Seems this place is pretty dead, kinda sad really. I'll post here anyway because it's snowing 8+ inches and I'm bored waiting for the snow to stop so I can go plow the driveway.
Onto my topic. So I did exactly what Natures Comfort told me exactly not to do with great results. I was told that I should never let my ash bed build up past the door lip because it can damage the firebox. Seeing that so many stoves don't even have an ash drawer I thought to myself that why the heck would that even matter. So lately I have been cramming my wood stove extra full to get my ash bed up about half way in the stove. Now it's been a few days since the ash bed has been extra thick, maybe 12-15 inches thick. I use my homemade rounded garden hoe to stir the ash and scrape the bottom a little to get the hard ash knocked up off the bottom. I just pull my ash drawer out, dump it and leave the 15 inch ash bed alone. I throw in about 4 30"x8" long pieces and this thing burns a full 24 hours easy now. Filled this stove Sunday at 4pm and didn't open the door until 6pm Monday night after work to find that I still had a good fire going without loosing much of my ash bed. When I pulled the ash drawer out it was about half full or so. Personally I think that ash drawer is great but it hurts the performance of the stove when all the ash falls into it before it's used up completely, which can be another 12 extra hours. So I'm going to do exactly what NC tells me not to do and keep a thick ash bed. I also closed the air door down to about 1/8 opening from 1/4 to try and keep more heat from going out the chimney. So far so good!