Wood Stove in Basement or Insert?

[Lumber-Jack]

Apparently it is ok to pipe heat from a stove into a central air system where I live (Central VA)..

I'm not understanding why everyone is talking about the heat floating up the stairwell when he has a forced hot air system he can pump heat into. My father heated a 2800 square foot house this way using a woodchuck furnace for 20 years. It worked very well burning six cord a year. He kept the basement door shut. The furnace warmed the basement enough to make it comfortable. The basement was a walk in so he stored the wood under a deck and brought in a wheelbarrow load every day or so. I think you should go with this setup and use the fireplace for ambiance.

I use my furnace fan and ducting to distribute the heat from my wood stove around my house, it works well for me too. I don’t even have the cold air return in the same room as the wood stove.
Use to be a lot of people in this forum poo pooing that idea, saying it won’t work, and that you’ll lose too much heat in the ducting. I could never understand that until I started questioning them and found out it was standard practice in some areas in the US to run the ducting in un-insulated attic spaces! Well DUH! Of course you are going to lose heat though that ducting if you run it outside, that’s like wondering why your house isn’t warming up and ignoring that fact that the door is open.
Before people start saying this or that will or won’t work you really have to take all the variables into account. 1500 sq ft isn’t a huge space to heat, and with a properly sized stove in an insulated basement, with all the doors and windows closed, you should have no problem comfortably heating the whole house, especially if you can use the furnace fan and ducts to help spread the heat around. It stand to reason though, that the room where you put the stove will be a lot warmer than the rooms that are farther away from the heat source.
That’s all I have to say about that, except to follow through with Dennis’s advice and start stock piling your wood now so it has a chance to dry properly long before you want to start burning it. Get the wood now, worry about the wood stove install later.