Hello everyone--I'm new to this forum. I have been reading posts for awhile now and its obvious this community has a wealth of info that they willingly share in a friendly manner. This is my first post here and I'd like to ask some advice.
I have a 1979 Lange, a Danish stove that I was the original owner of in 79, and burned it 24/7 for 5 winters, and compared to the old wood gobblers I had before, thought I had died and gone to heaven. It produced enough heat to keep a drafty southern Wisconsin farmhouse warm and always left a nice bed of coals for in the morning. After 5 years, I moved, crated it up safely and always stored it in the house with the exception of one winter in a decent shed. It was considered state of the art back then.
I have finished some remodeling and am ready to install a wood stove in a home that otherwise has hydronic heat--one main floor of ~2000 sq ft where the stove will be--good and tight construction and very well insulated in northern Wisconsin with a passive air intake for fresh air. There is a basement that can get it's heat from a separate hydronic zone down there.
Until doing a little research and a lot of reading on this forum, I didn't know stoves had made so many advances in the last 30 years. My stove was tested and listed by Maine in 78, has met the specs of that time and my insurance is good with the info that that testing provided.
The Lange is a cast box, kind of like the Jotuls of that era, with a chamber above the main firebox that required the exhaust to make to u-turns to exit, unless you opened a bypass and then the exhaust went straight up. The stove was great, but I used to get creosote on the cap spark arrester to the point it would run down the outside of the class A chimney pipe. I am now wondering if that was the stove's fault, or if I was guilty or cutting down the air flow too soon and I was the problem rather than the stove.
I am debating buying a new stove (Hearthstone Mansfield or VC Encore or ?) or using the Lange and letting it cruise with a little more air to solve the creosote problem. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance, Riverbrother.
I have a 1979 Lange, a Danish stove that I was the original owner of in 79, and burned it 24/7 for 5 winters, and compared to the old wood gobblers I had before, thought I had died and gone to heaven. It produced enough heat to keep a drafty southern Wisconsin farmhouse warm and always left a nice bed of coals for in the morning. After 5 years, I moved, crated it up safely and always stored it in the house with the exception of one winter in a decent shed. It was considered state of the art back then.
I have finished some remodeling and am ready to install a wood stove in a home that otherwise has hydronic heat--one main floor of ~2000 sq ft where the stove will be--good and tight construction and very well insulated in northern Wisconsin with a passive air intake for fresh air. There is a basement that can get it's heat from a separate hydronic zone down there.
Until doing a little research and a lot of reading on this forum, I didn't know stoves had made so many advances in the last 30 years. My stove was tested and listed by Maine in 78, has met the specs of that time and my insurance is good with the info that that testing provided.
The Lange is a cast box, kind of like the Jotuls of that era, with a chamber above the main firebox that required the exhaust to make to u-turns to exit, unless you opened a bypass and then the exhaust went straight up. The stove was great, but I used to get creosote on the cap spark arrester to the point it would run down the outside of the class A chimney pipe. I am now wondering if that was the stove's fault, or if I was guilty or cutting down the air flow too soon and I was the problem rather than the stove.
I am debating buying a new stove (Hearthstone Mansfield or VC Encore or ?) or using the Lange and letting it cruise with a little more air to solve the creosote problem. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance, Riverbrother.