Does anyone own/have views on HWAM WIKING Mini 2 or Charnwood Aire 5 stoves

wookie6

Hi,

We are looking at purchasing a HWAM WIKING Mini 2 with short legs stove as we like the idea of the WIKING Automatic feature. Does anyone have this stove / would you recommend it? As a secondary option, we were thinking about the Charnwood Aire 5.

Wiking Automatic - In a WIKING wood-burning stove, the regulation of air during lighting and re-stoking is managed automatically through the WIKING® Automatic™ device.

A heat-sensitive bimetallic spring expands or contracts depending on the temperature in the wood-burning stove. When lighting the fire, the damper will be open to ensure that the flames are supplied with the correct amount of air to get the fire started. The following quick rise in temperature will automatically cause the damper to close, thus ensuring clean and efficient combustion. When the fire starts to die out, the damper opens automatically again to allow for new firewood to be added or to let the fire die out.

Thanks!

Apodemus

No experience of this one and it does sound interesting, but I tend to look on a woodburner as a fairly basic metal box and I'm not sure I either want it thinking for me or having clever working parts that are likely to become points of failure over time.

EDIT:  Have you watched this on Youtube?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSYsXhNZk-Q  and read the users description of their problem?

lohr500

No experience either but I would agree with Apodemus.

I wouldn't like the idea of a self regulating wood burner for a couple of reasons :

More complicated and likely to fail over time.
Risk of the air vent opening when it shouldn't, or jamming open, causing the stove to overheat.

I've never had a problem in 30 years, regulating the air flow damper or the flue damper manually. It doesn't need lots of manual adjustment and will run for hours and overnight with no intervention.

wookie6

Thanks for the responses and the link to the Youtube video. We had seen this but you never know if this was just a one off or not. That said, perhaps having more moving automatic parts may just be asking for trouble over time.

This being the case, we had considered the Charnwood Aire 5 as a secondary option. Not sure if anyone has experience of this particular stove or Charnwood stoves in general?

henry24

Have a look at a Clock stove I have one and think it's brilliant as so easy to use 

thrope

We have a HWAM Ravel with an automatic mechanism, but can't tell you how well it works because the spring was broken when we moved into the house and very difficult to get it serviced locally. I have the sping and tried to change it myself but the peg it sits on broke, so I have the backplate piece, but this is much harder to change requiring moving the stove.

With the automatic mechanism broken the stove works fine but it is a pain to adjust compared to manual stoves I am used to as the mechanism is very short and hard to adjust.

If you are getting it from a local firm that can service and supply parts it would be good, but if not as others have said, in 15-20 years its likely to be a pain.

worlestone

We have a Charnwood Aire 5, installed 2 years ago. It's nice, but we preferred the Charnwood C5 we had previously, as the handle (wood) didn't get hot and the ash pan was deeper, so could go 3/4 evenings without emptying. Aire needs emptying every 2 evenings.  We tend to use the burner quite a lot as were in a rural area with E7 heating, so most evenings light a fire. The good thing about the Aire is the viewing area and the width, easy to put on 12" logs which burn more slowly than the 9" ones we also buy. As others have said, basic is better, it's just a fancy efficient fire, no need to complicate things and if you have gas really not needed.

Have fun choosing and running

thrope

We've since replaced the thermocouple spring on our HWAM so it is as far as I can tell now working as designed. It certainly closes off the airflow automatically. We find it closes off a bit too much though (or only opens up again at too low a temperature), so we quite often leave the door ajar for a few minutes to get things going again. We leave the vents open on full. I'm sure its burning very efficiently and logs last for ages, but do miss having the controllability to be able to turn it up a bit.

We've got a flue thermometer, and the vents seems to stay closed to hold it around 200, and only really opens up when it drops down below 150, which really seems like the stove is too cold (ie can put hand right in more or less). Also the manual says the glass should remain clear and the stove material should not go black, and that's basically impossible for us to acheive. With all vents always open the upper half of the stove is always black because it just doesn't burn hot enough.

I think maybe it would work if we could put more logs in, but the burning area is so small it can only take at most 2 very small logs.

Overall we have more fuss and have to pay more attention to it than any other stove we've used in previous houses or holiday cottages, and feel like have very little controllability.

It may be that its not adjusted correctly, or the new spring is not quite right (was ordered from official UK HWAM parts). But I probably wouldn't recommend based on our experience.