, the flame burned very high. I wish the flame would burn more evenly. Well, I still have the old wick in it and maybe it will be better with a fresh Arimid wick. (By the way, you can clean the old wick beautifully if you put it in the embers of a stove or campfire. But it's missing a piece, so I definitely want to replace it). I'm trying to understand how the paraffin is pumped up. It's not quite like the rattle boat, because there's a continuous flow. And there is no valve. Do we actually have a valve? Why does the stove only make a noise every 10..15s? And why does it rattle so metallically? I had expected a steady rattle.
Yes it is like a "knackboot" or putput boat. It creatates vacuum while vaporizing and then suck the fuel up again (in short terms).
I studied the stove a little more and took a closer look at the hand pump. There is a container in it that probably contains a valve that prevents the paraffin from being pushed out here when the paraffin evaporates and presses at the top. This is a difference to the Knack boat, which has no valve. In the stove, the paraffin can only flow in at one end, whereas in the knackboat it flows out and in at both ends. But it's true, the pumping principle is the same, here it just has one direction. The metallic noise is the rattling of the valve. I have now got an Arimid wick. I have tried different widths (original is about 20mm). I decided on 16mm so that the starting flame is not so high and sooty. For fun, I also tried 5mm, where the wick lies in the gutter. Here, starting is very difficult, but even that worked with spirit. In full operation, there was no noticeable difference, the mushroom at the top was glowing. I prefer to use spirit for starting, i.e. I pump a few times so that paraffin is in the tube and can evaporate later. Then I use a small jug to put spirit on the wick, light it and put the siphon on. This way I can also light the stove in the hallway instead of in front of the house. But only when the stove has been glowing for a while does it go into the living room. It runs more evenly with the new wick. But it seems to produce a little more rus than, for example, an Aladdin blue flame. And I found out something else. The wick should not be stuck in the gutter all the way to the bottom, because the paraffin can spread badly there and it doesn't burn completely round. I put a piece of wire under the wick, which keeps some space for the flowing paraffin.
This morning I tried to do everything exactly according to the instructions and in the best possible way. They say you should pump until the wick is wet with paraffin all around. After pumping 50 times, it was still not completely wet. I left it like that for a few minutes so that the wick could soak up all over. The lighting went quite well with this. Do you also need so many pump strokes? I started the stove outside the house. With the mantle around it, the mushroom heater soon started to glow evenly. Now I brought it into the room. When started this way, there is hardly any smell in the room. I know from extinguishing the stove the last few times that it gives off a lot of stench when it goes out. But there's not much you can do about it except put it outside.
No, very few, five or six merely. Maybe start a separate thread instead of continuing to hijack this?!!!
Thanks for the information. I will check the pump. Oh, sorry about hijack this, I thought this belonged in the Demon 70 thread, which was already 3 pages long, so it's all together.
@Micha I merely hoped you would start a new thread with photos of your stove and to illustrate your findings - a ‘Fettling forum’ thread perhaps - since your experience is quite different from mine with the ‘70’. Mine requires few flips of the control knob to saturate the starter wick, there’s no smoky flame on start-up, the stove doesn’t run too hot and there’s very little smell on shut-down. I think my experience of the marque is more representative of how it should perform and I didn’t want a future researcher to suppose otherwise. John
