Heating with wood cook stoves

[Watchguy]

Hi all,

Just curious how many of you folks heat or have heated your homes with wood cook stoves?

My wife and I have for three years. We learned a lot of how to do it and how not to do it. We had a Bakers Choice but are going to be upgrading to something different. Haven't made the final decision yet but kind of leaning toward a Kitchen Queen. We have several friends with them and they work very nicely. Oddly enough though they don't cook much on them. We cooked and baked a lot and loved it.

Anyway, like I said just curious.

 

[mark cline]

This is my 1908 Amherst Bee which will be in my log home . I plan to cook and heat with it when we move in about 3 yrs. Kind of a novelty , but it will be functional. Why upgrade from the Bakers Choice? Need a larger stove?

 

[Watchguy]

Why upgrade from the Bakers Choice? Need a larger stove?

A couple of reasons. I didn't care for the shaker grate (prefer a bed of ash), didn't like the small firebox door, didn't like the door handles - would get real hot at times and they were small, thin-ish gauge metal for most of the construction, wouldn't hold a fire overnight unless I stoked it a lot and turned it down, then that created a lot of creosote, had to load the wood just right to get it to stay burning most of the time.

My wife and I have a 1300 sq ft well insulated home so a small to medium stove will work well.

I know now that a lot of my problem with burning was a mismatch of the flue collar to the chimney. The manufacturer of the stove used a 7" offset pipe to go around the warming oven but at the flue collar the size was an oval about 3" x 8". If you squeezed the 7" offset pipe down it fit the oval flue collar perfect. Problem is that the cross sectional area of a 3" x 8" flue collar is about equal to a 5" flue. I had installed an 8" chimney for this stove thinking I was going from 7" stove pipe to 8" chimney mostly because I would have had to order the 7" chimney at a higher price and because everyone I talked to said going from 7" to 8" was OK.

The Baker's Choice has some charm to it and is somewhat functional and I probably could have made it work but I'm ready to upgrade.

 

[mark cline]

On my old stove , the flue goes straight up from ,I think the 3x8 to 6" round . I will go up from there with 7 or even 8.Thanks for the info, I'll need to look into it , thinking that 6 would have been ok.

 

[SteveKG]

We heat half our home with ours. No problems. Large firebox, airtight design. I do most all our baking on it, except sometimes in the summer I use an outdoor gas grill for breadstuffs when it is simply too hot a weather day.

One benefit of a cookstove is its mass. It can take a couple hours to be completely heated throughout the body of the stove, but once hot, it stays hot. Ours radiates heat all night long even if the wood is all burned up. I can load it once more at supper time, then in the a.m. get up to find the top too hot to rest my hand on for more than a few seconds.

If I were not using the stove to cook as well as heat, I would likely opt for a physically smaller stove. They take up a lot of room. Ours needs five inches clearance from combustibles, so that's not too bad [does not have to stick way out from the wall, for example], but they are massive things.

But we love ours.

 

[Watchguy]

What stove do you have SteveKG?

 

[tsquini]

My family has a camp in upstate New York with a wood cook stove. I like them, if you can keep them clean the work great. I have been looking at Esse Stove (http://www.esse.com/range-cookers/) very nice modern wood ranges. They have one called Ironheart which I have been thinking about getting.