Lopi Cape Cod Hybrid

Sprinter said:

800 sf with a 3 cf stove? Where are you, in a nylon tent on the North Pole? Must be hard to get wood delivered...

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Well, there's a little more to it than that, but I'm heating a similar space with a 3.0 cu.ft. cat stove in the other wing of the house. Works perfectly well, thanks to the fact that big cat stove is rated to burn as low as 10,000 BTU.

The space for the new stove is 4 floors netting 1060 sq.ft. each. Take away my 18" thick stone walls, and you end up around 871 sq.ft. interior space per floor, which is not very large. Then consider the fact that I'm heating that mass of solid uninsulated stone all around, including the fireplace into which the stove is set, and heat losses for one floor below the stove and two floors above, three exterior doors and 32 windows in that wing of the house, and the stove requirements begin to climb.

Truth be told, I have no idea what size stove it will take to heat the place, since the setup is less than ideal. This is my primary reason for seeking a cat stove, since they have a much wider range of operation than a non-cat. Go big, and there's no harm in running it low, if need be. If I go non-cat, I'd be looking at a much smaller stove, likely a Jotul 400 Castine.

eclecticcottage said:

/\ this makes me want to see pics of your house. Sounds like an awesome place.

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It's an interesting place. Lots of fun to heat!

I thought I had put some of these photos in another thread, but can't find it now. Here's some photos from the listing, with the old owner's furniture.

Left end is 1773, middle part is 1894, right end is 1994:


Fireplace #1, holding the Jotul Firelight 12:


Living room, showing plaster on stone walls:


Fireplace 2 in original kitchen, shown here with old gas insert, but slated for new woodstove:


Original kitchen fireplace foundation in basement rec. room, will likely receive a direct-vent gas stove (there's already a gas fitting thru the back wall of the fireplace):


Fireplace #4, out on back patio:


I suspect there's another fireplace hidden in the wall of one second floor bedroom, but haven't done any exploration on that, yet. There are four chimney stacks in the house, with five total flues and 7 stovepipe thimbles (two flues have two each). We plan on only running two wood stoves on the first floor, and one gas stove (more for fun than heat) in the basement.

Thanks, guys. You're correct about the hot water baseboard. Six zones. Would be fun to have an outdoor boiler, but obviously a much bigger undertaking. Maybe I could put a wood boiler in the basement next to the oil boiler, down the road, but then I'd need to build another chimney stack. I was already dreaming of putting a second chimney stack adjacent to the oil boiler, if I could talk the wife into putting a wood cookstove in the kitchen above, down the road. Just for fun... and no time real soon.

Woodstoves are our compromise for now, since my wife doesn't want the "mess" of burning open hearths. I grew up in a house with three open fireplaces, and never thought them too messy, but I guess I wasn't doing the dusting. A dual-career family with precious little time for what's really important, our goal is not to eliminate oil completely, but to have some fun with woodburning, while cutting down on the oil usage as much as we can.

One family owned this house from 1773 to 1921, spanning five generations. I've been in contact with some members of that family, although the last generation of that family to live in this house is now passed on, several of their kids are still alive. It has changed hands a half dozen times since 1921.

In this case, the walls do talk... literally! The entire first generation to grow up in this house signed their names in the stucco on the interior face of the chimney on that original kitchen fireplace, sometime around 1775. Some of this stucco was removed to do a chimney repair, and some signatures are now covered by a third floor bathroom addition, but most are still visible in the attic. The builder also signed the same area, and drew some interesting pictures in the stucco.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program...

Yeah, those Victorian houses are fantastic. Not for me though... too much painting and wood trim rot to deal with!

My family owned the same house and farm from 1692 until 1995. My aunt, the last of my family to live there, has the original Penn's grant to the place, signed 1726... so we were basically squatting on the place 34 years before we owned it! It was sad the day that sold, but it was an enormous place, and no one in the family had the means to keep the farm going at the time. That was an interesting house, having started as log cabin in 1692, with an early 1700's brick addition, and then a stone addition in the mid-1800's, which engulfed the log cabin. I'm told that there were still original 1692 log walls hiding behind the plaster and lath on some interior walls. They had 180 dairy cows, until the cow plague wiped out most of their herd in 1986, and they decided to retire the farm soon after.

I think doors on fireplaces were very common, at one time. Bottom line, without refrigeration, there was want and need for frequently smoking meat. Some houses had separate smoke houses, but I believe many of them just settled for smoking in their fireplace, with the doors closed. Most of these big fireplaces have big steel rods running front to back, about 7 - 8 feet off the floor, presumably for hanging meat.

We also had many deals fall thru on many old houses. Spent four years looking, before we bought this one. Almost bought two different old mills along the way, one already converted to a house, and the other abandoned. Both were HUGE (the smaller of the two was 6400 sq.ft.), and each had walls 28" - 30" thick at the ground level. Massive 14" square timbers throughout. One still had the water wheel. Amazing stuff, but no fireplaces!