Well, I was brought up on a Montgomery Ward box stove with blower so when I got a place of my own after I got out of the army, I borrowed a little home made stove welded out of a truck frame that sat on my hearth with a pipe up through the smoke shelf. it would burn so hot I could sometimes see the damper through the pipe....I know, not good. I then graduated to a barrel stove, once again home made but very functional none the less. was a lot like the volgulzang kit but fabricated back in the early 80 by a local welder and fitter. it was a good little stove. I left rural n.y. and went to work in the big city in d.c.. I bought a house and put a buck insert into it with a proper direct connect....after I had a couple of smoke shelf fires from the bad install of the previous owner. when I sold the house a few years after that....we won't go into why, I moved into a little split level that already had a connect for a free standing stove, in the living room. as luck would have it, my wife, who never experienced wood burning, had a friend that offered her a little jotul 602....free. she asked "should I get it" my response was immediately yes.....and so began my love affair with jotul. it kept us warm through the winter of 93, cooked our dinners when the power was out and saved us "ton-O-bucks" keeping the electric heat to a minimum. moving again, to a house with no wood stove, I got an Adirondack stove by DW and while it was a good stove, it wasn't quite the BTU that I needed and I gave it to my brother that used it for at least 10 years. Liking the cast iron, I got a CDW 2461 because I heard of these "new fangled" contraptions that burned the smoke too giving longer burn times and more heat. I placed it upstairs on the main floor where it almost overpowered the space with long-lasting wonderful heat.......until my wife suggested it was just too big and too hot to keep upstairs. So, I moved it downstairs and punched a hole through the basement for a new 6" double wall chimney....to which I connected the 2461 and it gave us good heat most of the time but it wasn't quiet big enough to do the job.I continued to burn the 2461 and got my small Jotul F3 CB based on my earlier love affair with the 602 and put it upstairs in the livingroom. i have not been disappointed as i use it for shoulder season and when it gets really cold out to supplement the basement stove .... or when I get low on wood...like now.....so, after reading a lot about stoves on this forum, I became a member started doing some research on a bigger stove.......Blaze King King...... is what I really wanted as it was very similar to the "mother earth" stove in size and volume with an approximately 90 pound payload if I remember correctly and a forever burn time.....yup, that was what I was gonna get until.....I saw it needed a 8" connector. Drat, I only had the six and I wasn't going to put in an 8" chimney. . So, after more research into big stoves, I decided on the PE Summit, which I've had for a couple of years now....third season I think. I must admit that it wasn't my "soul mate" and I became frustrated with the stove and was ready to yank it and throw it over the bank and go get a monster Jotul. Patience and reading here in the forum prompted me to think that "hey, most ideas of seasoned wood are WRONG" after I realized that and started feeding good wood to the Summit, we kissed and made up. We occasionally have a problem with draft or a back-puff here and there but for the most part, its a pretty good match and she keeps the house at a comfortable 70-72 degrees although I wish her appetite wasn't so big.
So, thanks to a lot of folks on this fourm like begreen, brother bart, backwoods savage, webby and a host of others too numerous to count, I learned how to burn all over again, learned what to look for in a stove and how to perform proper maintenance of the system.......and that's how I moved beyond stuffing the smoke dragon.
.......sorry I got carried away.....my name is tom and I"m a fourm-a-holic.