Hi all.
This is my wood stove story.
I have been toying with supplemental wood heat for the last 5 winters with varied success. I bought a house that came with an old VC Intrepid wood stove. I had never used a wood heater myself until that point. I could get heat out of the old Intrepid, but I always had to keep an eye on the thing as it would creep up in temp, and if I throttled back, even a bit too much it would die..seems I would just find the sweet spot, and get a few hours of good heat out of the darned thing and the small fuel capacity of the Intrepid would come into play and I would have to add more wood, which seemed reset that sweet spot, and I would have to fiddle again to find it...Needless to say, the thing only really ran on weekends when I was home to watch it because my wife was too busy with other things to babysit this old stove.
Anyway, with the price of fuel for my primary LP forced air heating system going up this year, I thought there must be a better way to get some more wood BTU's this winter as I have a lot of ash on my property that I can use. So, I started doing research on the Intertubes and found this web site. So I started looking at what folks on here said about the Super 27 that my local Stove shop recommended for my application and found generally favorable comments.
So I spent some cash and had the local stove shop install a Super 27 ped with ash pan. It was a pretty easy install, as they basically removed the old Intrepid, trimmed up the double-walled pipe to fit, gave me a lesson on how to use it and answered a few questions I had and away they went..less than 2 hours.
So, last night after supper I fired it up to cure the paint as the installers recommended and opened the windows to let out the paint fumes..That is a nasty smell. I have to marvel at how easy the thing lit, and watching that secondary burn as people have described on this forum truely is mesmorizing! I found that the stove needs to get to 550-600F before you switch it to low to keep the secondary burn running..I played around with it but did not add any more wood after about 9:30pm last night, set it to low around 10pm and went to bed. I came down this morning expecting to find a cold stove and ashes like my Intrepid would have left me, but to my delight the stove top still read 300F and I had 3 or 4 inches of glowing embers in the bottom of the thing. I opened the draft and threw a split on it just to see how easy it would light back up and it had no problems at all. Within a few minutes the fire was started again. I let it get up to temp and again set it to low, had breakfast and before I left to go to work I took a peek to see those secondary flames swirling around. I can see this is going to be a great stove to use after what I was used to. With home heating prices rising and all that, this stove can really be considered an investment as I hope it will pay itself back in 2 or 3 years if I can keep it going 24x7 which appears not to be an issue. If anyone is still running an older stove like I was, and you have the resources you really should check out the benefits of the new advanced tech stoves!
Looking forward to some cold now.
Mr. K from Canada
P.S. I will try to upload before and after pics later
This is my wood stove story.
I have been toying with supplemental wood heat for the last 5 winters with varied success. I bought a house that came with an old VC Intrepid wood stove. I had never used a wood heater myself until that point. I could get heat out of the old Intrepid, but I always had to keep an eye on the thing as it would creep up in temp, and if I throttled back, even a bit too much it would die..seems I would just find the sweet spot, and get a few hours of good heat out of the darned thing and the small fuel capacity of the Intrepid would come into play and I would have to add more wood, which seemed reset that sweet spot, and I would have to fiddle again to find it...Needless to say, the thing only really ran on weekends when I was home to watch it because my wife was too busy with other things to babysit this old stove.
Anyway, with the price of fuel for my primary LP forced air heating system going up this year, I thought there must be a better way to get some more wood BTU's this winter as I have a lot of ash on my property that I can use. So, I started doing research on the Intertubes and found this web site. So I started looking at what folks on here said about the Super 27 that my local Stove shop recommended for my application and found generally favorable comments.
So I spent some cash and had the local stove shop install a Super 27 ped with ash pan. It was a pretty easy install, as they basically removed the old Intrepid, trimmed up the double-walled pipe to fit, gave me a lesson on how to use it and answered a few questions I had and away they went..less than 2 hours.
So, last night after supper I fired it up to cure the paint as the installers recommended and opened the windows to let out the paint fumes..That is a nasty smell. I have to marvel at how easy the thing lit, and watching that secondary burn as people have described on this forum truely is mesmorizing! I found that the stove needs to get to 550-600F before you switch it to low to keep the secondary burn running..I played around with it but did not add any more wood after about 9:30pm last night, set it to low around 10pm and went to bed. I came down this morning expecting to find a cold stove and ashes like my Intrepid would have left me, but to my delight the stove top still read 300F and I had 3 or 4 inches of glowing embers in the bottom of the thing. I opened the draft and threw a split on it just to see how easy it would light back up and it had no problems at all. Within a few minutes the fire was started again. I let it get up to temp and again set it to low, had breakfast and before I left to go to work I took a peek to see those secondary flames swirling around. I can see this is going to be a great stove to use after what I was used to. With home heating prices rising and all that, this stove can really be considered an investment as I hope it will pay itself back in 2 or 3 years if I can keep it going 24x7 which appears not to be an issue. If anyone is still running an older stove like I was, and you have the resources you really should check out the benefits of the new advanced tech stoves!
Looking forward to some cold now.
Mr. K from Canada
P.S. I will try to upload before and after pics later
