I’m afraid I can’t compare your two options, but I can tell you a bit of my experience with a Revere. We used to own a raised ranch home in Virginia, and there was a masonry fireplace in a large rec room in the basement where my husband also had his office space. Our first winter it was uncomfortably cold down there, and we had to resort to electric space heaters, and we didn’t use the space much.
I was a big fan of wood heat, having grown up with a wood stove, so the next year we had a Revere installed. We chose that model because we wanted it to be as much like a stove as possible. We had a raised brick hearth, but we did build a tiled hearth extension to meet requirement in front of the stove.
We bought the stove as a space heater and used it that way for a year or two. It worked quite well, but once we had more wood and discovered just how much we liked keeping the house warmer than we’d ever set the thermostat, we began using it for almost all our heat. It was undersized for our square footage (2,500 +), and it was a challenging layout, but it did admirably all things considered. The basement became everybody’s favorite place in winter, and the stove is what my kids talk most about missing from the house we moved from.
If we had stayed in Virginia, we had plans to change to a different insert for a larger firebox and more even heat, so I think it really does pay to consider what your goals are. If you really only want a nice fire and more heat on one floor, the Revere would be a great choice. Begreen, who asked questions above, is a wealth of information and can give you all sorts of options based on what you tell him about your current fireplace and the floor plan you want to heat. You’ve come to the right place for suggestions.
