Who needs a Blaze King! 15 hours between loads on this Englander!

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pen

pen

There are some who call me...mod.
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Aug 2, 2007
7,968
N.E. Penna
Loaded the stove up at 5:05am. I worked late and the Mrs. didn't get home till late after running around with the kids. All said and done the stove didn't see wood until 8:15 tonight. I shoved the remaining coals to the back, took 1/2 a 2.5 gal bucket of ash outside, raked the remaining coals forward and loaded her up. No match necessary, no kindling necessary.

My fisher couldn't have done that. Even well into the second year with this epa stove, this change in technology still amazes me. It's like fuel injection compared to a hit and miss engine.

pen
 
Give it up Pen. Everybody knows that there hasn't been a real wood stove made since 1987. You are freezing in that house and just don't know it. :coolgrin:

Or you just don't live where it gets cold.
 
BrotherBart said:
Give it up Pen. Everybody knows that there hasn't been a real wood stove made since 1987. You are freezing in that house and just don't know it. :coolgrin:

Or you just don't live where it gets cold.
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Ha! I put my shorts away in May and get them back out again in October :coolsmirk:

pen
 
Beetle-Kill said:
I don't consider coming home to a 50 °F house a success. Just say'in. :coolsmirk:
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Not quite 50, but the house was down to 60 when I came in. The ceiling has good insulation, but the walls do not. I also heat from the basement. Raised ranch / split level sort of a house. Not far from zero out.

pen
 
Here is the circumstance as we speak:

9:50pm

P2100057.jpg


P2100058.jpg


I came home to a 60 degree house and warmed it to 69 in about 1.75 hours. (That's w/ a stove in the basement and the temp measured upstairs)

W/ the fisher, if I had started at 60 I would have had the house to about 75 by now.

HOWEVER: The fisher would have been stone cold at 2pm this afternoon so I would have come home to a low 50's house and burned 1.5x as much wood getting things back up to par as well as starting from a cold stove rather than loading on coals.

Did the old stove throw more heat quicker? ABSOLUTELY If this were a cabin at -5 F I was walking into 1/2 in the bag at 11:30 at night I'd want the fisher. Since this is my home, the Englander does laps around that old girl.

pen
 
To get the 15hr burn..how many splits did you have to jam in the 30? Reason why I am asking is, since most of the BK dudes are leading the parade with burn times, we never discuss the amount of wood they jam in their stoves.
 
I only load the 30 to the top of the firebrick and it works out to around fifty to fifty five pounds of dry oak. Every night I load it at nine o'clock and when I get up at eight the coals are good for another couple of hours if I don't reload. I don't have to get in any hurry to reload since the house is usually around sixty eight or so but it is only in the teens then. Not 20 below zero like a lot of the guys here. Were it that cold here I would be up at five reloading. BTDT on zero degree nights.
 
Diabel said:
To get the 15hr burn..how many splits did you have to jam in the 30? Reason why I am asking is, since most of the BK dudes are leading the parade with burn times, we never discuss the amount of wood they jam in their stoves.
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Well, I should have emptied the ashes out of the stove this morning so I was only able to fit in 5 medium splits (you can grab them easily by the butt end w/ an average man's / woman's hand). Having the extra ash in the stove is why the house was a bit cooler than I'd have expected coming home, but the ash did insulate the left over coals saving some of them for me even though I waited so long on such an average load of wood. If the stove were low on coals/ash, I could probably get 8 to 9 of those splits in the stove.

pen`
 
Here are a few pics to try and get an average as best we can. It obviously varies but here's what is sitting in the rack now.

P2100059.jpg


I would consider the split seen just above and to the left of peeper's head to be a split on the small side of medium

P2100060.jpg


pen
 
No doubt BK is a champ. But I just loaded three rounds (5") of beech in my old VC & I will have nice coals at 10am tomorrow. NG will be running however....
 
Diabel said:
No doubt BK is a champ. But I just loaded three rounds (5") of beech in my old VC & I will have nice coals at 10am tomorrow. NG will be running however....
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Having another heat source is cheating.
 
BrotherBart said:
Diabel said:
No doubt BK is a champ. But I just loaded three rounds (5") of beech in my old VC & I will have nice coals at 10am tomorrow. NG will be running however....
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Having another heat source is cheating.
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Maybe in NV! Anything goes on ON + 3000 sq ft wife designed house......
 
Yeah. Yeah. If I lived on the moon somebody here would tell me that it doesn't get as cold there in a 2400 sq. ft. builder designed spec house. I always love "I heat 24/7 with wood." and the next sentence is "The furnace comes on a little in the morning.". Don't have a furnace, wouldn't know how that works. :lol:

Stay warm bro.
 
If you put the cat in the stove you'll get a longer burn, just saying :cheese:
 
WRONG!!- cat's are normally not seasoned, and will scratch your eyeballs out if you try to shove them in a stove.
 
But they are so cute up against the glass trying to get out.

(Before anybody puts a contract out on me for that, I have the first pet I have ever had in my 63 years on the planet. A homeless cat that I made friends with out around the wood pile. She now has her own F3 CB heating her in the basement. A cat with her own wood stove and a thousand sq. foot house down there all her own.)
 
That first line- I can't stop laughing... I think I sh!t myself, twice! ....still laughing.... awesome image! damn you!
 
also if you put the cat in it'll burn much cleaner and maybe even longer than 15 hours.
 
Diabel said:
Reason why I am asking is, since most of the BK dudes are leading the parade with burn times, we never discuss the amount of wood they jam in their stoves.
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About this much, it's not a Magic Heat. Its about twice the size of the Encore it replaced and this time of year I get about twice the burn time when I am running wide open. On the other hand, when the heat demand is lower the BK has burn control the Encore couldn't touch. All of the above is worth a lot to us as there is no furnace to come on in the morning.
 

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pen said:
I would consider the split seen just above and to the left of peeper's head to be a split on the small side of medium
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That's awesome. The only wood our killer dog protects is the wood in the stove.
 
you fellas do well to get that 14 -16 hour burn time. i load at bedtime, 9 30 ish , a full firebox (30inches wide 28 inches deep) jam packed with 8pieces house is in the 68 to 70 range and the fire is down to small average coals. when i leave i try to find the biggest uglist pieces to keep the fire alive till supper time 5ish. my old stove eats wood and cranks out the heat. our home is 100 years old and the heat output makes up for the lack of insolation. i would be very hard pressed to sacfice the heat this old stove gives us for a new one. no furnace back up but we do have some electric bb heaters if we go away for a long time.
 
BrotherBart said:
Give it up Pen. Everybody knows that there hasn't been a real wood stove made since 1987. You are freezing in that house and just don't know it. :coolgrin:

Or you just don't live where it gets cold.
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Interesting post, I have never posted that but have thought it many times, do you have a way of reading my mind?
 
I have had enough coals in my olympic 24 hours later to start a fire. That does not mean it can throw out heat to match that Big Badass BlazeKing with the 4 Ft Cu firebox...
 
Who needs a BK? I think it would be people who have large houses, or who have a challening situation in terms of insulation, siting, or design, or who have a lifestyle that requires infrequent trips to the stove. Or who think they're pretty.

I've been giving the whole `how much stove do you need' question a lot of thought, both before and after I bought this one, watching the numbers of house sizes and insulation and siting and stoves and temps, and asking the occasional impertinent question, and have a working hypothosis that houses that required less fuel before a wood stove went in might get away with a less ambitious stove than BK. Okay, that's not exactly profound, but coming from me, it counts as an epiphany. People who live in the same area I do with similar-sized houses that required a lot more fuel oil than I did are running with bigger stoves and more firewood. Stands to reason. I didn't understand how to factor that into my decision when I was stove shopping, but at least I was able to start forumating the right kinds of questions. And flippantly as it may have been asked, `who needs a BK' is one of those sort. The answer turns out to be: apparently not everyone.

It was 0F with a chilly breeze when I got up this morning. Temp was a comfortable 68 upstairs and down, and the stove had run all night on poplar with the air intake shut down and the damper in the stovepipe cranked over pretty good. I pulled off about a quart or so of ashes, raked the coals to the front, piled on the splits, and let her rip.

I have no other heat source; it wasn't my idea--boiler failed a month ago. In a way, I'm glad it did, because without that I wouldn't know just how much that stove could do. It's been like taking a new boat out for a shakedown cruise that turned, unplanned, into a trans-oceanic voyage. Okay, an exaggeration--but I never would have put it through these kinds of paces if my hand had not been forced. And I have been consistently blown away by how much my mid-sized stove can do. I think so very much just comes back to design, siting, insulation, and maintenance. Some of those factors we have control over, some we don't; we maximize what we can, and then buy accordingly.
 
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