Drolet stoves any good ?

I have had a Drolet for a few years.Your looking at three to four hours of usefull heat maybe more with hardwood.The Drolet is nothing fancy but does the job.Our stove heats an area of about 1000 sq feet and does a good job.The fan is a huge plus when the weather gets real cold otherwise the fan stays off.Supposed to be minus 34 here this week so the old stove will be red hot for a while.

Drolet(SBI) makes a nice stove just like the Englander brand. I was looking at a Drolet Escape insert from northerntool and the reviews were all 4 and 5 stars. I ended up with an Osburn which is just another brand under SBI and its a nice insert.

With 3.1cuft you should be able to get easy overnight burns, ~10hrs depending on your setup/wood

http://www.overstockstoves.com/50nowomo2sqf.html Includes blower and shipping. That's sorta directly from ESW.

Seems like folks are finding it from HD online for $899, IIRC. Might have to play with the zip code for your 'home' store. I've never seen a stove at ANY of the HDs around here.

Menards has them on sale thats maybe why he is looking at them for 799.

They have a nice warranty of 5 years. They are EPA tested to meet the standards for efficiency.

I'm going on the third winter with a Drolet Escape 1800. To me it's money well spent-burns real clean with seasoned wood and very easy to operate. With ash or red oak if I load it up at 10:00 before bed I can just about always depend on a good bed of red hot coals in the morning when I wake at 6:30 to throw another load in and get it up and going again in no time.

We had a Baltic, with a 3.1 fire box in my expirence with maine hardwoods the usefull heat was more like 8 hrs. We swapped it out this year for a regency 2400 with supposedly the same heat out put, im seriously thinking of putting it back in service, big diffrence in the two stoves below 0 degrees, just my opinion.

This is my first winter with the HT2000.

Built like a tank.
3.4 cft box
lots of heat
super clean glass
9+ hours easy to achive with seasoned wood

I have the Myriad and have been very happy with it. Build quality seems good. Firebox size is very good. It has a bypass damper for start up and reloads which means even with just 15' of chimney I get no smoke spillage on reloads. The stove is very controllable. I can run it right up to 600*+ and it will still respond to shutting the primary air. It is one of the few stoves actually designed as a N/S burner. Which with having the N/S loading I have no reason to want to ever load E/W. It has the stainless plate for the secondaries so no baffle board to worry about hitting. I got it also from Menards back in the fall when they had them for 799 then. My Menards did not have it in stock so they had to order it and it showed up in 2 days at the store. I would have to say with good hardwoods it is what I would consider a real 8-12 hour burn stove. I have gone an honest 14-16 hours on a low burn and had a softball or larger bed of coals to reload on with a 3/4 load. It burns smaller loads well which has made me very happy with this long shoulder season. I can just load 2-3 medium splits around 4" on a small bed of coals every 3-6 hours and keep the temps even in the house when it is in the 30's or 40's outside. I really think it is right up there with the best value stoves with good quality on the market today.

Let me add since you are in my same climate by your location that I would say I would recommend this stove up to probably 1800-2000 sq ft if fairly well sealed and insulted. My house is a little over 1400 with 10' ceilings, fairly well sealed, and average insulation - about R13 walls/ R38 attic. The night before last it got down to 4*F here and I was able to push the house into the 80's running the stove at 650-700*. With about a 3/4 load I could run that pace for 5-6 hours on a load. That is the first time I have ran the stove that hot for that long and let me tell you, at 650-700 it is really cranking out the heat.

The fire box on the Drolet Myriad is nice also as its listed as:

Firebox Size W x D (in.) 18 1/4 x 20 1/4

does the 2K have a bypass damper ?

ozzy73 said:

This is my first winter with the HT2000.

Built like a tank.
3.4 cft box
lots of heat
super clean glass
9+ hours easy to achive with seasoned wood

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No it does not have a bypass damper.
It only has one control for the primary and take.

How about the Drolet Savannah? I am looking at a used one right now and it looks like it will do the job. So far the feedback I see in this forum looks pretty favorable. I am moving to a new (small)house. I heated for 25 years with an old "The Boss" by Thermolator...a real beast of a stove-fantastic... but I can't take it with me. The town where I am going is strict about UL listings and all that and I can't find any info on this old faithful. :^(

How well is your house insulated. I am using about a 2.12 cubic foot fire box stove and its doing fine as I am heating 1900 up stairs and the stove is down stairs in a basement thats 1500 sqft but I am dong a good job of getting the heat to the upstairs. Its usually has to do with how well you get the heat to flow thru the house as a very big stove will mean one room is pretty warm while the outter rooms are cooler. Some things to ponder.

I just looked up your stove and see it is a 2.1 cu. ft. firebox. Any of these stoves, the Myriad, Ht2000, or the NC30 are going to give you about 50% more stove. I would think that any of those are going to get you to 0-10* if your getting through ok with 2.1 cu ft to 25* now. The real heat output between the three is probably going to be splitting hairs. The only numbers we have to go by is the manufactures specs. By them they break down as follows:

Drolet Myriad, Austrial: 3.28 cu. ft. fire box - 2,100 sq. ft. - 85,000 btu on cordwood

Englander NC30: 3.5 cu. ft. fire box - 2,200 sq. ft. - 75,000+ btu on cordwood

Drolet HT-2000: 3.4 cu. ft. fire box - 2,400 sq. ft. - 95,000 btu on cordwood

If your looking for a swap in for a reasonable price (under $1,200) Those three are probably your best bets. Really, if you cannot heat your house with one of the above you really need to go to either multiple stoves or a wood furnace. 2,500 sq. ft. is really starting to ask allot to heat in a fairly cold climate with one stove.

I was pushing my Myriad the other night when it dropped to 4* here and running it at about 650* stove top with the blower on high the best I can calculate by the load of wood and also by the load calculation for my house at that temp says it was pushing 62-66,000 btu output. I could only run it there for about 3 hours as it had pulled the house up from 66* to 84*. It could maybe run at that output level for 5 or 6 hours on a full load.

IIRC the Escape has a 1.8cu ft firebox....pretty small. I would invest in something with larger capacity, it will be worth it in the end. I have a 1200sq ft home, solid masonry and the 3.1 cu ft Avalon works reasonably well, but it's hard to heat so depending on how your home is constructed. My next house is 2k sq ft frame with brick veneer on the lower level and shingled upper and I intend to install the same unit there.

good luck with your choice

steve

One trick I did was at the far end of the house up stairs I unhooked one of my vents from my wood furnace ducts (havent used it in years eats alot of wood) then I put a small quiet fan facing downwards on low blowing air down into the basement. This pulls warm air down to that end of the house. Plus who ever owned the house before me has a floor vent right above the area, down stairs that the stoves is located. If I dont run the stove fan the stove acts like a radiant heater (duh) and the heats rises straight up thru the vent. I can stand up stairs and feel it rise into the upper floor level. I hear that this is against code but it was there when I bought the house so i use it. Plus some nights I leave the basement door open as its down closer to the other end of my house. Now in the basement one part is a garage the back part we have turned into a family room, thats where the stove is. Nice to watch the flames jumping around like you got an open fire place. This end of the basement stays pretty warm, As I dont have a permanent wall up yet to divide the garage part yet but I do have some things providing a barrier betrween the 2 areas like shelves, wardrobe , a up right freezer all help to devide the area till I get the wall up. Now down there by the garage doors its colder as with the division I do have between the 2 areas it keeps the heat down at that end of the basement. Plus even with the garage doors sealed really good some cold air gets in. Also with the redoing the basement I tore down all the foil type floor joist covering, down at the end of basement thats being made into a family room. Its exposing the wood floors upstairs to heat down there and you can feel the warmth of the heat coming up thru the wood floors like I have heat cables in the floor.

Now you have to realize that with wood heat its not going to be like your using a central air forced system with all the rooms balanced. Coldest its got here this year has been 9 degrees and I woke up with the center of the house at 70 degrees , I dont have a thermo in the ends of the house but it was cooler. I had plenty of coals left to fire up another fire and get the heat going back up.

I wasnt suggesting my stove for you but just giving you a point of reference on a approx stove size I have. I would say go with the bigger stoves.

Hope this helps.

HighHeat22 said:

b I was surprised the englander was the lowest of BTU's output. I keep hearing what a beast it is.

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That is why I put the disclaimer that the manufactures numbers are all we have to go by. I don't believe for one minute that the NC30 is not going to put out just as much heat as the Drolets. The HT2000 may be capable of the most peak output by a little bit just because it is more designed as a convective stove versus the Myriad/Austrial and NC30 being more radiant in design. Also keep in mind that you can only fit so much wood in the stove at a time and your load size versus your burn rate (or heat output) is going to equal your burn time. So if we figure we load 60 pounds of wood in the stove and let's say we get 7,000 btu per pound. That would be a total heat available in that load of wood or 420,000 btu. If we figure it at 75% efficiency we can get 315,000 btu output out of that load (420,000 X 75%). So if we burn that load at 60,000 btu an hour output we will get a burn time of about 5 hours and 15 minuets. But if we burn that same load at 30,000 btu an hour average output we should get about a 10 and a half hour burn time. You might understand all this but maybe others don't so I hope to make it so it is easy to understand. So we have two different but related things when looking at this. First is maximum heat output and second is firebox size which will determine how much total heat we can get out of each load.

I reccomend to physically measure the usable fire box yourself while shopping around, they aren't always what they advertise. I don't know about the Drolet's but the Englander isn't even close to 3.5 cu ft.

Some manufactures include the space above the baffle as part of the fire box or measure it without the bricks. I guess it just a marketing scheme like the BTU numbers.