It's finally looking more like December here. Into the 20s last night and not getting out of the 30s today with a 20 MPH north wind. I started a fire at 10:30 last night. I packed about as many 6" chunks in as I could fit, with some room for kindling towards the front at the top. This is the most I've had the stove loaded so far:
I've gotten things down to where I can leave the door barely cracked for the first 5 minutes or so while keeping an eye on the kindling taking off, and then I can shut it and walk away. Here's what things looked like at 5:30am - still a few blue flames showing not coming out well in the pictures from my cheap phone:
And here's 10:15am when the house had dropped down to 63 and I reloaded. The stove top was around 125 degrees. A few of these coals were peeking out from the ashes and I uncovered most of what you see here, put some smaller sticks on top of them and then some splits, and had flames and shut the door a couple of minutes later. The stove had cooled down enough that the intake damper was back open for this reload.
Overall I am happy with the automatic air control. There are times I wish I could shut the air down sooner, and times I wish I could open it for 10 minutes when I reload on a very burned down coal bed, but I'm extremely happy with the burn time for a stove this size. Since I still had flames from the coals at 5:30am, personally I would easily consider that to be at least a 7 hour burn time. I went back to bed and didn't check it again until a couple hours later. I should be able to go longer when I'm sticking full 16" splits into it instead of a tetris pile of 6-8" chunks sized for the previous fireplace, and also longer when I'm reloading on hot coals and not taking up space with kindling starting from a cold firebox. VC claims 10 hours and I really think that's achievable from what I've seen - with the right size and type of wood, and after you get used to how to operate it.
I am waiting to put in a rating for the stove on this site until I finish the first season, but so far I'd say 4.5/5 stars.