Wood Heat Thread ~ post pics

4 cord aready.. an i got 9 for the year..

 

I burn 2 cords / winter tops

 

Yea..my stove is not very efficient.
Just real old cast iron wood stove. Gaps in it not airtight by any means..The t6 will burn much less wood.. but no way I could just burn 2 cord... we like the fireplace too much for that...

 

I have the Alderlea T5 and it keeps our 2500sqft house warm pretty much all by itself , we have some area of hydronic slab heat , but thats mostly in the basement

 

I've run through about 5 cord/season for my 2200 square feet the last couple of years, but my winters tend to be a bit cooler than yours

 

No doubt . My house is brand new and has external insulation and low e windows and a lot of concrete thermal
mass inside so that also helps quite a bit

 

Yeah, whereas mine was built in the 70's, lol. I added a layer of R-38 over the existing twin layers of R-19 in the attic when we bought the house, but until the siding comes due for replacement I'm not able to do much else to improve its insulating abilites. Planning on doing new windows at the same time, since they're casement-style from the same vintage, and while they still seal well there's still a fair amount of thermal bridging on the frames, so we put that thin plastic sheeting on them every winter.

 

If you do a full re-siding job , I would definitely recommend at least considering adding a layer of Roxul Comfortboard 80 to the extrrior under your siding

https://www.rockwool.com/products/comfortboard-80/

 

Yeah, when it comes due I'd do the whole house, and a layer of rigid exterior insulation is definitely on the list. Which is why I figured I'd do the windows at the same time, since I'd have to pull them extend the frames/flashing anyway.

 

IMO , I would use Comfortboard over any type of foam board

 

I've heard that the rockwool does a better job with moisture and sound control. Plus you obviously get the added bonus of it being fire resistant.

 

All those things plus it won't harbour insects or rodents

 

Finished first ton of pellets, crap stuff kept clogging my slide chute, to much fines! Started the stuff from last year. More heat and stove is running better and more consistent.
All pellets are not created equally!

 

Here is my wood heat. I have a 4 bay bldg that is 50x30(moderate insulation), so this wont quite do the job. I also have a Remington 70,000 BTU kero/diesel that I use to get the temp up while the stove gets hot. I can then "coast" the rest of the day on wood. I made a steel frame w/wheels to sit it on. I thought I might want to move it in the Summer. I have the weight of the chimney pipe suspended from the rafter.

Depending on outside conditions (wind/temp), I can take my garage from 30-35 up to 55-60 degrees in about 1-2 hours using both units. That's when I cut off the Remington and then only use as needed.

I am burning cherry, maple, and oak this year. The oak was a blow down, cherry was dead but still standing, and the maple, eh, it's everywhere in my area.



Homemade squirrel cage blower duct system hanging behind it. I wired up two of the four speeds on the motor. 2x4 frame and cardboard face w/cutouts. Poor mans version of "Magic Heat"! Actually, I have most of the output directed at the body of the stove, to push heat out into the room. Advantages to having it up high are it pulls in warm air, in addition to it's push of the air around the stove, and it's out of the way.



The stove was actually made in the early 1900's at Advance Stove Works in my hometown of Evansville Indiana. I don't think Amazon offered free shipping then, so they made them local. haha.



Backup. By the way, these things are awesome (quite, efficient, very low odor, strong blower), But, they refuse to light below 40 degrees unless you have almost straight kerosene in them. Since kero is much more expensive, I just burn the fuel level down to empty each time I use it. I put in about 1/2 gallon of kero to get it really hot, then add as much diesel as I need for the length of my garage day so I end up back at empty.

 

This is our Woodstock Soapstone stove. Provides around 65-75% of our 3,000 sqft home here in WI. We love it.

 

Those are made a couple of hours from me. I was seriously considering one but I wanted something w/o a catalytic converter, not sure if they make one now but at the time they didn't.

 

I was looking at the Progress Hybrids when I was searching for a replacement for the wood/coal combo unit that came with the house. They're awesome stoves, but I stumbled across my Hearthstone Mansfield in Craigslist for something like $450. The cast iron was covered in surface rust from being stored in a wet basement so it looked lousy, but all of the parts were there and in good shape, and some work with a wire brush and two coats of stove black fixed the rust issue. It's been heating the house like a champ for the last six years.

 

Just for the sake of curiosity, why do you not want a catalytic combustor?

 

short answer:
If you don't operate them correctly, they'll clog and need to be replaced. If you do operate them correctly, eventually they'll break down and need to be replaced. The costs aren't absurd, usually $100-$200, but replacing them a lot of times involves disassembly of at least some of the stove.

Longer answer:
But, in my opinion cat stoves have a worse reputation than they deserve. The early ones were admittedly very picky and fairly fragile, usually needed replacing every few years and people didn't know how to use them correctly anyway so they just made the problems worse. You had a lot of people replacing their traditional stoves with a cat stove and running into burn problems because they couldn't just toss their unseasoned firewood into the fire box and button it down to a low burn without plugging their cats. The same principle applies to the new stoves that 'reburn' their smoke; they need good dry firewood to work properly, but the catalytic stoves were the first solution to the new EPA requirements and they got stuck with being the whipping boy while people dealt with the learning curve from going to a low tech cast iron box to a stove that had more stingent wood requirements.

One of the biggest reasons that cat stoves have such a bad reputation, too, is that the company that pushed them the most heavily was Vermont Castings, and they were running into some major quality control issues at the same time that they were introducing catalytic stoves to the market, so the combination of low quality stove production and new tech pretty much torpedoed public opinion on the concept of a catalytic converter for a while. Both VC and catalytic converters in general have hammered out their problems by now, but that bad rep is hard to shake.

 

Thanks. That is good information. We have considered a newer stove.
It seems to be to meet EPA requirements rather than improve stove function.
We have a VC Consolidated Dutchwest FA288CCL. It is an extra large and Federal Airtight. There are 3 names to this sucker. Pre-90 so maybe it is like what you said about VC. I seal the inside with gasket cement every few years. That get old real quick. But it is pretty efficient. We just have a ventilated log cabin.

We have replaced our cat twice over almost 10 years. I have another in the box ready.
A company close to us makes them. Yes, not cheap. http://www.condar.com/Combustors.html
We do try to have seasoned wood, and we do not turn on the combustor until the temp is 500° F.
But, overnight it does drop temp. This year we have had more creosote than any other year that I remember.

Thanks again, very informative,
Ken in NC