For smoke, try a draft inducer? An order of operations

Hey there!
I have a similar problem to the post “Smoke & Neighbors,” but in my case I’ve gone to some pretty tall lengths to try and fix it. Our homes are close together and the smoke is blanketing my next door neighbor’s yard and badly creeping into their house through old windows! Despite a cool couple of days, the smoke is drawing up, cooling, and coming back down. It flows down the narrow space between our homes and leaks into theirs right where they are working from home. They’ve told us the linens smell like a campfire.

I wanted to list out options here and see what the experts recommend. The first several things that I’ve tried to date have not helped. This is the first few weeks of my experience with the oven - if time will heal, let me know!

  1. by slightly cracking the door during start up, i’ve got a good draft going and the smoke doesn’t come out the front much at all.

  2. by designing a gas igniter, i’ve already reduced the startup smoke (though I’ll be blowing through a lot of propane each time)

  3. I built a (pictured) temporary Dr. Seuss pipe monstrosity that can be put down for each cook. It’s full extension upwards is 7 feet. I did buy the Dura Tech cap and dampener, but I’m leery to have it installed now that I’ve learned that DuraTech pipes can only go up to 48"!
    ---- above are the tried (and failed) ideas

  4. I have now ordered cooking wood from a specialty dealer. I don’t have it yet - as @BrickWood has recommended in another post, the wood I was using was not “surprisingly light.” It was heavy oak.

  5. I’m meeting today with the mason that built the whole thing to see if he comes up with clever options. I’ve learned from this forum (in a buried old post) that we can’t really build anything on top of the oven chimney without creating new supports. One of the “out of the box” ideas a contractor-neighbor had was to pipe the smoke into the fireplace chimney, then extend the fireplace chimney higher.

  6. And with that crazy idea came the search for a draft inducing fan. If I could “shoot” the smoke really high, maybe it wouldn’t come back to earth and smoke out my neighbors?

  7. “smokeless” coal, or wood, or something?

  8. Buy them some Indow Windows Inserts - we have them on all of our windows and we don’t smell a thing. The alley adjacent rooms in our house (similar to our neighbor’s location) are our children’s rooms, so we would be alarmed if we smelled a wisp of smoke in their rooms.

  9. hire a plumber and spend a lot of money retrofitting it to a gas oven

What do yall think? This is tough,
Smokey the Neighbear

Hi David,

First, an apology—your post (like another you mentioned in this one) got buried in a section of the forums that doesn’t notify us when it appears. That’s a shame, because your process is fascinating and I appreciated the detailed approach you have taken.

I’m wondering how these steps have worked out since you posted in December. What has helped? What hasn’t?

Again, I’m sorry your post was not seen, and hoping that moving it to a more-visible board will help!