Adding Family Room Addtion - Wood Stove a Must - Need help with which one

Random thoughts . . .

Welcome to the forum.

Kudos on already having a bunch of wood cut, split and stacked . . . hopefully this may help prevent you from being among the "My woodstove doesn't work well" posters this coming Fall. Seriously . . . nice job.

I think you have a few options . . . if you only want to heat the addition you can go with a small stove . . . or (depending on the rest of the home's layout and spacing) you may wish to get a bigger stove and heat all or most of the rest of the place. It is entirely possible to heat an entire home and not be driven out by the heat -- the secret is in moving the heated air out of the room with the stove. I mean to say the room with the stove will always be warmer than the other rooms, but depending on how you move the heat and how you control the heat you can be quite comfortable and not have to resort to sitting around half naked all winter long.

P.S. Jotul makes a great stove . . . not sure about "Yotal" . . . must be one of those Chinese knock offs.

Budget?
I'd reconsider the soapstone and look at Woodstock's Keystone and Palladian. A small cat stove would be a good fit for a relatively small space in a relatively mild climate.

Englander VL-17.

Cheap and very cool looking stove that puts out good heat. Small firebox and short burn times though. If your truly looking for a one room heater, then this is your best value. Did I mention that it looks cool?

I would go as big as your buget allows and if you want to heat more of the main house you can, or you can just make smaller fires if you want to confine most of the heat to the addition.The larger stoves BG recommended are good choices.

Welcome to the forum Gabby12.

Some good stove choices there. I would highly suggest you add Woodstock to the list.

As for the room getting to warm, blowing the cooler air from the other parts of the house will not only help to cool the room but will also move a lot of that warm air into the rest of the house. All you need is a small desktop fan running on low speed blowing into the stove room. In addition, the heat from the soapstone stoves is a "softer heat" vs from cast and steel stoves. I thought this was bunk at first but we found out there really is something to it.

As you can see from my recent post 'Look what I found in my driveway', I've discovered wood fired cook stoves that not only give you heat but also versatility and a conversation piece to boot! Since you are starting from scratch, why not design in a little something different? http://newwoodstoves.net/index.php/product/magnum

We just finished our addition a few months ago. A LOT of planning went into it and I wanted to heat the entire house with the stove. The thing I would change about my stove right now is where it is situated. I can't get great draft for my stove without looking absolutely ridiculous on the exterior of the house. I would have placed it closer to the original part of the house to make it taller, using the height of the house to extend the chimney. Make sure it is as straight as possible You will see what I mean if you look at my posts on this thread...

https://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/92471/

I also put through wall fans in my new room to blow the heat around upstairs. I am not sure if you will be able to do this, but I have been able to heat my entire house all season (evenly) without using a single drop of oil. The fans are also in the pictures, are quiet and do a great job. The stove I own, a VC defiant, is WAY over-sized for just the 20x24' room we put on. But with the fans, the room is usually within a degree of the upstairs. I can get the room up to 85F, and have by accident, but you will want to open those purdy insulated glass widows if you do. Last night I ran the stove just to get the temp in the house up a bit as it was warm yesterday. I left the fans off upstairs and what a difference it made. Downstairs was a balmy 76F while upstairs was at 70F.

One other thing you may consider is ceiling fans. Moving the heated air around is critical if you want to get the most out of your stove. If you are in the building phase, this is when it needs to get done, rather than when everything is sealed up and it is an afterthought.

The through wall fans I used are Panasonic whisperwall fans. They need some modification for interior application, but they are worth it.

One more suggestion for you. We were given the option for a basement under our new room. It was $7k more for the option and I said yes. Worth every penny. I essentially doubled the size of the room for only $7k.

And, last but not least. Make sure you are home A LOT during the construction. I work an odd schedule which allowed me to be home while they were working. I caught a lot of mistakes that the the guys were making. One such mistake is that the architect told the guys to put the insulation for the basement on the inside. If I wasn't home, that is exactly where it would have gone, even though I told him to put it on the outside of the foundation. I also gave them a couple cold beers on Fridays. Was a nice touch.

Seriously, the last thing. If you do decide to go big on the stove and get the basement, figure a way to send some heat downstairs, sort of a dump zone instead of opening windows. I usually have excess heat and wish I had set a fan up to blow the air around to the basement. It gets chilly down there.

The OP said he only wants to heat the new addition and has no intention of heating the rest of the house.

"The purpose of the stove is to heat this room mainly and if any residual heat goes into the house that's great"

With a little planning, a lot of residual heat can go into the house.

That's a pretty big space. I wouldn't worry about overheating the room. I've got a 3cf insert and can modulate the heat quite effectively just by changing the fan speed. If you're not planning on 24/7 burning then my opinion is the size of the stove is less important, you can always make smaller fires.

What's your budget for stove + install? I like the look of cast iron but would prefer a welded firebox. I like the look of the soapstone stoves but unless you're talking about massive weight (masonry furnace) they really don't hold that much more heat. You could add a lot more thermal mass from another layer of drywall. I also will probably go with a cat stove next time around because an extra 10% eficiency would more than pay for itself in the wood I'd save. I've got a lot of oak that just doesn't dry out, so I tend to smolder more than wanted. But, then again I haven't checked the price of replacement lately.

You might want to bring pictures with you to the stove shop to give them an idea of the location so you can come up with a plan together.

You did not specify if cathedral ceiling or not, but with an entire wall of glass, no matter how good those windows are, is going to be a very cold wall along that glass. If there is in fact a cathedral ceiling, I highly suggest installing a good ceiling fan in the room, and figure a bit larger a stove. Tough to recommend without knowing the ceilings height, and how many openings lead into the room.

Just realized the link I posted was to this thread, hehe. Here are the postings for my addition.

https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/i-hate-to-ask-but-i-think-i-have-a-draft-problem.74129/

I am going to design some sort of heat transfer system into main house but not looking to heat main house solely with stove - just want to take advantage of the heat if I can.

Click to expand...

Those fans are nice, and quiet. They don't look all that great on the inside wall, but nobody ever even notices them. My addition really lent itself to heating the entire house, so I took full advantage of it.You would be surprised how much even one fan will distribute heat.

There will either be a set a french doors or leave opening open all the time

Click to expand...

Same here, but we went with pocket doors. They only get closed if the kids are being too loud, and are out of the way when open.

We situated our stove so it "convects" the heat down the hall to the rest of the house. You can sit in front of it and feel the cold air sucking into the room and the heat going out. We're heating @ 700 sq feet with the Republic. If you're really drawn to the Jotul, then go for it-you're going to have to look at it all the time you're in the room. The Republic is a little big for our space but we can just burn smaller (but still hot) fires-and it's the stove I wanted looks wise (hadn't see Woodstock previously, but the clearances for the Republic beat them hands down). And it's good for longer burns vs the smaller 1250.

I think you should look for a stove with long burn times, not just for this situation but for any situation. Wood stoves (or any heater) won't heat up a room instantly - it takes a few hours for cool or cold furniture, floors, etc. to heat up. Plus it takes time fo the wood stove to heat up before the stove even starts to heat the room. This all means that you shouldn't plan on lighting a fire in the room at 6:30 after dinner and sit down for a warm evening in the room. It will be more like start a fire at 5:00pm and by 7:00 the room is cozy. When it is cold you'll want a long-burning fire. In general larger stoves mean a longer burn. I wouldn't worry too much about the heat output because I think most stoves will be enough.

Have you figured out exactly what you'll be needing for a flue?
I was going to originaly put my stove in the corner of our 24' x 14' stove room, but after I put some thought into what I'd need for a flue I changed my mind and put the stove against an inside wall closer to the center of the room. The reason being, in the corner of the room the flue would have exited the roof at a low level and I would have had to add a lot more of the expensive insulated flue pipe to get it high enough to conform to code. Also at that height it would have needed support braces and would have been virtualy impossible to inspect or clean from the top. Where the pipe exits the roof now it is close to the peak of the roof and only 5 ft high, and is very easy to clean and inspect. If had put the stove in the corner I would have had about 12ft of free standing pipe sticking out of the roof.