Hi,
I had a Kuma Cascade LE insert installed into a masonry fireplace recently and have been a little concerned by the heat output of it and the install. For reference, the room I'm trying to heat is only 650sqft but has a 16ft tall ceiling with an open loft area above. There is a bedroom attached through a corridor and a stairwell leading to the ground floor of the home which is unfinished. With this stove being rated for 2800sqft, I assumed it would be cooking us out of the house. The house has a lot of older windows and with the floor below the stove being unfinished, there's probably a lot of heat loss, but I figured this large stove could keep up.
I have a 9x13" terracotta chimney that's about 25' tall but they were only able to fit a 5.5" liner for some reason. And they ended up not insulating the liner because they said it was too tight. The Kuma manual says you must have at least a 6" insulated liner, so I'm not too happy about that. But I don't have any puffbacks of smoke as long as I open the damper and bypass, so I'm not sure if that's a serious issue I should bring up to the seller or not. I saw mention of the solid insulated oval liners in another thread, and I'm wondering why they didn't use that instead.
It's been getting down to 30*F overnight here and 50*F during the day, and I've been running this stove between 400*F and 650*F all day long, with wood around 18% moisture. I've been getting around 6-8 hours of burn time with a full load burning mostly oak and ash and the indoor temp in the room with the stove struggles to get up to 70*F, and on overnight burns it drops to 63*F, and there will be a nice bed of coals with the stove around 300-350*F, so I can just throw some wood in and it starts back up.
My questions is whether this is expected from an insert like this? I grew up with a Hearthstone freestander that would radiate so much heat that you can't stand near it, but with this insert and the fan on max speed (which is very loud, so I usually keep it around medium) I don't feel like I'm getting much heat out of it. I do plan on installing a ceiling fan in my loft area to help bring some of the warm air back down so maybe that will help. I also currently don't have a surround installed, and have the stove pulled out as much as possible, since I wanted to get more radiant heat out of it. But the top and sides of the stove stay below 250*F all the time so that's probably not doing as much as I had hoped.
I had a Kuma Cascade LE insert installed into a masonry fireplace recently and have been a little concerned by the heat output of it and the install. For reference, the room I'm trying to heat is only 650sqft but has a 16ft tall ceiling with an open loft area above. There is a bedroom attached through a corridor and a stairwell leading to the ground floor of the home which is unfinished. With this stove being rated for 2800sqft, I assumed it would be cooking us out of the house. The house has a lot of older windows and with the floor below the stove being unfinished, there's probably a lot of heat loss, but I figured this large stove could keep up.
I have a 9x13" terracotta chimney that's about 25' tall but they were only able to fit a 5.5" liner for some reason. And they ended up not insulating the liner because they said it was too tight. The Kuma manual says you must have at least a 6" insulated liner, so I'm not too happy about that. But I don't have any puffbacks of smoke as long as I open the damper and bypass, so I'm not sure if that's a serious issue I should bring up to the seller or not. I saw mention of the solid insulated oval liners in another thread, and I'm wondering why they didn't use that instead.
It's been getting down to 30*F overnight here and 50*F during the day, and I've been running this stove between 400*F and 650*F all day long, with wood around 18% moisture. I've been getting around 6-8 hours of burn time with a full load burning mostly oak and ash and the indoor temp in the room with the stove struggles to get up to 70*F, and on overnight burns it drops to 63*F, and there will be a nice bed of coals with the stove around 300-350*F, so I can just throw some wood in and it starts back up.
My questions is whether this is expected from an insert like this? I grew up with a Hearthstone freestander that would radiate so much heat that you can't stand near it, but with this insert and the fan on max speed (which is very loud, so I usually keep it around medium) I don't feel like I'm getting much heat out of it. I do plan on installing a ceiling fan in my loft area to help bring some of the warm air back down so maybe that will help. I also currently don't have a surround installed, and have the stove pulled out as much as possible, since I wanted to get more radiant heat out of it. But the top and sides of the stove stay below 250*F all the time so that's probably not doing as much as I had hoped.
