New Vermont Castings Defiant 1610 non-cat, very happy stove owners

We recently purchased a brand new Vermont Castings 1610 non-catalytic wood stove in black enamel.

We stumbled onto hearth.com a year or two ago, and we have spent many, many hours reading the posts. It is a great site and we got a lot of valuable information here. Thanks for providing this valuable service.

We live in West Tennessee where it gets cold in the winter, but usually does not stay cold very long. It will get down to freezing and warm back up into the 40's or 50's. Sometimes it will get into the teens sometimes, but not often. It usually will warm up, rain, then cool off, the repeat the routine.

We bought our house about 15 years ago. It is about 2000 sq ft downstairs and 1000 sq ft upstairs. It is very well insulated with fiberglass insulation with 1" of foam sheathing under redwood siding. The stove sits on a tile hearth with the back against the east wall, sort of in the middle of the house. the other rooms open into the room with the stove. Kind of an open floor plan.

The house came equipped with a Forrester brand woodstove that was really a fireplace insert on legs. My guess is it was built in the early 1980's. It was made of welded plate steel with two walled construction. It had a blower that pulled air from the bottom front of the stove and then pushed it around between the two walls before blowing the air out of the top front and side front. The fire box air intake consisted of two sliding vents, one in the bottom of each door. The vents did not seal very well, so I modified them so that we could completely shut off the airflow to the firebox. the bottom of the firebox was covered with firebrick, but the sides of the firebox were a corrugated sheet metal. I guess it was corrugated so that it could expand and contract. In fact, the corrugated stuff had cracked in several places and I had to weld up the cracks. The blower was on some sort of thermostat and it would not turn on until the stove reached a certain temperature. That was very annoying.

We thought we had a pretty good stove, but after using the Defiant non-cat, we wish we had changed stoves years ago! The new stove is superior in every way to the old stove.

When we were looking at stoves we checked with several different dealers plus hearth.com. We wanted a top load because I was tired of being on my knees stuffing heavy pieces of wood through the doors and over the dog irons. The glass in the front doors turned black nearly immediately after starting the fire. It was difficult to start and the wood rarely burned completely up-it kind of burned in the middle and we had to push the ends back to the middle. You had to wait until the fire was nearly extinguished before removing the ashes, or smoke up the house.

Wow! What a difference with the Defiant. When we were shopping for stoves the dealers told us the newer EPA stoves would put out twice the heat and burn half the wood. Well, the old stove put out plenty of heat, but you had to run the noisy fan. If you slowed the fan down the thing would kind of go wa wa wa with a little bit of a rattle. I tried to lubricate the fan and change the rheostat, but nothing helped. I think the Defiant puts out maybe 25% more heat, but uses a whole lot less wood. Also, we tend to burn a lot of softer woods like sweet gum and elm simply because that is what falls down on our acreage. The Forrester stove would creosote up the flue pipe real bad, and clog up the screen thingy in the chimney cap. I would have to climb up on the roof and blow out the screen a couple of times each season. Bummer. The Defiant radiates heat way out into the room and holds heat a long time.

I read some pretty bad reviews about Vermont Castings products on this forum, but when I asked all of the dealers about VC they had nothing but good things to say. all of the dealers sold several brands, and the consensus seemed to be that all of the EPA stoves were good, it just depended on what features you liked. We looked at Lopi, Quadra-Fire, and others. We liked some of the features on the other stoves, but we definately wanted a top load, so that narrowed down the search. We liked the look of the cast iron stoves, we wanted the ability to install an outside air kit because I could tell that our old stove sucked a huge amount of air, which had to come from the unheated outside, AND, if we had a bathroom fan or cooktop vent turned on, the stove seemed to have a hard time getting air. I guess our house is pretty tight, plus we knew it was not a good idea to pull cold air into the house while burning the heated air. Anyway, we bit the bullet and dropped $4,000 for a new stove, enamel pipe, and accessories. We plan on using the $1500 tax credit, so that took a little of the sting out.

Compared to our old stove, the Defiant is a dream to operate. It is easy to load, easy to start, the glass stays fairly clean, it is easy to control, extremely easy to take the ashes out using the swing out ash tray, every bit of the wood burns completely up, and it heats our house with no problem. When we get ready to put in more wood we take the fireplace shovel and push the ashes around until the fall through the grate in the bottom of the fire box.

If I have any complaints they would be as follows: we are having some problems with back-puffing or whoofing as some have called it. If we throttle down the primary air intake sometimes it will whoof-a better description would be a belch. It is a flash of fire in the firebox with a corresponding puff of smoke out of the top load door. Not a big belch, but enough to get a smokey smell in the house. We are using some pretty crappy wood this year and we hope when we are burning oak, hickory, or pecan that the problem will go away. We have not been able to load the firebox all of the way to the top, because if we want to throttle it down we get the whoof.

Oh no! I see that I am nearly out of characters!

Happy wood burning!

Thanks for the link.

The basic stove was about $3,000. We added two warming shelves, 3 sections of enamel pipe, one slip pipe, and an outside air kit. We shopped 4 different stores and the price we got was one of the lowest. I did not want to mail order the stove in case we had a problem. We had read on the forum about the customer service problems people have had with VC. We might could have saved a few hundred dollars, but it was not worth the risk. We bought the stove from a company who has been a VC dealer for 20 plus years. We did not have to pay shipping and the stove arrived in about 3 days.

The stove puts out more heat than I expected, we might have been able to get by with a smaller stove. Some people told us it was better to have too much stove and close down the air, and some people told us that the stoves like being run at capacity. We still don't know. I just know that the defiant is VASTLY superior to what we had. It was what some people on the forum call a "smoke dragon". My son named the stove Saint George because it killed the Smoke Dragon!

The new stove is in every way superior to what we had. We have not had any problems with the secondary burn. the stove emits almost no smoke.

Thanks. Have you had pretty good luck with your Encore? Does it heat well? We are almost thinking that we should have gotten the Encore since the Defiant puts out so much heat. We've really been amazed.

Do you think these stoves run efficiently at 300-500 degrees stovetop temperature? If we run our Defiant at 400-600 degrees it will run you out of the house. Instead of loading the stove during the day and throttling back the air supply, we seem to have better luck putting in a couple of small rounds or medium splits every three hours or so. At night we load it about halfway up and leave the air supply at about 40-50%. It won't burn all night, we have to throw another couple of pieces of wood in about 3 or 4 AM. Either me or my wife will usually wake up once during the night anyway. You can open the bypass and then open the ash door for about three minutes and the wood will blaze up real good. We then wait about 5 minutes and close the bypass.

We will keep working with different combinations until we can get an all night burn without over-firing or burping.

I'm still amazed at how much heat the stove will put out.

I wonder also if we did in fact buy the Encore(one size smaller than the Defiant) if it would even make any difference. I'll have to have another look at the Everburn shoe and see if it is any different between the two stoves. It may be that only the firebox is larger.

Great! We've been real happy with our Defiant non-cat. It's been unusually cold around here this winter and we have run our stove nearly every day for about the last 6 weeks.

So far, so good.