Draft issues canvas tent stove

Hi,

My friends and I have a canvas tent on a deck we built to fit the tent, which we set up in May and take down in October each year. This is at 9000’ in Colorado, so reliably chilly most nights. It’s a Davis tent with a rainfly and we had them put a stove jack in the side, so we didn’t have to deal with taking the chimney out if it was raining.

We’ve had some trouble getting a good draft going—usually needing to heat the chimney with a propane torch to get it going and even then we get some smoke when we open it to add wood. I’m considering having stove jacks cut in the tent and rain fly to have a straight chimney instead, but since the tent is on a platform, we wouldn’t be able to open and close the hole easily, so we’d have to deal with a little water coming in.

I’ve heard that chimney height can do a lot to improve draft, even with a couple of elbows. We could certainly make the chimney taller, but would have to build some kind of support.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and any ideas about what’s best in our situation. Also, if anyone has built a support for this kind of chimney, I’d love to see it.

Thanks,

- Bruce

Hi Bruce;
Some stoves smoke back from poor design.
A straight pipe would certainly help, what about increasing your stove pipe diameter?
If you have a 6" pipe now, bump it up to an 8" pipe, ideally, as it leaves the stove, and hopefully 8" fits through the sidewall jack.

Can you give us a picture of your stove?

I have played around with a variety of portable tent / hunter stoves. Some draw surprisingly well (Camp Chef Alpine Cylinder Stove). Others need babysitting, taller chimneys, no elbows, and a 3-4" hanging flap of sheet metal added to the front opening so they don't smoke back. The extra-cheap tiny ones are impossible frustrations IMO.

If it's a 6" pipe, you can buy rotating chimney caps that turn with the breeze and create a "wing" effect creating slightly more draw and limiting downdraft.

EDIT: There are also adjustable angle elbows that avoid the "hard stop" of a 90 degree fixed elbow. They tend to be spendy though. For outdoor / temporary installations I have cheated and used old HVAC adjustable elbows, the ones where the metal is reasonably thick. Scrounged from the recycling centre.

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm pretty sure it's a 6" pipe. The stove is the largest of these, the "Peak":

https://www.davistent.com/product/wood-burning-camp-stove/?srsltid=AfmBOorOvUoISolTzfpi4xA72E_p-ZPVaLYvzv-uMyftraZz63qRrCwK

Here are a few pictures. I included the picture on the outside without the chimney so you can see how it's off the ground a little because of the deck the tent is on. I'm realizing looking at it now that those are probably 45 degree elbows by design that we're trying to get closer to 90 degrees in how we're using them and maybe we should go 45 degree straight out of the stove, through the jack, then another 45 degree outside, which I think is what Davis Tent actually intended.

It's nice being off the grid and away from the internet, but this is also the sort of thing I'd probably have figured out there if I had internet access.

The jack definitely won't fit an 8" pipe, so that won't work, but if I can figure out a good support system, I'm thinking the longer chimney outside might be the thing to try.

Happy for any other thoughts, though.

Thanks,

- Bruce

Hi Bruce.

I hot tent camp a lot with my kids. I use a large Winnerwell stove that looks to be much smaller than yours and my canvas hot tent is only 10'x14' so smaller scale there as well. I also use this same stove in our monitor style barn to heat a shop area.

I have noticed that in the tent, the stove pipe sticks up almost 3' past the tent roof and we have no draft issues. When I use the stove to heat a room in the barn, I am on an outside wall and about 20" above the eave. To actually get above the roof line all together, I'd need another 15' of pipe that I would have no idea how to support because it would just be sticking up into the air.

I have draft issues when I use it in the barn and I have to heat the pipe and be careful of which doors I open and close. I will also get down drafts with certain wind direction, gusts, etc. I think this is due to not having the pipe above the roof line.

These are just my observations. Maybe if you hear enough comments with experience on being above or below the roof line, you could investigate a little further into your situation with that in mind. It appears that you are below the roof line of the tent from the pics.