Hearthstone Equinox Getting it Hot From a Cold Start... VIDEO

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woodmiser

Feeling the Heat
Oct 20, 2011
390
Garnet Valley, PA
I recorded a video this morning to demonstrate how I get my Equinox up to temp from a cold start.
Took about 10 minutes to start feeling heat on the top, 1/2 hour to actually consider it generating heat and after an hour and a half she was cookin. This fire lasted until 5 pm with a very thick layer of blasting coals before I reloaded. The room which is open to the rest of the house (3300sf) is 25 x 25. Temp went from 61° to 75° in that two hour period in the room. Currently it's 9pm and the whole house is around 80 in the main parts. 87° within a 10ft radius around the stove.

As for the video, unless you are hard core into watching other people start fires and watch them burn and listen to a bunch of BS, you may want to skip through it and just look at some of the stuff in the end.
Enjoy.

 
Nice place and thanks for the video it was very useful to making a decision wether to get a larger stove well maybe a mansfield
but not the equinox just too big for the house I have. Great job on the experiment. Really enjoyed it, thanks.

BUY AMERICAN!!!!!!
 
Great documentation on your technique for a cold stove. Watched a good bit of it but a bit long even for us addicts. %-P Great for you to have though.

Thanks
 
You can always fast forward by clicking on the bar on the bottom.
 
Woodmiser, thanks for posting this. Beautiful stove with a matching setup. Can't believe how you load up the stove to the gills, but it works very well. While I was watching, I got to wondering what the white thing is under the stove?
 
I moved the fan on the floor to the french door opening from the rest of the house and have it aiming into the room with the stove.... big difference. Much more heat coming out into the rest of the house.
The white thing is some insulation board. I have another piece that I'm going to cut to size and cover with black painted sheet metal. Too much heat will crack the granite. Don't ask me how I know.
 
Nice video - thanks for taking the time to share your method.

Noticed the fire extinguisher next to the stove. If that's the only one you have, you might want to move it next to an exit door. A fire near the stove will make it inaccessible and potentially cost someone their life if they try to get to it. If it's near an exit, a decision whether to fight the fire or not can be made with the extinguisher in hand and a way out nearby.
 
Thanks for the tip.... will do. I also purchased a couple of Chimfex sticks just in case I get a runaway stove/chimney fire.
 
I keep forgetting to buy a little burnz-o-matic torch although i thought about that last year. those supercedars are on my wish list too. that was a good video. i watched the beginning and ending mostly. this should be in the newbie how to forum for new soapstone non-cat stove users. you were detailed and showed every step of the way.

i think hearthstone should build an even larger stove for those with the jumbo 5000+ sq foot house. It would be cool if it was one stone wider and one stone deeper. you could fit even bigger logs. of course, it would be approaching 1,000 pounds and require a larger pipe, but fantasies don't have to be grounded in logic or reason.
 
To summarize it, I took the stove from 60° to 650° and the room from 60° to 78° (in the center of the room) in two hours. After that I had to bring it down as it was overheating the house. Within 6 ft of the stove it was well over 80°.

I don't feel soapstone has a major disadvantage because of the mass but it does have a major advantage because of it.
 
firecracker_77 said:
i think hearthstone should build an even larger stove for those with the jumbo 5000+ sq foot house. It would be cool if it was one stone wider and one stone deeper. you could fit even bigger logs. of course, it would be approaching 1,000 pounds and require a larger pipe, but fantasies don't have to be grounded in logic or reason.

Disagree--the whole point of having a large house is to have multiple stoves: a Squirrel in an unexpected nook near a window-seat with a bookshelf on a rainy day, a marine stove in the work shop for burning up scraps of curly maple and aromatic cedar on cool October evenings, a high-efficiency, high-end cook stove in the sun-room off the kitchen, a Tuliviki in the great room, a barrel stove in the Quonset hut out back in which you have sequestered your teenagers while they go through their hoarders' stage . . .

It's all about the stoves. The space is just the rationale . . .

I've added top-down fires to my repertoire, skeptical at first as were you. To me, it's a tradeoff. When I want `light a match and walk away' convenience, a top down is a handy thing. Big splits, smaller splits, kindling, twists of newspaper, open dampers, light a match, walk away, come back in fifteen minutes and adjust the dampers. The trade-off is that the house will be cooler longer. If I build a bottom-up fire, it requires me swinging by to tend the fire more often, but I get heat coming out of the front of the stove much more quickly.

I think I heard you say that you had Super-Cedars in the pile somewhere. Rather than burying the puck in the pile, you might try sometime putting it on top of the kindling, right under the burn tubes, igniting it, and seeing if your top-down will start with a little less fatutzing on your part. I am not using Super-Cedars, so maybe the effect won't be the same without the burning newspaper to get the updraft going, but I get a kick out of watching the fire starting from the top and burning down.
 
Yeah, super large houses are going to be more efficiently heated by zoning them. That can be with multiple stoves, but a high-efficiency boiler setup might be more economical and comfortable in the long run. Or maybe sub-divide the place into a duplex.
 
. . .seriously though, nice documentary for those who are having trouble getting their big rocks up to temp. In addition to the burn technique, you pointed out that the wood was dry. Folks looking to improve the performance of their stoves should also note that your flue setup is about as good as it gets, straight up with much of it indoors. :) I'd put one of those two thermometers up on the flue pipe. . .might help with fine tuning when to use the pipe damper to hold heat in the stove vs. sending it up the flue.
 
And once it's hot and I'm burning 24/7 it's such a pleasure to run as it doesn't have a mind of it's own. I can keep it burning at 500° continuously since the stone acts as a capacitor.
 
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