Is Papa Bear best for survivalist?

wow, your sort of like Oliver Wendall Douglass on "Green Acres".

I think the Fisher would be perfect for a SHTF scenario. Treated decently, it should last for 100 years needing nothing but door gaskets every few years (buy a roll). The stove pictured in my avatar was ~40 years old and in perfect condition when I sold it.
New EPA rated stoves are more efficient but more complex.

Unfortunately in a SHTF scenario, you need wood, lots of it and for most folks that means chainsaw and gasoline to run it plus most likely a splitter. You are far better off learning to drain the heating system (if hydronic) and going with a much smaller stove (preferably not an EPA due to the need for dry seasoned wood) unit so that your wood demand is low and then move into the space heated by the woodstove. A Jotul 602 will heat quite a bit of space with not a lot of wood. If you are dependent on wood stove to keep warm its surprising how well you will get used to getting up in the middle of the night and feeding the stove, talk to anyone who has a hunting camp in cold territory and they can fill you in. Having experienced cutting a couple of cords of hard wood with an ax and then sawing it with a bowsaw, then splitting it by hand, I find that there is no way I would want to feed a wood hog just to keep a large house warm when there is an alternative in a SHTF scenario. If you can get to the point where you have a couple of cords of dry wood under cover that will cover a couple of weeks of wood heating which will cover most emergencies. For most folks any longer than a week or two and you will be worried about far more other things (like where you are going to be getting food). Cutting big long logs usually means big long wet logs and the heating content is cut by at least half that of dry wood plus you need to split it small to get it too burn.

There are other small stoves and a few rare cook stoves that will fit the bill like the small morsos but the 602s are fairly common and reasonably priced used. Jotul 404s wood cookstoves are in steady demand by preppers as they serve both heating and cooking without taking up a lot of room. They both use a very small stove pipe so running a liner is a lot easier. If you go with a big fisher make sure that the liner you can fit in the chimney will match the stoves outlet diameter.

I have nothing against Fishers and used to have one but boy without the baffle conversion they are real good at heating the chimney rather than the house. When I switched to my Defiant, I cut my wood use by at least a third and noticed that my chimney was a lot cooler. Its not an EPA stove and will burn wet wood if need be but also has primitive secondary combustion once the fire get going plus a hot plate for a cook stove. It will also take a long log. The caveat with used Defiants is that they are more fragile than Fishers and if you get one that has been beat, its going to need rebuilding.

I bought an nc 30 and it isn't over complex, but I can see from a survivalist standpoint the old stove might be a bit more durable. IE no fiber board or air tube's to worry about, just solid metal and firebrick. But than again, I believe it is like anything. It is how you treat and maintain it. If you overfire the old stove and throw huge logs in it(braking fire brick) it won't be around forever.

If the basement is not where you spend your time, then you might give some serious consideration into locating a wood burning stove on the level of the home you occupy the most.

fox9988 said:

I think the Fisher would be perfect for a SHTF scenario. Treated decently, it should last for 100 years needing nothing but door gaskets every few years (buy a roll).

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Actually, it's even better. Fishers need no door gaskets, they are made to "seal" without them.

You don't need a stove that will last 100 years. You need one that will last as long as your food supply. I have every bit as much faith in my fancy EPA stove lasting for the next year as I do a fisher.

Tsar777 said:

I have a propane central heat furnace in my medium, large two story farmhouse. Thinking of putting a big woodstove in the basement to heat the house if the economy collapses and I can't get propane or the electric goes down and the fan can't be powered. Or for an extended ice storm.

Thinking of lining the sketchy old chimney put there for the old furnace decades ago. Thinking of a big old used fisher and keep the basement door open to let the heat rise up into the house. Lots of hedge around here, lots.

Thinking of cutting big long logs and building a big fire to get me thru those cold Missouri nights.

Are new stoves better or worse? Will it be cheaper to get a used Fisher or a new one.

Any advice? I'm an accountant who moved back to the family farm and am clueless.

Thank you

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Putting a woodstove in the basement usually turns out to be a huge disappointment and perhaps in this case, even more so. The main reason is that the basement walls in your home are probably not insulated. This means that most of the heat your stove will produce would go to heat and keep heated the basement walls. But even if they were insulated, most people have found it is very difficult to get the heat from the basement to the upper part of the house. Yes heat does indeed rise, but in this case, very little will get above that floor. It simply does not work.

Therefore, if you intend on heating with wood, you will find that placing it in the area you spend most of the time will serve you much better. This normally is not in the basement.

You do have some very good firewood in your area and should be able to do well with it. I would suggest you begin by leaning (visit The Wood Shed) what types of wood you have, how long it takes to dry that wood before you can burn it and how best to store it so that it dries the quickest. Learn first that it does take time to dry wood. Gone are the days when folks were said to cut wood in the fall and burn it in the winter. You do not want to get into this sort of thing.

Are new stoves better or worse, you ask? You be the judge as I will give you an example of our situation.

Many years ago we were given a great bargain on a stove, or so it seemed. This stove was basically new as only a very few fires had been burned. At the time, this particular stove had been highly regarded. For a mere $100, we took that beast out of their home and installed it into our home. Well, we did not freeze (it was a big stove after all), but I can tell you we were never comfortable in winter. To assist, we closed off part of the house during the winter and also used a small heater in the bathroom to use when we were ready to use the shower. We averaged about 6 cord of wood per year. The most we used was about 7 1/2 cord. As stated, we were never comfortable in the winter but we got by.

Fast forward to 2007 when we finally decided it was time to get a better stove. After much searching and researching, we purchased a stove from Woodstock Soapstone. At first I laughed when I saw the stove. It indeed was a beautiful stove and we admired it but I just could not see how a stove so much smaller than what we had could heat our home. Long story short, we bought. Of course I leaned on that six month guarantee they offered. We installed the stove in September, 2007.

The results we have obtained are:

1. We are no longer uncomfortable in winter. In contrast, we keep our home at 80 degrees or warmer all winter.
2. We no longer close off part of the house in the winter. In fact, we have added a room onto the house.
3. Rather than 6 cord of wood per year, in the six year's we've had this stove, the most wood we've burned is 3 cord. (There may have been just a few fires over that 3 cord last year but the year before it was 2 1/2 cord at most.)
4. If we figure we've burned 3 cord less per year, this amounts to 18 cord of wood we have not had to cut over the last 6 years.
5. When we had the old stove, we cleaned our chimney normally 4 times per winter or more. We have cleaned our chimney one time since the new stove. To add to that, I have not yet looked but my wife did remove the cap from the tee a couple weeks ago and some ash fell. I have not measured it yet but there was not much. There has been no black creosote since we added this stove.
6. Our stove is as much a piece of fine furniture as any in the home. It looks at home as well in the summer as in winter.

You judge. Was the new stove better, or was it worse?

Good luck.

By the way as an accountant you may want to study this thread https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads...re-heating-by-wood.113905/page-4#post-1527488
My dad was an accountant and that's why we started out cutting by and splitting by hand.

I do have a stove in the basement, its not ideal but its a backup to my wood boiler which is the primary heating. My basement walls are insulated somewhat so the heat does rise to the first floor but there is insulation between the first and second floor plus lousy circulation so worse case is I drain a loop on the second floor and live in on the first floor in an emergency. I have heated the first floor in a ice storm situation for several days and usually the biggest issue was it was too hot. I don't care to have a stove on the main floor as its a smaller house and its easy to spread dirt around. Worse case is I do have a spare hookup on my chimney on the main floor sized for my jotul 606.

The whole survivalist concept just doesn't make sense to me. I don't mind self sufficiency and efficiency in what I do but its more because I would rather spend some time getting exercise in the woods than writing a check to an oil company. Its easy to use woodburning as a justification to buy toys but the reality is start slow and decide if you are into it, some folks are and some folks find its a big hassle. The reality is that woodburning from scratch has a long payback.

Highbeam said:

Actually, it's even better. Fishers need no door gaskets, they are made to "seal" without them.

You don't need a stove that will last 100 years. You need one that will last as long as your food supply. I have every bit as much faith in my fancy EPA stove lasting for the next year as I do a fisher.

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Bingo beat me to it. If civilization collapsed I'd be more worried about what we are going to eat,access to clean disease free water, medical care if I cut my foot off in a splitting accident.

You get the drift....

no door gaskets-even better

In a word you can get a serviceable stove like a Fisher that uses 40% less wood. The main difference is the way the air flows through the stove. If you live in a place where a constant smoke signature is OK for your mindset, a Fisher would be fine. If you do not want a smoke signature, get a EPA stove.

When I hear the word survivalist my thoughts go immediately to a cookstove just as it would for homesteader or anything else related to simple living or back to the land. While it's certainly possible to make civilised meals on any stove that has an uninsulated flat top and a couple of trivets to make adjustments, and one can do wonders with a dutch oven or a stove top oven box, it's still a lot of making do and compromise that perhaps with all the other inconveniences of life, should something happen that causes an abrupt shift of lifestyle, may not be appreciated or be more time consuming when other time consuming jobs present themselves and need attention. While of course the main concern would be heating, I do think cooking would come as a close second in such a scenario (food, water, etc, those are all givens, they're going to happen no matter what), the idea choice of course would be to have a heat source plus a cooking appliance that each did the best for what they were made to accomplish, but that's usually out of range of most people's resources and capabilities, so to me the best compromise would be finding a unit that has the best range of heating ability (and that can include something that can be hooked up to a water loop to provide some remote or other heating abilities) while having the most flexible cooking options.