Introduction, Happy New Year, and of course advice requested

[Tron]

Hello everybody!

Before I jump right in I think I'd better tell you guys where I come from (stove-wise) and what I have done in the past. Now, we moved to Mississippi from Germany about a year ago. Over there we had a cozy 2000sqft. house with a real monster of a wood-burning stove. It was constructed of masonry, weighed about 5 tons with a volume of at least two cubic yards and took 25 lbs. of wood at a time. It was not something if you wanted instant heat, because it took the better part of three hours just to warm up, but after that it radiated heat all day. Now here in Mississippi it's not really that cold (sub-freezing, yes, but no sub-zero temperatures), but we still need to run a heater in the winter. The home has a gas fireplace installed which does not even have a vent, so all the combustion gases go right into the living room. Probably more of a decorative fire than to actually heat anything, but that last aspect is a total no-go for me. So we are thinking of tearing that out, which would leave us with an alcove about 60" wide, more than enough for a wood stove. The pipe can go straight through the ceiling, into the attic and out the roof.

Now the question is: which brand and which size of stove to choose?

We have two gas-fired forced-air furnaces in the house, 100,000 and 75,000 BTU/hr. input(!) each, so at, say, 80% efficiency the furnaces would put out 140,000 BTU/hr. combined if run continously. Now yesterday (temperatures between 30 and 50F outside) my home automation tells me that they ran about 15% of the time, let's say 20% to be conservative. That would come to 28,000 BTU/hr. heat requirement, which really isn't all that much.

Now I want to use the stove mostly for the cozyness, but it won't be our only source of heat. I was thinking about programming the furnace to run the fan once and again to move air throughout the house, so the stove's heat can distribute a bit better. Basically to prevent roasting in the living room while the office is freezing. Would that work?

So, I guess I only need a rather small stove? True, more is usually better, but it also makes no sense to run a big stove throttled down to the minimum all the time. Due to the Mississippi climate, there are only a few dealers for stoves around, one of them sells Quadrafire. Sure, they can probably get me any stove I want, but will probably not be able to provide parts and service for that, so I'm not sure it's worth it. But the Quadrafire seem to be quite good. They are baffle stoves, and no catalytic stoves like a Blaze King, right? So I was looking at their 3100 line rated at 51,000 BTUs or their 4300 line rated at 63,700 BTUs, although that's probably too big already.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Michael

Edit: I forgot to mention that our property has about 5 acres of woods on it (about 50% pine, but the rest is hardwood), so I hope that I will be able to sustainably get my firewood from there. I estimate that there are about 2000 big trees in that woods, so I could easily harvest about 20 of them a year and not hurt the forest. Not sure if that's enough, in Germany we used about 2-3 cords of wood a year, but that will surely be different here. We'll probably be using the stove on weekends mostly.

 

[jatoxico]

I think the first big decision is catalytic vs non-cat. Especially in a milder climate, a cat stove has a real advantage over a tube stove for their ability to run low and slow, really extending the burn time. With an extended burn time you may find you'd be burning more regularly, not just nights and weekends.

The advantage cats provide drop off some in colder climates or if you have a very leaky/drafty house since both situations require more heat output so the low and slow isn't needed as much. Cat stoves do require some more maintenance and expense but given your situation I would give them a good look.

 

[Tron]

That may be a good idea. Which brands of catalytic stoves are recommended?
Blaze King? Seems like they only make catalytic stoves.
Regency claims that their models are "available in either catalytic or non-catalytic", but the stove descriptions don't mention anything here.
I don't see any mentioning of catalytic stoves on the Quadrafire website...

 

[bholler]

That may be a good idea. Which brands of catalytic stoves are recommended?
Blaze King? Seems like they only make catalytic stoves.
Regency claims that their models are "available in either catalytic or non-catalytic", but the stove descriptions don't mention anything here.
I don't see any mentioning of catalytic stoves on the Quadrafire website...

Regency has hybrid stoves using both tubes and a cat. So does Woodstock. Buck has some cat stoves. There are probably others I am missing and some new ones coming out. But blazeking has the thermostatic control that sets them ahead

 

[begreen]

Welcome Michael. The Quadrafire 3100 is a time-proven stove. Sounds like it would work fine in this application. If the goal is to keep it simple, this is a decent stove. Buck also makes catalytics and may have better dealer support in Miss. Having a dealer for installation and support is a good thing. The main thing that you will need to watch will be the alcove requirements for the stove. The second thing will to start splitting and stacking the wood. A modern stove is going to want fully seasoned wood to operate well. Pine will dry faster, if top covered or in a well ventilated shed. It will also burn faster. Hardwood, like oak is going to take a couple years to season after splitting and stacking.

PS: Did you mean 2 cu ft for the German stove? 2 cu yds is over a thousand pounds of wood.

 

[Dix]

Welcome to the Forums Hope we don't scare you

My first question is what's the house layout? That's going to tell us a lot !

Don't mind me, I'm the floor plan gal around here. Rough drawn is fine

 

[Tron]

@begreen: I suppose any dealer can install any stove, I certainly need them to build the flue and chimney, but if they connect a Quadrafire or a Blaze King to the pipe should not really matter. But yes, support is important.
I took the space and clearance requirements for the Quadrafire, and I have enough clearance all around. Critical is only the clearance to the sides, anyway, for the back clearance we can always move it forward a bit.
We already have about 12 cu yards or so of wood split and drying. We built a trail through our woods, and for that a few trees already had to go. I took 8*20' heavy gauge wire mesh sheets from concrete construction, tied them into a tube, pushed large branches through the lower meshes, filled it with cut and split wood and covered it with a tarp. I have been doing that for years, and it works out very well.
For the German stove, I meant the total masonry volume of the thing, that's about 2 cu yards (and 5 tons of bricks). The firebox itself was probably around 3-4 cu ft.

@Dix: one-level residential home, about 3000sqft in an open layout. Again with two separate forced air furnaces, which do a pretty good job keeping the home at a constant temperature throughout, so using the fans of those to move air around should work. The intake for the furnaces will be about 30ft or so away from the stove, but there are no doors in the way.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Welcome to the South, Tron. We moved to Texas Hill Country a couple of years ago, and boy did/do we miss our woodstove. It’s not so easy down here. Gas is just so popular.

I’ve worked with several stove and fire place shops in Texas (none can be described as local, which is another complication), and it has not been my experience that any dealer can get any stove. Some are more accommodating than others. Ours was a tricky situation because we have a pre-fab fireplace that’s not been much used but is old enough that it qualifies as too old for some insurance companies to offer us coverage. We talked about tearing it out and doing an alcove, but that affected our insurance, too, so we needed an insert approved to go in a prefab that fit our height. The stove shop I had been talking to for a year wasn’t able to get the brand we found that suited us best because it wasn’t one of their existing lines.

I looked seriously at Blaze King because the low-end output was very appealing, and their alcove clearances are nice. Running “low and slow” might give you more consistent temperatures similar to your masonry heater in Germany. The trade-off is an often sooty window if that is a factor. Blaze King will allow any dealer to order a stove; it just depends on whether the dealer will do it. If you had a dealer who would do it, he could certainly order parts.

I really don’t know anything about Quadrafire, so I’ll let others comment on that. I will say that we did find an insert that should work in our fireplace, and it’s a “tube stove” rather than a catalytic one. We’ll probably mess up and overheat our room sometimes, but we’ve got 3,000 sq ft, too, and high ceilings, so there’s a lot of room for heat to spread. Do you have high ceilings, too?

I will say that one thing we cared a lot about was the shape and size of the firebox. (And that made it harder because we could easily have fit in a tiny insert, but we would have found it frustrating). We preferred not to go smaller than 2 cubic feet to have coals for a morning reload if we wanted, and we prefer to be able to load wood “north-south” (with ends facing the front door). Just some things to think about as you consider various options.

You’ve come to the right place to get some great advice. Begreen can probably tell you just about anything about any stove (except for some new 2020 versions just hitting the market—that also makes stove shopping right now a bit trickier.) Keep asking questions.

 

[Dix]

@begreen: I suppose any dealer can install any stove, I certainly need them to build the flue and chimney, but if they connect a Quadrafire or a Blaze King to the pipe should not really matter. But yes, support is important.
I took the space and clearance requirements for the Quadrafire, and I have enough clearance all around. Critical is only the clearance to the sides, anyway, for the back clearance we can always move it forward a bit.
We already have about 12 cu yards or so of wood split and drying. We built a trail through our woods, and for that a few trees already had to go. I took 8*20' heavy gauge wire mesh sheets from concrete construction, tied them into a tube, pushed large branches through the lower meshes, filled it with cut and split wood and covered it with a tarp. I have been doing that for years, and it works out very well.
For the German stove, I meant the total masonry volume of the thing, that's about 2 cu yards (and 5 tons of bricks). The firebox itself was probably around 3-4 cu ft.

@Dix: one-level residential home, about 3000sqft in an open layout. Again with two separate forced air furnaces, which do a pretty good job keeping the home at a constant temperature throughout, so using the fans of those to move air around should work. The intake for the furnaces will be about 30ft or so away from the stove, but there are no doors in the way.

If you have ceiling fans, you might not have to run the blowers. Again, floor plan.

 

[Tron]

@DuaeGuttae: Thanks for the information. I will stop by a local dealer on Friday and ask what brands they would install. I'll see if I find a floor plan (or the time to roughly draw one), but not running the furnace fan to distribute heat throughout the house is not going to cut it, even with ceiling fans. Too much of a labyrinth to go from the living room to the master bedroom.

We first were thinking about a fireplace insert as well, but dropped that idea. Mostly because the current gas fireplace is just surrounded by drywall, so that has to come out anyway and would need to be replaced by something more heatproof. Second, to distribute heat at all those need a blower, which is another noise source. Ripping the whole fireplace, mantel and pseudo-flue-cover out and creating an alcove will allow convection to take place, without the need of a blower.

I have cut my wood at 12" length (at least by visual judgment), so any firebox with a door wide enough for that is fine for me. But I agree that the possibility to load wood front-to-back is nice.

 

[EbS-P]

Here are my two cents from a southern wood burner. You will spend WAY more time with no fire in the stove than when its lit. Pine burns great and dries in 12 months. Low and slow is great but so is the thermostat button. Give serious thought to a stove that can be loaded north south. Lower BTU wood is great when it’s not very cold. I wish my 1.8 cubic foot firebox was 2.5 cu. ft.

Evan

 

[Tron]

Here are my two cents from a southern wood burner. You will spend WAY more time with no fire in the stove than when its lit.

Oh, yes, I have no doubt about that. Even in Germany we did not light the oven when it was above 50F outside, so from March to October it was not in use. That period is probably even longer down here. That is, BTW, my wife's main concern, that we will not use it to justify the expense...

I suppose your recommendations can all be fulfilled with one of the medium-sized Blaze Kings, so I'll lean in that direction.

 

[EbS-P]

It’s a functional design element. I’m probably never going to break even with my stove even if I get wood for free. We have a heat pump. Below 25F it can’t keep up and the house can drop below 60 if we don’t use the resistive heat strip. A really cold week we could spend 50$ above normal. The house is now About 5-8 degrees F warmer. Shorts are now year round indoor fashion. It’s nice to have a backup heat source. I split wood instead of going to the gym.

 

[molly1414]

When we bought our house it had a very large Quadrafire wood stove. I thought it would be a heating monster. It produced no heat. 0. Through investigation I found out it was a jacketed stove that has a metal jacket on all sides of the stove. The only place we felt heat was from the top and front. Air is supposed to travel through holes in the jacket and by convection put heat out. We ripped it out and put in a Jotul Oslo. I would never buy a Quadrafire that was a jacketed stove.

 

[bholler]

When we bought our house it had a very large Quadrafire wood stove. I thought it would be a heating monster. It produced no heat. 0. Through investigation I found out it was a jacketed stove that has a metal jacket on all sides of the stove. The only place we felt heat was from the top and front. Air is supposed to travel through holes in the jacket and by convection put heat out. We ripped it out and put in a Jotul Oslo. I would never buy a Quadrafire that was a jacketed stove.

I have run many jacketed stoves stoves including a quad and they all worked very well

 

[begreen]

There was an old guy here that replaced a Nashua with a big jacketed stove and hated it, in spite of getting a nice fire view and a warm house. He spent several threads going on about it, complaining the stove was no good. Once we got him to put some thermometers on it the results showed the stove was burning fine and room temp was quite warm, but what he really wanted was radiant heat. I suggested he take the jacket off the stove or buy an unjacketed one. He left in a huff, but I found out later that ended up buying an unjacketed Drolet and was happy as a clam. It was not the stove, it was the individual's wants that were key here.

We had an unjacketed stove in our house and although it was a beauty, it had much greater room temp swing between cycles, so not as good a fit for our house. Same thing for our next door neighbor. Different strokes for different folks (and houses). In an alcove installation the odds are a jacketed stove is what will be needed to meet clearance requirements.

 

[Highbeam]

We have two gas-fired forced-air furnaces in the house, 100,000 and 75,000 BTU/hr. input(!) each, so at, say, 80% efficiency the furnaces would put out 140,000 BTU/hr. combined if run continously. Now yesterday (temperatures between 30 and 50F outside) my home automation tells me that they ran about 15% of the time, let's say 20% to be conservative. That would come to 28,000 BTU/hr. heat requirement, which really isn't all that much.

Now I want to use the stove mostly for the cozyness, but it won't be our only source of heat. I was thinking about programming the furnace to run the fan once and again to move air throughout the house, so the stove's heat can distribute a bit better. Basically to prevent roasting in the living room while the office is freezing. Would that work?

So, I guess I only need a rather small stove? True, more is usually better, but it also makes no sense to run a big stove throttled down to the minimum all the time. Due to the Mississippi climate, there are only a few dealers for stoves around, one of them sells Quadrafire. Sure, they can probably get me any stove I want, but will probably not be able to provide parts and service for that, so I'm not sure it's worth it. But the Quadrafire seem to be quite good. They are baffle stoves, and no catalytic stoves like a Blaze King, right? So I was looking at their 3100 line rated at 51,000 BTUs or their 4300 line rated at 63,700 BTUs, although that's probably too big already.

You're getting some good advice but let me clear up a big misundersatnding. You correctly determined that your home needs 28000 btu per hour all day on average which is actually quite a lot for the south. However, you then used the peak output ratings for stoves to choose a stove. It doesn't work like that. The peak rating from a stove is only possible for a minute and then you get a long period of lower output. Worse, is that many manufacturers flat out lie about their BTU output numbers since this is not a regulated specification until the new 2020 results.

28000 btu per hour all day means you need to burn 672,000 btu of wood. A typical wood burner is 75% efficient and wood has about 8000 btu per lb so that means you need to burn 112 lbs of wood per day. That's a lot. You need a large stove. That is a 3+cubic foot stove refilled twice per day.

 

[BKVP]

Guten Morgen Tron! Willkommen! So you had a kochelofen. I lived in Wiesbaden for 8 years as a kid...I remember all the beautiful kochelofen's in hotel lobbies, restaurants and homes. And indeed, they do take time to warm up but the soft buffered heat can be very comforting.

You will get great input from many of the members here. As to catalytic wood stove manufacturers, here is a short but growing list:
Blaze King
Vermont Castings
Buck
Kuma
Regency
Jotul
Hearthstone
Travis Industries

Eine Frage bitte, warum Mississippi?

 

[Tron]

@Highbeam
My measurements may not be entirely correct. First, my thermostat may measure the total runtime of the furnace, and the flame may not be on all the time. Secondly, maybe the furnace's manufacturer exaggerated it's output a bit, I took the specs from the datasheet label. Judging from past experiences, 112lbs of wood a day is certainly overrated.
Besides, it is totally fine if the stove provides a bit of background heat output and the furnace does the rest. Of course, I am also looking at that "stove feeling" in the evenings. True, a BK may not have the nicest flames on low, but a constant heat output is more important to me than fire view.

@BKVP
Thanks for the welcome and the insight. It was not necessarily a classic "Kachelofen", but pretty close. A totally different design to iron stoves, you fire it up, the wood is burned down in as little as 2 hours, but the radiant heat stays for half a day. Difficult to control, though, I'd even say almost impossible. We had days when I thought in the afternoon "a bit chilly in here, let's fire up the oven again" and by bedtime our upstairs bedroom had 85 degrees...

Why Mississippi? Well, long story short, I work in nuclear power, a field that is being phased out in Germany due to government decision. I've always loved the US (been here many times before), so I decided to move and work here. And the company that offered me a job has it's nuclear division headquartered in Jackson. We currently run 9 nuclear reactors, mostly in the South. That's Gigawatts of heat each, not Kilowatts ;-)

 

[Highbeam]

For comparison, in my 1700 sf home, normal winter day I burn 40-50lbs. During our cold week I might go through 75 lbs per day. My climate is generally above freezing and my blaze king stove is rated at 80% efficiency.

I spent a bit of time decommissioning nuclear submarines and ships. Sending the cores to BKVP’s backyard!

 

[kennyp2339]

Just read the alcove requirements for each stove, some have different minimum ceiling heights along with widths, also check hearth R value requirements.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

You're getting some good advice but let me clear up a big misundersatnding. You correctly determined that your home needs 28000 btu per hour all day on average which is actually quite a lot for the south. However, you then used the peak output ratings for stoves to choose a stove. It doesn't work like that. The peak rating from a stove is only possible for a minute and then you get a long period of lower output. Worse, is that many manufacturers flat out lie about their BTU output numbers since this is not a regulated specification until the new 2020 results.

28000 btu per hour all day means you need to burn 672,000 btu of wood. A typical wood burner is 75% efficient and wood has about 8000 btu per lb so that means you need to burn 112 lbs of wood per day. That's a lot. You need a large stove. That is a 3+cubic foot stove refilled twice per day.

I don’t know if houses are built in Mississippi the way they are in Texas without basements, but are your ducts in an unconditioned airspace like an attic or crawl space? That, of course, will add some run time to your furnace.

 

[Highbeam]

I don’t know if houses are built in Mississippi the way they are in Texas without basements, but are your ducts in an unconditioned airspace like an attic or crawl space? That, of course, will add some run time to your furnace.

Plus furnaces are rated on "input" btu so you need to subtract for the burning efficiency as well as the duct losses. 15 minutes per hour sounds like a lot of cycles which further hurts efficiency compared with the steady state rating.

 

[BKVP]

For comparison, in my 1700 sf home, normal winter day I burn 40-50lbs. During our cold week I might go through 75 lbs per day. My climate is generally above freezing and my blaze king stove is rated at 80% efficiency.

I spent a bit of time decommissioning nuclear submarines and ships. Sending the cores to BKVP’s backyard!

Great...I was looking for some ballistic material for my cannon....watch overhead Highbeam!

 

[Woody Stover]

two separate forced air furnaces, which do a pretty good job keeping the home at a constant temperature throughout, so using the fans of those to move air around should work.

If you use the forum search to read up, you'll find that the ducting often soaks up any heat you are trying to transfer using the furnace.
The reason Dix requested a floor plan is that we can then offer suggestions on how you can keep yourself from roasting in the stove room, and possibly move that heat to the office and bedrooms with the use of a couple small desktop fans strategically placed to move cool, dense air along the floor and into the bottom of stove room doorway. It worked surprisingly well for me at my MIL's house, where the stove room was at one end of the layout.
A lot of factors come into play when moving heat; Layout, insulation and air-sealing level, ceiling heights etc. I'm guessing that if the home has programmable thermostats, it may be a newer home with decent weatherization.

our property has about 5 acres of woods on it (about 50% pine, but the rest is hardwood), so I hope that I will be able to sustainably get my firewood from there. I estimate that there are about 2000 big trees in that woods....We'll probably be using the stove on weekends mostly.

Even if you end up using the stove more, I don't think you'll use anywhere near twenty trees a year to heat a home that far south. You should be able to get all the wood you need by culling dead/dying trees. If it's anything like here, Pines get attacked by bark beetles and there are always some that are dying and can be taken, preserving healthy trees. Use the Pine to get ahead on dry wood now, split and stack the hardwood for a couple years to get it dry enough.