I already put a link to the page below in a reply I had in another thread, but thought I'd give it a thread of it's own (so sorry for the repeat for anyone who's already seen this),
I bought our current stove back in 1981 from a local dealer. The brand (Wood Saver) I've never seen before or since, but bought it based on the bullet proof construction, great welds, heavy cast iron door, firebrick lining and large (around 3.6 cu ft) fire box. It was made by a small fabricator in New York's Hudson Valley. It has heated our house since, and still looks about the same today as it did when brand new.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago. The stove certainly didn't owe me anything, and I was wondering if replacing it with something more efficient might be worth doing. Since I wasn't convinced that a newer stove would really save me much wood, I did a little experiment by adding secondary burn tubes to the stove. One thing led to another, and I also retrofitted it with a cat this year. Gary Reysa of Build it Solar was nice enough to put the story up on his site. Besides the retrofit projects, I also put some info in about how I did the performance testing of the stove . The link to the page is below. I am now a firm believer that all this new burn technology works and saves fuel, but now have my stove efficient enough and clean enough I doubt I'll be replacing it anytime soon. It's not the nice looking stove you'd want in a living room installation (especially with the cat box on it) but for my cellar installation it's fine and I'm currently warming my house with long slow burns (typical of a cat stove) with no smoke out of the chimney once I engage the cat.
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/BioFuel/CatRetrofit/CatRetrofit.htm
Scott
I bought our current stove back in 1981 from a local dealer. The brand (Wood Saver) I've never seen before or since, but bought it based on the bullet proof construction, great welds, heavy cast iron door, firebrick lining and large (around 3.6 cu ft) fire box. It was made by a small fabricator in New York's Hudson Valley. It has heated our house since, and still looks about the same today as it did when brand new.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago. The stove certainly didn't owe me anything, and I was wondering if replacing it with something more efficient might be worth doing. Since I wasn't convinced that a newer stove would really save me much wood, I did a little experiment by adding secondary burn tubes to the stove. One thing led to another, and I also retrofitted it with a cat this year. Gary Reysa of Build it Solar was nice enough to put the story up on his site. Besides the retrofit projects, I also put some info in about how I did the performance testing of the stove . The link to the page is below. I am now a firm believer that all this new burn technology works and saves fuel, but now have my stove efficient enough and clean enough I doubt I'll be replacing it anytime soon. It's not the nice looking stove you'd want in a living room installation (especially with the cat box on it) but for my cellar installation it's fine and I'm currently warming my house with long slow burns (typical of a cat stove) with no smoke out of the chimney once I engage the cat.
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/BioFuel/CatRetrofit/CatRetrofit.htm
Scott