Size of Stove for my house?

[Mattfrombdale]

Hi all,
I currently have an old woodstove that I am thinking of replacing. It is long and narrow like the morso 2b standard and it currently is in our main living room/kitchen. The room is about 500sq feet, but it connects via a small hallway to our other living room that we don't really use much (read don't really heat in the winter). This part of the house was built in the late 70's and the windows and sliding glass door are in good shape. I also have a small 4" vent that leads to our master bedroom directly over the stove, but it doesn't ever seem to add much heat to the bedroom. I don't know how to compare the stove I have to the stoves that I am looking at to get something that is similar and I don't want to get something too small or too big for the house. In the winter we usually run the stove all day and stoke it at night. when we come down in the am 8 hrs later or so we have a few coals left but have to restart the fire again.
So i am looking at stoves that are rated for 1000 to 1200 sq feet like the morso 2b standard and the Joutul (sorry for the misspelling) stoves like the 118. They have the same shape as our current stove and put out about what i think would be the right amount of heat, but I worry that I am under or overestimating my heat requirements. I don't want the stove to cook us in this room if it is burning like it should. I know that I will have some heat going into the other room of the house which is about 300 sq feet and the upstairs bedroom which is also about 300 sq ft, but I don't know if I should count that in the heat rating of the stove. I guess the question I have is when it says it will heat 1200 sq feet does that mean that if it is in a room that is only about 500 sq feet it will be too hot or can i include the rest of the house because it is connected by hallways and stairs? There has always been a 10-15 degree F temp difference when you walk down the hall away from the main room when we have the fire going.
Any help with me figuring this out would be greatly appreciated.
Also would comparing the size of the fireboxes between the old and new stove be a good gauge or is that like comparing apples to oranges because the new stove will be much more efficient?
Thanks for any help
Matt

 

[southbalto]

go with something rated for the space your trying to heat or larger....

I think the consensus around here is that you go big. You can always burn smaller/fewer fires.

 

[branchburner]

Welcome, Matt. A great trick to moving heat is getting a fan to blow cool floor air towards the stove, rather than trying to push warm air. Try that with your current stove and see how it works.

A bigger firebox will give you longer burns, but if you oversize the stove too much, you correctly observe you won't need or want the long burn. That's the tradeoff. I think you want a medium or small stove, firebox about 2 cu ft or less. It seems to me that a smaller space is well served by a catalytic stove. Woodstock Keystone is a good bet, the soapstone giving a "softer" heat.

If you don't mind the look of a steel stove, the Buck 20 and Blaze King Princess are other options. (The BK is a bit large, but thermostatically controlled.) There are a few dealers for each within an hour from you.