We have only had it running 4 days or so. So far so good. It's supposed to be 13C = 55 F today. I shut it down this morning was pretty hot in the house. Must invest in a few thermometers. Interested to see how it goes when the really cold weather comes.
We are heating a poorly laid out 2200 sq foot basement incl, 40 year old side split with a crappy envelope and electric baseboard heating. There are two levels of finished basement and two levels upstairs. The Eco-65 is located in the lower basement. The heat for the living room, dining room and kitchen (now open area) is coming through a hole in the floor with a grate. This hole was from the wood stove that previously resided in the basement. There is a ceiling fan running in the kitchen to circulate the air. There is a ceiling fan circulating air on the uppermost ceiling near the bedrooms at the top of the stairwell.
Seems there are a few gaskets, yes. I'm guessing I won't be the one doing the maintenance on it. General cleaning will be me mostly probably. I prefer to bake and cook and work on my motorcycle. Working on the stove will be Mr. VIBErator's job.
Reviews on it were good and we picked it up on sale, so price was reasonable as well.
Happy stove hunting becasunshine.
I'm on Cooking, Baking and General Stove Cleaning Duty as well. In fact, I should go vacuum out the Napoleon because the stove is stone cold right now. We burned it for a few hours last night when the house dipped to 65'F but we cut it off before bed because it was getting too warm for overnight sleeping. It's literally warm outside right now but I'm sure we'll fire up the stove later tonight just to take the chill off. I've already paid for the pellets, why pay again for the gas?
Like you we are dealing with a poorly insulated envelope- in our case, there is no insulation in the envelope. We have 1950's brick and block construction with mud over plaster interior walls. We have mass but no wall insulation at all and no real easy way of introducing wall insulation. We compensated by insulating the heck out of the attic and that does help quite a bit. This house had replacement windows installed when we purchased it, so that's good- but we added cell shades which helps even more. The walls are thick (brick/block/plaster/mud) so the double hung window wells are deep. On those windows, the cell shades are mounted inside the window frames. We had a winter a few years back that was so cold for our region that we actually noticed convection cold coming into the room from around the edges of the cell shades. That's probably not a surprise to you but it was for us. The convection cold was so noticeable that we did the candle test around those windows. Nope- no "breeze," no air leaks- just convection cold. Enter butt ugly thermal curtain panels for the windows whose cell shades are recessed into the window frame. The thermal panels cover the tiny gap in between the cell shades and the window frame, keeping the convection cold (and heat, in 100'+ summers) out of the room. Fortunately, buying them in neutral colors and keeping them pulled aside most of the time means that they kind of blend and disappear into the room. We pull them closed across the windows during both temperature extremes and it makes a noticeable difference in stretching the stove's BTU's and the HVAC's cooling in the summertime.
We have a handful of other windows in the house that are sliders high up on the walls with no sills (think mid-century construction) and the cell shades completely overlap the window frames, so there is no convection heating or cooling from the glass entering the house. I have curtains over those cell shades in one room because that room has an unobstructed south-southwest sun exposure, and the additional fabric helps insulate those windows in the summer. During the winter I leave those curtains pulled back.
Might I recommend cell shades, butt ugly thermal window panels (ours came from a Big Box Home Improvement Store but Big Box Discount Retailers carry them as well) and/or old fashioned window quilts, in whatever combination works for you, to help with that envelope?
Also, attic insulation really helped us. (Everyone on here probably has this story imprinted on their retinas, sorry guys, but in my own little way I think it helps the stove newbies.) Was it the winter of 2010-2011? I think it was late winter 2011- we had a very cold winter that year for the mid-Atlantic, with weeks-long stretches where it never got above freezing even during the day. That's probably typical for you but it's unusual for us to have sustained cold spells like that. We knew that we needed more attic insulation but we'd been putting it off in favor of other projects (we had some work to do on this old but new to us house.) That winter reset our priorities. We attended a local home show and talked to some insulation contractors. Because we also deal with very hot summers and we have an unobstructed south-southwest exposure on this house, we elected to have a radiant barrier tented (installed on the underside of the roof and the sides of the gables) in our attic. We also elected to have a professional insulation company install it for various reasons. Most of our attic is accessible and my husband and I aren't afraid to DIY- but there were some installation sticky spots in our attic over areas that we specifically wanted covered (an enclosed porch under roof that is now a bedroom, for instance.) We felt that the professionals could handle the tough spots better than we could. Also, this company's proprietary product was better for our application than we could buy off of the retail shelves.
Long story short, the day that the installers came it was cloudy and cold with yet another cold front moving into the region. Temperatures started dropping in the morning and continued to drop below freezing as the day progressed. The crew got to the house relatively early in the morning and they worked until just before noon. I turned the furnace off because the attic access door was opened all day long, with the heat from the house going up and into the attic- and the HVAC thermostat is in the same hallway as the attic access. I saw no need to fire the furnace to send heat into the attic and out of the attic vents. I simply sat by the pellet stove and stayed out of the way.
The weirdest thing happened- I swear I watched this happen with my very eyes: temperatures outside were falling, the wind was picking up, it was literally freezing and blustery and cloudy outside, so we didn't even have any solar gain- and as the work in the attic progressed, with the attic access door still opened, the temperatures in the house started to RISE just from the heat of the pellet stove.
I became a die hard believer in insulation that day- radiant barrier, blown insulation, batting insulation, whatever works in your particular application. I sat there and watched the temperature on our HVAC thermostat rise as the radiant barrier went up on the underside of the roof in the attic and temperatures outside fell. Our Napoleon puts out 43k BTU's, our conditioned living space is 1410 sq ft, and our attic covers the entire upstairs. The attic also has a ridge vent, soffit vents and gable vents. The thermostat wasn't rising because the Napoleon saturated the available space with BTUs and we had some to spare- the ventilated attic plus the living space of the house would be, IMHO, too much space for the Napoleon to heat and waste heat outside as well. The HVAC thermostat was rising because the radiant barrier was working in the downward direction.
My husband finished off that afternoon by rolling batting insulation over the portions of the attic floor that we aren't using (substantial portion of the attic) and that helped even more. We felt a palatable difference in the comfort of the house immediately- as in, that day.
Insulation, properly installed, is your friend.
I do like that Drolet... quite a lot, actually...
As far as tearing the stove down for a Big Clean- I've been known to do that while clad in my flannel nighty, because I saw no good reason to take a shower *before* I did the Cinderella bit. So if I can do it in a flannel nighty, a woman who works on her on motorcycle can certainly do it while baking a cake.
