Manufacture Sq. Ft. Heating Recomendation

[vpetersen]

Hi All,

I am researching different free standing wood stoves for my 1200 sq/ft home and am curious how accurate are the manufactures claims of heating capacity? For example, I was looking into the quadrafire 2100 millennium. Quadrafire claims the stove would be great for 950-1500 sq/ft. Can anyone attest to this, or should I look into a larger stove? Thanks.

 

[jadm]

I don't know anything about the Quadrafire but the general consensus here if you check out other threads is to get a stove bigger than you think you need. You can always burn a smaller fire in a bigger stove but you can't burn a bigger fire in a smaller stove.

My first insert was rated for our square footage but just couldn't keep temps. up on our really cold days. After several years I gave it to a friend a bought a bigger insert and am happy I did. :coolsmile:
(I didn't know about this forum until last winter. Read and you will save yourself a lot of grief and frustration and money.)

 

[karl]

Don't get anything less than a two cubic foot firebox or you may not be satisfied with it. Small house or not, a small firebox won't burn all night.

 

[paulie]

not sure how they rate their stoves, I have a hearthstone homestead, it's rated at 1800sq ft, I heat a 1300 sq ft very comfortable. karl is right find the stove you like and then go one size bigger, your heating 1200? get some thing rated at 1500, to 1800 thats ok, you can thank us later

 

[myzamboni]

Take 25-30% off of what the manufacturers state (so the quadrafire you mentioned would top out at ~1150 sq ft). Their figures are under ideal conditions which none of would duplicate with any regularity.

 

[gyrfalcon]

Hi All,

I am researching different free standing wood stoves for my 1200 sq/ft home and am curious how accurate are the manufactures claims of heating capacity? For example, I was looking into the quadrafire 2100 millennium. Quadrafire claims the stove would be great for 950-1500 sq/ft. Can anyone attest to this, or should I look into a larger stove? Thanks.

Looks to me like the manufacturers all wayyy overstate the heating capacity of their stoves, and the dealers go along with it. I'm sure they figure they can sell you a smaller and less expensive stove easier, and then sell you another, bigger one when you find out the small one won't heat your home. As said above, you can always build a smaller in a big stove, but you can't do it the other way around.

Speaking from experience.

 

[burntime]

Need to determine how tight your home is, but I agree, bigger is better!

 

[kenny chaos]

The Lopi Liberty claims to heat between 1,500 & 2,500 square feet. In a stone house (no exterior wall insulation), I keep about 800sq.ft. at 67 degrees with outside temps in low 20's..
Here's what you really need to think about and it's right from the Owner's Manual: "Heating capacity will vary depending on the home's floor plan, degree of insulation, and the outside temperature. It is also affected by the quality and moisture level of the fuel."

 

[Cedrusdeodara]

Great question, wish I had your foresight. I just began here on hearth.com, but I am in the process of spending $1k to swap out a 2 month old insert for the next size larger (and another brand with much higher blower capacity). My house fell in the middle of the range for the model that I have, but it did little more than keep 2 or 3 rooms habitable, especially when it was below freezing outside and windy.

There are enough variables (ceiling height, wood type/moisture content, location, insulation, etc, etc) that you will never get any satisfaction after the fact from the manufacturer or installer. Initially, I was told from the installer to not oversize the stove because you "want to burn it hot and not have too big a stove that you burn it cold and introduce creosote". My home is about 1350 sqft/2 story. I have a stove that is rated for 500-1800sqft with a blower of 130cfm. It stinks and it heats little more than the room it is in and maybe the next adjacent room. I am swapping out for a model that is rated for 1100-2000 sqft with a blower of 400cfm. I hope it works.

NO BRAINER, IGNORE THE MANUFACTURER LITERATURE AND GO ANOTHER MODEL HIGHER AT LEAST. That last sentence might have saved me $1k about 3 months ago, had I only known.

Best of luck,
Cedrus deodara

 

[gyrfalcon]

Great question, wish I had your foresight. I just began here on hearth.com, but I am in the process of spending $1k to swap out a 2 month old insert for the next size larger (and another brand with much higher blower capacity). My house fell in the middle of the range for the model that I have, but it did little more than keep 2 or 3 rooms habitable, especially when it was below freezing outside and windy.

There are enough variables (ceiling height, wood type/moisture content, location, insulation, etc, etc) that you will never get any satisfaction after the fact from the manufacturer or installer. Initially, I was told from the installer to not oversize the stove because you "want to burn it hot and not have too big a stove that you burn it cold and introduce creosote". My home is about 1350 sqft/2 story. I have a stove that is rated for 500-1800sqft with a blower of 130cfm. It stinks and it heats little more than the room it is in and maybe the next adjacent room. I am swapping out for a model that is rated for 1100-2000 sqft with a blower of 400cfm. I hope it works.

NO BRAINER, IGNORE THE MANUFACTURER LITERATURE AND GO ANOTHER MODEL HIGHER AT LEAST. That last sentence might have saved me $1k about 3 months ago, had I only known.

Best of luck,
Cedrus deodara

Well, here's the key, seems to me, if it's not a typo, "rated 500 to 1800 square feet." What the hell does that mean? That range is absurd-- 500 sf with open chinks in the walls and 1800 if the house is sealed in a plastic bubble?

I'd be wary of any dealer arguing I should buy a smaller stove. They're licking their chops at the fact you're going to buy a second stove from them next year, seems to me.

There are terrific and honest dealers out there, for sure, but a lot of 'em are used car salesmen recycled, IMHO. Thank God for Hearth.com, I say, particularly if you find it before you plunk down the dough for an inadequate heater.

 

[begreen]

Hi All,

I am researching different free standing wood stoves for my 1200 sq/ft home and am curious how accurate are the manufactures claims of heating capacity? For example, I was looking into the quadrafire 2100 millennium. Quadrafire claims the stove would be great for 950-1500 sq/ft. Can anyone attest to this, or should I look into a larger stove? Thanks.

Actually, Quadrafire says up to 1400 sq ft. with these caveats:

† Heating capacity and efficiency may differ due to climate, building construction and condition, amount and quality of insulation, location of the fireplace, type of fuel used and air movement in the home. Btu output will vary, depending on the type of fuel used. Units require standard maintenance in accordance with the owner's manual.

There is a reason these sq ftg claims are called estimates and have such a wide range. All they can ever be are estimates. There are too many variables involved to provide much more than a guess. If the house is leaky and located in Maine, it's going to have very different heating requirements from a well-insulated, tight house in Washington state or North Carolina.

I agree that you would be better off looking at a 2 cu ft stove for the longer burn times and cold weather capacity unless this is in a confined area that would easily overheat. In the Quad line this is the 3100.

 

[gyrfalcon]

Hi All,

I am researching different free standing wood stoves for my 1200 sq/ft home and am curious how accurate are the manufactures claims of heating capacity? For example, I was looking into the quadrafire 2100 millennium. Quadrafire claims the stove would be great for 950-1500 sq/ft. Can anyone attest to this, or should I look into a larger stove? Thanks.

Actually, Quadrafire says up to 1400 sq ft. with these caveats:

† Heating capacity and efficiency may differ due to climate, building construction and condition, amount and quality of insulation, location of the fireplace, type of fuel used and air movement in the home. Btu output will vary, depending on the type of fuel used. Units require standard maintenance in accordance with the owner's manual.

Yeah, but that's in the fine print, nowhere near the frequency and prominence that stove manfucaturers and dealers put the "estimated" sf range. If they were really honest, they'd put the words "under ideal conditions" right after the upper end of the range they cite.

But of course, they don't.

I still say it's a deliberate scam on the unwary consumer.

 

[jotul8e2]

While it is easy to beat up on manufacturers for their "heats XXXX sq. ft." claims, it is much harder to come up with a number that a buyer could look at and make a decision. After all, you don't want to heat a "typical" house, or an "average" house - you want to heat your house! It would be much better if we could have a system of btu output based on a standard fuel input. Something fairly close to this is available from the EPA based on their emissions testing, but their raw numbers would be of little value to most of us.

However, wouldn't it be possible to simply posit a given operating temperature, say 400 degrees, and calculate the btu value from the available radiating surface area? I realize this would be complicated by ir heat through the glass, but some sort of close approximation should be possible. I am too many years removed from college physics to even remember where to look for the formulas. The value in this would be that you could compute the total btu output for a given stove and give consideration to both the total btu heating requirement for your house and the expected problems for moving that many btus from the room in which it is installed. While this gives no help in putative burn times (which would be a factor of efficiency and firebox size), it should help in actual sizing.

Back to that hypothetical "heats XXXX sq. ft.": The factors involved would fill a book. Likely they DO fill a book somewhere. When I designed our house I designed it first to be heated by a wood burning stove. This meant no cathedral ceilings (which I hate anyway - who cleans those things?). It meant VERY high insulation numbers. It meant limiting the size and number of windows. It meant a floor plan that had a chance for natural convective flow. Now, we could do much better yet - for example, we have NO window coverings of any kind, not even shades - but we are doing fine in our 2500 sq. ft. (not counting the 2000 sq. ft. basement) heating only with our Jotul Oslo, which claims it will heat 2,000 sq. ft.

So why did we choose this stove when we have 25% more floor area than Jotul claims to heat? 1) Design factors of the house (see above). 2) We live in southern Missouri, not North Dakota. 3) I want to be able to use it during our lengthy shoulder seasons without overheating the space - as it is there are times when I can only run it four or five hours of a night, and sometimes not even that every day. And 4) We bought the one the wife liked.

Mark

 

[gyrfalcon]

While it is easy to beat up on manufacturers for their "heats XXXX sq. ft." claims, it is much harder to come up with a number that a buyer could look at and make a decision. After all, you don't want to heat a "typical" house, or an "average" house - you want to heat your house! It would be much better if we could have a system of btu output based on a standard fuel input. Something fairly close to this is available from the EPA based on their emissions testing, but their raw numbers would be of little value to most of us.

However, wouldn't it be possible to simply posit a given operating temperature, say 400 degrees, and calculate the btu value from the available radiating surface area? I realize this would be complicated by ir heat through the glass, but some sort of close approximation should be possible. I am too many years removed from college physics to even remember where to look for the formulas. The value in this would be that you could compute the total btu output for a given stove and give consideration to both the total btu heating requirement for your house and the expected problems for moving that many btus from the room in which it is installed. While this gives no help in putative burn times (which would be a factor of efficiency and firebox size), it should help in actual sizing.

Back to that hypothetical "heats XXXX sq. ft.": The factors involved would fill a book. Likely they DO fill a book somewhere. When I designed our house I designed it first to be heated by a wood burning stove. This meant no cathedral ceilings (which I hate anyway - who cleans those things?). It meant VERY high insulation numbers. It meant limiting the size and number of windows. It meant a floor plan that had a chance for natural convective flow. Now, we could do much better yet - for example, we have NO window coverings of any kind, not even shades - but we are doing fine in our 2500 sq. ft. (not counting the 2000 sq. ft. basement) heating only with our Jotul Oslo, which claims it will heat 2,000 sq. ft.

So why did we choose this stove when we have 25% more floor area than Jotul claims to heat? 1) Design factors of the house (see above). 2) We live in southern Missouri, not North Dakota. 3) I want to be able to use it during our lengthy shoulder seasons without overheating the space - as it is there are times when I can only run it four or five hours of a night, and sometimes not even that every day. And 4) We bought the one the wife liked.

Mark

Heh. Very well said, Mark, and I congratulate you on your smart house construction-- though I wouldn't give up my too many windows with their view of the valley and then the moutains for anything, so the expenese of that in heating is something I'm willing to carry.

Howsomever, I still say the manfucturers/dealers could solve this all, if they were really honest, by just adding those few words, "under ideal conditions" to their upper ranges . To the total noob, that prompts the immediate question, "What do you mean by ideal conditions?" and then everybody involved would be off into a thoughtful discussion of floor plans and cathedral ceilings, etc. But I'm convinced they mostly don't want to have those discussions because it's way too much to their advantage to sell you an inadequate stove and then sell you a bigger one a year or two later.

Again, not saying it's all dealers without exception, but it seems to be all manufacturers without exception, and from what I read here and elsewhere on the Web, the vast majority of dealers. They're all eager to sell people way too little stove for the job, and I can't see how that's even possibly a coincidence born of some combination of good will and misunderstanding.

 

[vpetersen]

Hey, thanks for the feedback everyone. I thought their numbers might be suspect, and am glad I asked prior to putting the money down. This forum is worth its weight in gold.

 

[kenny chaos]

Yes you can't trust stove manufacturers or stove dealers and we all know about those firewood dealers. Burn oil!

 

[Ken45]

BG said it well, it all depends on what you have and your expectations.

Currently, my elderly father is living with us and he thinks it's cold when the house is 75 degrees. He prefers 80 (we close our bedroom room to keep the heat out and sometimes open a window).

A lot depends on where the stove is located and how well that location distributes the heat. A stove located in a central spot in a house with wide openings will do a lot better than one located at the far end of the family room which is stuck behind the garage and only has a narrow door opening to the rest of the house (our situation in 1977).

A lot depends on how you want to feed and tend the stove. Small splits of hickory or oak fed in every few hours will do a lot better heating job than if you use larges splits of softwood and expect it to last 8-10 hours. What are your expectations?

Of course North Dakota vs. Virginia makes a big difference as well as if you expect to heat entirely with the wood stove vs. just cutting your utility bill 80 or 90%.

Ken