One man's heaven is another man's hell.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but those types of burns are exactly what I'm trying to avoid in the very same stove. I see no advantage to having a massive coal bed form in the bottom. If you lived up this way and needed that stove to heat your house the next day, you would probably be surprised what a chore it would be to get it burning right. New wood added will be way above the air inlet holes along the bottom of the fireback and shutting the stove down will only cause the fresh wood to turn to more charcoal. Even in updraft more, it will be a long time before you burn down all those coals to the point where the outgassing new wood is being met with an adequate supply of air to ensure complete combustion. And by then, you will have a massive amount of red hot ashes to deal with.
There have been many posts that I've seen here about how to deal with too many coals, and the advice most get is to stop adding wood continuously to the fire and let it burn down to a small, hot coal bed as part of the burn cycle. I agree with this advice. You added insult to injury by allowing your primary air to close all the way. It will burn that way for a while, but I'll be willing to bet that if you went and checked your stove 3-4 hours after you topped it off with those extra rounds, you'd find it a smoldering, low-temp mess of partially pyrolized wood. The thermostat will have opened the flapper most of the way, but the draft will already have been killed, so the stove will be drawing poorly.
I had the very same thing happen to me yesterday. Why? Because I can't seem to be able to follow my own advice. At the time, it seems like adding those last two splits of hickory will give me that extra bit of heat I want, but again and again I find that it's simply not true. Instead, they further insulate the top from the fire in the box. In horizontal mode, the Vig is burning across the bottom, from left to right. The flame path doesn't go through the entire wood mass and the stove eventually cools down. Sometime about 2-3 hours later it heats up again as the wood at the top starts to become involved. If the stove was shut down too much, the wood at the top will be mostly charcoal. Guess what happened to all those gases that didn't ignite? And now you are stuck with an extremely high source of BTUs on the bottom of your stove, with no effective way to add enough air. So you wake up and recharge the stove and shut it down again and the same problem grows worse until your firebox is half full of coals delivering a very low heat output. In my case, I remedied the problem by removing a large metal can of red hot coals and smothering them with a lid. I will use them in the spring in my forge, or to grill some salmon steaks.
100ºF for a stove is nothing. My sheetrock walls 4' away from my stove get up about 120º, and gypsum holds heat a lot better than does cast iron, pound-for-pound. A stove radiating at 100ºF is only putting out about 20% of the heat energy that a stove at 350º is, and one at 500º is putting out almost twice the heat as a 350º stove is. At temps below 200º, you aren't really heating anything, just keeping the coals from going out. That could take up to a week in those conditions, but more likely, it will never happen.
Anyway, I'm taking BeGreen's sig line to heart and won't go along with the majority here, saving me the time needed to pause and reflect. Both the VC manual and my own personal experience with about 100 full-time days operating the Vigilant this year tell me that is not how the stove is designed to be burned. A true 8 hour burn is the most that can be expected from this stove, at which point most of the charge should be gone and stove temps hovering around 200ºF.
One other thing... rounds don't burn slower and hotter, they just burn slower. Filling your stove up with them is a big reason why you are getting the burns you are. But don't get me wrong, if it works for you down in Texas, great. Everybody has different needs.
