north of 60 said:
Give the vid a try. Its still useful to understand the black beasts.
Good video, but a lot of hype. Their stoves are
4 times more efficient than any non-catalytic wood stove? C'mon. So a BK has 80% efficiency and a Jotul Oslo only has 20%? Boy, that must piss off all the Oslo owners when they find out they are using 4X as much wood as they need to. And since a new Jotul stove is supposed to be twice as efficient as my stove, the BKs must be 8X as efficient, so I can go from 6 cord/year to 3/4 of a cord and heat this place the same? I'd be all over it, but I ain't buying it.
I also find it kinda humorous that they are recommending wood that is substantially drier than 95% of people are able to achieve. I don't think that one summer in ten will get my wood down below 15% around here, this year was a fluke. Thankfully, I don't have to depend on that or I'd never have dry enough wood.
Note that the video said not to burn wood larger than 8-10" in diameter. They put some pretty honking big pieces in those stoves to get those extremely long burns. With splits that large, you will have no problem burning extremely dry wood at all, even with the air wide open. FWIW, I was burning cherry that was about 12-14% MC all morning long with no problem, even in my non-cat dragon. Splits were large, however, about 6" in diameter. When I left for the afternoon, I put on three nice pieces of very marginal hickory. They went right to flame on the hot coal bed. When my flue temps got to about 500º (less than 10 minutes), I shut the bypass damper, waited for the flue temps to stabilize, shut down the air most of the way, and went shopping. They were still burning nicely when I got home. In fact, the place got so warm and we had to open the front door for a while.
You are only gonna get "X" amount of BTUs out of a pound of wood not matter how dry it gets. Heating this place all day during a cold snap in Jan with only 3-4 splits... it just ain't ever gonna happen.
, just showed ya where I got 12 to 18%MC from. 
