After about 20 minutes, your fire should be burning hot and with only a little smoke. Check the thermometer that comes with your stove and see if the temperature indicates that it is OK to close the bypass damper to engage the catalytic combustor. The smoke from the fire passes through the combustor before exiting the stove. The surface of the combustor is coated with a thin layer of platinum or palladium. To understand how this happens, it is necessary to know something about fires and what happens when wood burns.
Fire is a chemical reaction.
The fuel and oxygen must be present in the right proportion and the temperature must be high enough. If these conditions are not met the fire will not burn properly. That is why it is so important to use dry, seasoned wood in your stove. Unfortunately, most stoves cannot consistently produce temperatures in this range and many of the gases never get hot enough to burn. The result is woodsmoke that contains carbon monoxide, soot, free hydrogen, tars, and other organic compounds.