Wood stove for small space

I have a 24x24 pole building garage with concrete floor, insulated garage door, 1 1/2 inch foam insulation in the walls and 2 inch foam insulation in the ceiling. I have a quad millinium in there which i think is a 2.4 cu ft firebox. I can tell you from experience when it drops below freezing outside and the stove and garage are both cold it takes several hours for it to get warm in there. It should have a much bigger stove because like begreen says it takes serious btu's to heat several tens of degrees. It's 14 degrees here now. It usually warms up about 15 degrees per hour from cold up to around 72 degrees I stop loading it. If I needed to work in the garage in this weather I need several hours (around 4 hours) to warm it up and the floor will never really get warm. I have basically the same stove in my house and it can heat the whole place no problem. In a building that size I would get the largest stove I could afford, but that's just my opinion based on 7 years of heating my garage in the winter this way. Be careful though, it became an addiction for me and I love burning wood now due to the wood stove in the garage, which led me to put one in the house as well

JKC said:

Thanks for all you help. I like the idea of the 2 cubic foot stove. I just did not know if it would be an issue with the flue if you throttled the stove down. How low can you run a stove throttled down once the space is up to temperature and not cause issues?

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If you throttle back or burn at too low temps for extended periods you risk creosote build up. It's the nature of the beast. Too big a stove becomes the uncontrollable monster in the room. Don't become fodder for the "you can never have too big a stove" mentality. It's a logical fallacy. ( if you've ever been in a house where some yahoo decided to exceed HVAC recommendation of 10 feet of slant fin/room x4 you know how horribly those rooms overheat ). You also don't want to over-fire too small of a stove . You want the most efficient heating device for the size room and variables such as heat loss and mass retention. A medium size stove for a medium size room will give you too much and too little stove in weather extremes. Perfect. If once every ten years you have to sit a little closer to the stove when it is 20 below is that so bad ?

JKC said:

I have been looking at the Englander stove I have been looking at 50-SNC13 and 50-SNC30. I do not have a store for wood stoves in this area and you can but these stoves on Amazon. I see that the 30 was mentioned earlier. Would the 13 be better for this size room? It looks like the same stove just smaller. Can the 30 be turned down enough for this size room since it has a bigger box it looks like it would last all day. Your thoughts. Could these stoves be through a wall to external chimney or would it be better to go through the roof. I have a metal roof and worry about getting a good seal on the roof stove pipe. Your thoughts?

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Hey JKC, I would go with the larger 30. I believe you can do a 90 (or two 45s) and go out the wall as long as you have the chimney height to establish good draft and meet the manufacturers stated minimums and proper bracing etc. As for "turning the stove down"- that's not really how they work. It's not like you pack it full of wood, then leave it wide open and get tons of heat, or throttle it back for less heat and a longer burn. These units are made to be run differently. If you want a lot of heat, load a lot of wood. If you want less heat, load less wood. There are other catalytic style wood stoves that are designed to run differently, but the EPA secondary burners, like the 30, have a direct relationship between heat output and fuel load.

I hope that helps. Good luck! Do you mind if I ask what it is that you are doing in the barn in weekends only?

ETA: I realize I have repeated a lot of Begreen's post #9. Somehow I missed that before

JKC, I'm curious why the pellet stove wasn't considered a good option?

Englander came recently out with its Madison model. It's 2.4 cu ft firebox would fall right between the 13NC and the 30NC. It is still a special order item meaning you have to go to the service desk at an Englander stove retailer and ask them to place a special order for it. Cost is $900 I think. There is a pretty extensive thread here: https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/madison-in-my-burn-trailer.128150/
You will find more with a forum search.

Another option is the Pacific Energy True North with a 2 cu ft firebox. Retails at about $1000. An advantage of that model is that it only needs a 12 ft chimney.
Drolet makes budget mid-size stoves (look at their large models). The Escape 1800 would be an option.

What are you doing in this barn and how warm do you need it to be? For example, I like my house to be quite warm as I'm usually not physically doing anything. In a garage/barn/shop you are, presumably, maintaining some level of physical activity. I don't need to be doing much to feel completely comfortable wearing a t-shirt in a 65 degree shop, knowwhatImean? If this is a hideout space for you when you just can't bear up under one more second of your wife's unrelenting personality then you might want it a little warmer.

JKC, seriously, no stove has to run you out of the room with too much heat. If you just want a little heat, build a smaller fire with less wood and/or lower BTU wood. It's really not an issue. My guess is you're in far more danger of not having *enough* heat in there to make you happy in that garage with the concrete floor. The problem is that during the week when you're not in there and the place has no heat, the structure itself will become frozen, never mind how much insulation you put in. Then when you turn on the heat, most of it is initially going to go to warming up the structure, including the insulating material itself, before it ever gets around to heating the air inside much.

Last winter, for example, we had a couple week-long bouts of double digits below zero, for which I'm somewhat under-stoved. I did OK, though a little chilly. But I was really amazed how long it took -- a couple of days -- in the succeeding strong warm-up to 40-degree days for the house to get back to a normal really comfortable temperature. Even though it was much warmer out, the house structure itself was still so cold that it was using up much of the stove's output heat, and my rooms were still chilly, even though I was running the stove non-stop at near its highest safe temperature.

Heating systems of any kind don't just heat room air, they have to heat up and then keep the structure itself warm.

I think one reason for me that I would have went with a bigger stove is because I work on cars, trucks, and old gas pumps in my little garage and I'm always opening the door to bring vehicles in and out which cools the temps quickly even after it's warm. Once my building is up to around 70 I let the fire burn down then just throw one or two small logs in every so often and keep the air opened up to keep flue temps up. I've done it this way for 7 years and have never had any creosote residue inside the chimney, just black dust which is swept yearly.

I would go as big as you can if you want to heat it up relatively quickly - I have a Super 27 (similar to the TN19) in a 900 sq ft cabin which we use to heat the place up from cold every weekend in the winter (and usually it's above freezing, although often not by much). It takes about 4 hours to get it warm, 6-8 hours until it's cozy. If it gets too hot later on we just open some doors and/or let the fire die down.

JKC said:

Thanks again for all the help. I started looking at a different manufacture of stove to get the fire box size between the 13 and 30. I have read a lot of good things about the Englander stoves but I do not think these fit my needs. I did see the Madison from Englander but I can not find much about how the stove perform. I do think from all the information that I received in this thread leads me to a 2 to 2.5 cubic ft firebox.

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If you can tell us what exactly do you not like about Englander stoves, it will make it easier to give you some recommendations. There are certainly plenty of stoves around in the size you want (Regency F2400, PE Super, Osburn 2000, Quadrafire 3100 to name just a few) but they will all cost considerably more.

He is heating a barn with cement floors go big or you will be running to stove to warm your hands all the time