Another content Hearthstone owner chiming in w/my .02's worth.
I heated a 2000sf house in the middle of Alaska last winter with a Heritage (didn't plan it this way, but that's the way the boiler crumbled). Lots of windows, well-insulated.
A couple of things I learned along the way that help with MY stove, MY heating situation, plus a few generalizations I've picked up from hanging out here:
dry wood heats like a dream with this stove, but sometimes you have to use what you have at hand. You can get heat out of substandard wood with this thing, but you need to get a good initial fire going first. Sometimes that means smaller splits, sometimes bringing in hotter wood from elsewhere (cut up pallets are popular for that on this forum). One suggestion that I haven't seen mentioned on this thread, so I'll put it out there--get something to burn that you know eliminates the `is it my wood?' question: biobricks, cut-up pallets, bundles of wood from the grocery store sold at exorbitant prices. Get enough of whatever to take that puppy out for a spin around the block, and see what it can do with good fuel. Once you have a hot fire established and are getting some serious heat out of it, you could try adding the wood you have on hand in small splits, and see if it will start popping out some BTU's. I was fortunate enough to have really good wood when I started learning my stove. If I'd started out with sub-standard, I'd have probably thought I had an inferior stove. As it was, I just burned up a lot of prime firewood going through the learning curve--ouch.
Just for a day or so, you could also see if you can isolate the room that the stove is burning in and then evaluate the heating capacity of that stove. Even if you have open doors, just hang blankets in there with a spring-loaded curtain rod. That way, you're eliminating the `is it my house?' factor. If that turns out to be the case, there are a lot of low-budget, high-ingenuity fixes for a poorly-insulated house. Hit the DIY forum for specific suggestions on this.
Someone used this analogy to describe different kinds of wood, and I'm just gonna kinda *borrow* it here to describe the air controls on a stove as well. Think of the built-in damper on the stove as a way of running the stove through gears: wide open is first gear, which allows you to get the fuel combusting, and build up a little forward momentum; mid-point is your middle gears where you're getting more efficiency out of the wood you're burning, more power building, and shut down all the way is cruising in 5th gear. It's counter-intuitive, but wide open is NOT more heat--that's where you hang out to get the combustion process underway.
THe manufacturer recommends in the manual a daily `run-up' fire; starting it out with a nice hot fire to `clear its throat' and get the draft running and ensure a clean chimney. I do this daily, and then dial it back. My run-up stove temps are usually about 450F max--when my stove gets up towards the high 500's, I'm generally keeping a close eye on it and am not adding more wood or air at that point. Most of the time my operating temps run around 350-450, even at -30. This is for the Heritage, mind you, so I'd go with whatever the Equinox owners say about stovetop temps. Just trying to say that even at 350, my (smaller) stove is heating my (smaller) house (alone, in a colder climate). The Heritage manual is available online, so I imagine that the Equinox is as well.
I get a lot of heat through the glass as the stove is warming up. Although the stone takes awhile to come up to temps when it's cold, if I burn a bottom-up fire, I get heat out of the glass almost immediately. If I try starting a top-down fire, most of that initial heat goes up the chimney, so I would only use that approach when I am either starting with a warm house, or simply have no time to fuss with a fire. After 20 minutes, that glass is throwing off so much heat I have to back away from the stove.
I use my stovepipe damper a lot to regulate temps and hold heat in the house. However, I have a lot of good factors on my side with the stovepipe--internal chimney, no offsets or horizontal runs or even angled runs--straight shot through two stories, exits about 3' off the ridge on the downwind side of the house, and I live in a cold, dry climate. This means that on an average day I have a good draft, and in a windstorm, that chimney screams like a banshee; I *need* that damper on those days. The rest of the time, it helps keep heat in the house, but only after I have a hot fire established and my front damper is dialed down and cruising in 5th gear. However, I'd learn the basics of getting this stove running before I had a damper installed.
Do us a favor and stick around and let us know how this works out for you. If you're lucky, wkpoor might even post pix of his Elm--that alone would be worth hanging around for. We like knowing how the story ends, and we love "happily ever after".