Cleaning a Woodburning Cookstove

After some unfortunate incidents with the caramel from sticky rolls boiling over on top of the stove, a rather large splash of oil while frying chicken, and a gurgle of ketchup which managed to even hit the ceiling, the time had come to clean the cookstove.  Marjorie needed a bath.

If you click on this picture, you can get a better glimpse
of how dirty Marjorie the Margin Gem had gotten.

Her cooktop was particularly unbecoming.

Grease from frying chicken had cooked onto the stainless steel trim
that surrounds the cooktop.

The light-colored square on the top of the water reservoir
is the outline of my breakfast griddle.  I had left it on the reservoir
but didn't realize that it was covering the holes which are on the left.
Those holes are steam vents for the water reservoir, and when I
realized what had happened, the griddle was sitting in a puddle of
water.  Not only did the bottom of the griddle have to be re-seasoned,
but the top of the reservoir had retained its autograph.

I started out with a stainless steel soap pad on the top of the reservoir. 

The soap pad and I were soon good friends.  We spent a lot of time together.

The soap pad skittered across the stainless steel cooktop trim,
followed closely by a damp rag.  Then, the soap pad waltzed all
over the backsplach and stainless steel section of stovepipe.

In the picture above, please note how rusty the stove collar is at the base of the stainless steel stovepipe.  When Marjorie arrived last year, like all new cookstoves, her highly polished cast iron cooktop had been coated with a thin layer of some type of petroleum product in order to keep it from rusting before it was put into use.  Unfortunately, whoever had applied this coat of oil, missed putting it on the collar.  Hence, the collar began to rust even before we had installed the stove in March, but I hadn't done anything about it yet.

The next thing that I did was begin working on the cooktop.  I rub a grill brick all over the cast iron.  This effectively removes any food and grease that has cooked onto the stove.  It also smells very strongly of sulfur.

The grill brick leaves all manner of sand in its wake.  I remove this with the vaccuum cleaner.  Next, I was on to soot and ash removal.  I removed the short length of stovepipe which connects the stove to the chimney, then began cleaning the flue which stretches up from the bottom of the back of the stove to the top of the warming oven.

A view down the stovepipe from the top of the warming oven
before cleaning.

The next step was to remove fly ash from the top of the oven and creosote which had accumulated along its right side and beneath it.  New cookstoves are generally shipped with a handy little tool called a soot rake which is made for this task.

The soot rake scraping across the top of the oven.

The manufacturer's identification plate masks the
oven clean out door.  The soot rake is pulling
creosote from beneath the oven.

After that, I drained the reservoir and began working on cleaning it out.  You can learn more about that in the previous post.

 

After the stovepipe had been cleaned outdoors and re-attached, the next job was to coat the newly scrubbed cooktop with vegetable oil.  I also put a layer of stove black on the collar.

All other surfaces were wiped clean and parts replaced, and the ashes which had missed falling in the ash pan were also scooped out.  The water reservoir was refilled, and a new fire lit.  As the coat of vegetable oil burned onto the stovetop, the kitchen took on the scent of a large hot breakfast griddle, and Marjorie was once again a gleaming beauty gracing our kitchen.