First things first: go make yourself a big mug of hot cocoa, and add tights, a warm sweater, and thick socks to your outfit. Then go outside and chop wood for 15 minutes, and come back so we can talk. We all hate to see anyone shivering.
Read your profile, and if that gas fireplace was ventless, congratulations on getting it out of your house. Good step.
I understand your fear of overfiring--I've read the manual, too. The biggest threat for overfiring the Hearthstones comes in leaving your ashpan door open and walking away and getting distracted. Second is from doing the same thing with your loading door. Make a commitment to yourself never, ever, never to do that, and you've eliminated 95% of the risk. Most folks here will advise that you simply don't ever crack the ashpan door to get extra air on your wood, especially when the stove is cold. Just about anything else you'll do to it is asking it to do what it was made to do. She was born to run. As a matter of fact, the daily run-up fire that the manufacturer recommends will get you up past 350, usually. My experience has been that my stove does a good job keeping my house warm running at cruising temps (300-400 usually) after I do the run-up fire.
Sounds like you've got several things going on that are contributing to your discomfort. I'm guessing that your stove is located in your living room, and whatever heat you're generating is going up. That's a tough situation, but you are wise to focus first on taking that stove out on the highway and blowing the carbon out of its valves. You should be able to get a lot more heat out of it. Second the vote to get a stove thermometer--that's an expensive stove, and spending another 20 bucks to help you run it right just makes good sense.
Agreed with the advice above about getting good wood in there, or even burning pressed logs or something until you know what you can expect from the stove. Also excellent advice to turn off blowers and ducting fans until you have some heat to circulate.
Another thing that can impact how quickly the place warms up is to look at your hearth--if it's very dense, it might be serving as a heat sink that's taking awhile to warm up. Over time that will help even out temperature fluctuations, but it can take awhile to soak up the heat--esp if your stove is running cold.
Given the size of your house and the cathedral ceiling, that stove may prove inadequate for heating the whole house. We have a forum member with a 3Ksf house and an Equinox who also installed a Clydesdale at the other end of his house--and his is a ranch. (He's also further north.) But keep your warm socks handy, and get some incense for chasing the air circulation patterns, and put on your sleuthing hat (hopefully also warm) and hunker in for getting to know your house on a whole new level. Take it a step at a time (first one, of course, is getting the Equinox cooking), and try the small tweaks first. The Equinox might take you 80% of the way, and you may need a couple of small-space solutions to warm other areas--whether another wood stove, a small vented fireplace, electric in-floor heating in the bathroom, etc. Lots of us have to work this out over time.
One more thing that might be helpful is to think of your house and heating system as a sum of many parts that equal a system working together: stove, house size, layout, orientation, siting, chimney, other heating systems, ventilation, circulation, insulation, insolation, climate, lifestyle, heatsink mass in the stove area, etc., etc.
As you get to know how these interact, you learn ways to make small tweaks that make a difference before you take the larger, more difficult to reverse steps.
This is a great place for finding support through that process..
