Need advice on heating old cabin

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Joful said:
I see this typed so many times here in this forum. Perhaps it's just vogue. I grew up in a house with three open fireplaces, and most of my extended family heated their respective 200 year old houses with open fireplaces, so I speak from fairly extensive experience when I say they do heat very well! They may use more wood than any stove you've ever seen, but make no mistake about it, an open fireplace can throw enormous amounts of heat into a room! The one in the family room of the house I grew up in threw so much heat we often found ourselves opening the windows to cool the room back down, when someone who wasn't used to that fireplace threw too many logs on the fire.
Click to expand...

Joful, I think you know, as I do, that when our houses were built it was not unusual for an average family to burn 15-20 cord a winter just keeping a couple rooms warm. I don't think anybody says a fireplace cant throw heat, but it is doing it at only a tiny fraction of the efficiency possible from a stove.

I too still have and use two open fireplaces in our house. In our TV den, when the open fireplace is burning it can easily get that small 12x12 room to 80F. But doing so is actually sucking heat out of the rest of the house. It will also consume more wood in 4 hours to heat 144 ft2 as the Encore will burn in an entire day heating our entire 1400ft2.
 
Joful said:
Unless my eyes are playing tricks on me, that brick chimney stack is sitting on a wooden kitchen cupboard. Is gravity less significant in Oregon, or am I missing something in that photo?
Click to expand...
LOL! That was Grandpa. Here is another view
cookstove chimney stack.jpg
 
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