robertjp said:
OK I give up. I wont use the stove even though I dont think it was ever used. The rope around the inside of the door is brand new, so I doubt it was used. Getting the best stove to keep all the experts happy sounds good but realistically, I cant go over7-800 bucks if that. If that wont do it, I guess Ill just use my propane heater Ive been using and bag the idea altogether rather than burn the place down.
Well, now that you're sufficiently scared of this thing...
... if you ever get out to the eastern part of the state, I'd love to take it off your hands. :lol:
I don't get the comments about clearances. It's a small stove, so it shouldn't need huge clearances. The plate on the stove gives the minimum clearances required. Why would these need to be exceeded? Stove clearances are based on the area of the radiating plate and the maximum surface temperature expected. Stove with side baffles don't get as hot as bare castings do, and the back of that stove (which should face the wall in most installations) is only about a square foot in area. I think the recommended clearances for that stove are conservative. Unless the thing is literally belching fire out somewhere, the quality of the castings won't change the laws of heat transfer.
The biggest problem I see is the oval collar. I burned a Scandia 118 copy (the big brother of your stove) and it had the same size and shape collar (5" round) that the real Jotul had. I'm surprised to see that they deviated from the Jotul 602 on your stove. You may have to have one custom fabricated. The cost of that could be anywhere from cheap to prohibitive, depending on the willingness of your local shop to do one-off work.
BTW, Taiwan ain't China (at least for now, anyway). I sold power tools from both places. The Taiwanese stuff wasn't badly made, but the designs were somewhat atrocious, and the motors were massively wound yet still burned out (again, poor design). The Chinese stuff was garbage all the way around. The Chinese have closed the quality control gap between the two, but back in the 80s when this stove was made, Taiwanese stuff was vastly superior.
Here's another observation that may be of interest. A couple years ago, I lost a piece of door gasket at the beginning of the season. I fully expected the stove to run away on me. Not only did it not run away, it would smolder and go out if I closed the air down too far, even with a big fire raging away inside. I couldn't really see any difference between the way the stove worked with the fully gasketed door and the way it ran with the gap in the gasketing. Naturally, I replaced the entire gasket, but this eased my concerns that air might be leaking in through the spots where there were chips in the stove cement along the seams.
I admit to being biased since I used one of these things as my primary heat source for almost 20 years without incident. The biggest problem with these stoves that I see is that the internal baffles eventually warp and burn away in parts because they are intense little burners. But that holds true for the real Jotuls as well. The guy that gave me my stove replaced it with a real Jotul 118. He says he's on his third set of side baffle plates and these ones need replacing now. They are quite expensive from Jotul. Now he finally needs a new top baffle. Mine went last year. Since he used my stove for several years before he gave it to me, my top baffle seems to have lasted longer than the genuine article, even though I burned my stove a lot harder than he does with his.