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Old 03-11-2023, 12:07 PM
 
Location: Was Midvalley Oregon; Now Eastside Seattle area
12,961 posts, read 7,330,828 times
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OP, Probably efficient enough.
If you want more efficiency, spend $.

We burned our Oregon orchard in the cast iron, inefficient firebox. The wood eventually would turn into CO2 and energy as it breaks down, the only difference was how fast was the breakdown going to be.
We had a rancher with the firebox at one of the house. It could not heat the whole house because of the house design and because of poor insulation. We had a ceiling fan that helped but not by much.
Eventually burned thru the orchard and we switched to NG insert with thermostatic control.
YWMV
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Old 03-11-2023, 09:20 PM
 
Location: 53179
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For the blower it will need power..but even without blower it does get warm. Not the whole house but in the area around it.
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Old 03-12-2023, 09:53 AM
 
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We had a welded steel box / cast iron door EPA stove installed a couple years ago and ordered an "optional" blower fan with it. Fan was back ordered so we used the stove for a while without the blower fan, then with the fan. I could not really tell a whole lot of difference in how well the stove heated the room but the stove definitely runs a little hotter without the blower installed and running. I always use the stove with the blower but its good to know it works just fine and safe if we lost electricity.

We dont heat year around with the stove but its in a room with a lot of passive solar. On sunny days, burn a quick hot fire first thing in the morning to get the room comfy, then the passive solar warms the living area and for a lot of days in the winter, this tends to be adequate. With passive solar, you just take in all the energy you can so the room may get a little warm late afternoon - like 80F. The the temp drifts down during the night until the fire the next morning. I actually like the 80F temps in the winter, I may not have when I was younger..

We have a lot of mountain Juniper on our lot and half the reason for the wood stove was for wild fire mitigation and cleanup. The Juniper is a little bit of a pain to "harvest" but burns just fine. I also burn Aspen delivered from higher elevations which burns hot and fairly fast with less resin. You can barely smell the Aspen burning. I get some chimney smoke starting the fire and when its finally going out but normally no visible smoke at all. I still need to sweep the "chimney" but I think the Aspen tends to keep things cleaner.

Ive owned a few wood stoves/ inserts and have just loved them all..
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Old 03-12-2023, 10:03 AM
 
Location: San Diego
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It's raining again and our wood stove is cranked. We've used it more this year than most.
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Old 03-12-2023, 10:19 AM
 
Location: Grosse Ile Michigan
30,701 posts, read 79,347,054 times
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We can, but we rarely do. Our house was mostly built in 1736, 1850, amd 1868, so the fireplaces are designed to actually produce heat. The house is built around the chimney, so the heat going up the chimney heats the upstairs. The heat is not evenly spread so some rooms are 80 while others are 55. Someone usually has to get up at night and toss in a few logs. It can get smoky in some wind/weather conditions. But if your goal is merely to not freeze, it works great.
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Old 03-16-2023, 06:28 AM
 
Location: Grosse Ile Michigan
30,701 posts, read 79,347,054 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Coldjensens View Post
We can, but we rarely do. Our house was mostly built in 1736, 1850, amd 1868, so the fireplaces are designed to actually produce heat. The house is built around the chimney, so the heat going up the chimney heats the upstairs. The heat is not evenly spread so some rooms are 80 while others are 55. Someone usually has to get up at night and toss in a few logs. It can get smoky in some wind/weather conditions. But if your goal is merely to not freeze, it works great.
oops 1836 not 1736
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Old 03-16-2023, 01:34 PM
 
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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My parents did it for 13 years, with a good woodstove that had a fan, and it heated their whole 1,500 sf house. For the 1st 10 years or so in their late 60s-early 70s they would have 30-40' logs delivered, and my dad would cut to length with his chain saw, and had a gas powered splitter. Some years a few of us kids would go up in the summer to help and get it stacked under the covered shed. In the last few years they started to buy a pallet of manufactured logs made for woodstoves, for $600. It would take two for the season, so $1,200 which is still much less than it would have cost to run their 1970s electric forced air furnace. Without the fan it would have heated their main living area, but not gotten to the bedrooms and bathrooms. Their electric bill was not affected much by that fan, it had a thermostat and went on and off as needed. In fact at our electric rates here running that fan 12 hours a day would only run $4-5/month.
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Old 03-20-2023, 04:11 PM
 
Location: Eastern Washington
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I had a Lopi brand insert in a house in Iowa, before I moved here in 1991. The Lopi insert was good, enough of the front half of the insert was outside the fireplace that it heated OK without a blower. Like my Waterford here, this is/was a "first generation" clean burn insert. There in Iowa I could buy oak board ends for a ridiculously low price, like $10 for a pickup load. These board ends were small enough to put right in that insert

The Lopi had a "startup air" valve that allowed air to the bottom of the fire, it had a bimetallic device that would close it once the stove warmed up, in case you forgot.

I adapted a version of this to the Waterford I now have - I can crack open the ash pan door and let it draft through the ash dump grate, which I keep not quite fully closed.

That little unauthorized, "not in the book" technique really helps get the fire going or re-lit from coals. With no bimetallic "nanny" to close the under-fire air for you, you have to pay attention though.
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Old 03-21-2023, 07:02 AM
 
Location: Vermont
9,184 posts, read 4,972,750 times
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We heat primarily with wood up here in NW VT. We have a 20 yr old Jotul woodstove. We have about 7 acres of woods in back of our house (on a 10 acre parcel) and we've pulled wood from there the last 3 years running. We didn't have equipment to get way in the back so some years we purchased log lengths and split them ourselves.
This year my husband bought an ancient snow mobile, made a sled for it and has been back and forth ferrying huge logs to the house that we will split this summer (if he doesn't shred his hernia mesh!!!!). At some point, this will be too much for him, IMO, but for now, he really wants to do this.
The woodstove is in the basement and we have a blower. It heats the house well but doesn't get the bedrooms all that well. That's ok because we use flannel sheets and comforters and are very comfortable.
We have kerosene monitors as back up, though we rarely use them.
We usually start the fire in the evening and stoke it up before bed. In the am, usually some coals are left and if we need to, we restart the fire. We do that less and less this time of year because the house is still warm.
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Old 03-21-2023, 03:12 PM
 
Location: Eastern Washington
17,113 posts, read 56,725,836 times
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Jotul stoves are good stoves as well, if yours is 20 years old it is a "Gen II" low emission/high efficiency stove. Do you remember what model it is, and does it have an ash dump or do you have to shovel out ashes from the main door?

Kerosene monitors is a new term to me. Do you mean kerosene heaters? The "Japanese style" type kerosene heaters are unvented and very clean burning, quite efficient but of course you have to use high purity kerosene which ain't cheap.

In terms of heating a whole house, putting the stove in the basement makes a lot of sense, but depending on how your house is laid out, it may be inconvenient to get to the stove to add wood. My stove is in the living room on an outside wall, not the best to heat the whole house but it does OK.
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