Need advice on heating old cabin

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wizequack

New Member
Sep 30, 2012
10
Oregon
Hi Folks! Our family has a circa 1920s cabin at 1900' in the middle of second growth fir & cedar - not much sunlight. It's 1100sf, 2 story single wall construction on posts and piers and completely uninsulated. The main heat source is a huge stone fireplace that draws better than most on the mountain. Only smoke up the living room when burning wet wood, There is an old Sears wood/coal cook stove in the kitchen that is a bear to use so we rarely do, using the electric oven to heat kitchen. In addition there are two Thermador wall heaters - one in the living room and one near the bathroom in the master bedroom. The cabin is used alot from April to October and sporadically during winter. There are frequent power outages from limb fall and weather.

At home in town we gave up our wood fireplace for gas logs, then a Lopi NG insert and learned how expensive a big open fireplace can be. No gas lines at cabin but plenty of wood - so we are thinking a big wood insert for fireplace and small efficient wood or LP stove to replace old wood cook stove. One family member is very concerned about safety of old wall heaters and proposing replacement with LP wall heaters.

Seeking advice on all of the above, especially the big insert for the fireplace and kitchen stove. We want a big viewing area don't want to rely on blowers for heat. Our gas 31K btu Lopi heats half of our ranch house without ever using the blower. We have three seasoned cords cut to 20" so we need a firebox that will take em. One of family members is concerned that an insert or stove will make Somores extinct so we also seek reassurance regarding desserts. Thanks for your patience.
 

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Welcome!

Looks cozy! A small freestanding wood stove on the fireplace hearth would probably do a great job of heating your cabin. Most inserts rely on blowers (and electricity) to get the heat out into the room. I'm sure you'll get plenty of other (and more informed) suggestions.
 
Welcome. I don't think you'll need much more than a single 2 cu ft stove in our climate to heat 1100 sq ft. very adequately. The question is where the heat will do the most good, in the living room or in the kitchen. What area is most open to the rest of the cabin?

For insert suggestions we will need the fireplace dimensions including front and back Width and Height, plus the depth. Also, about how tall is the chimney?
 
The question is where the heat will do the most good, in the living room or in the kitchen. What area is most open to the rest of the cabin?
For insert suggestions we will need the fireplace dimensions including front and back Width and Height, plus the depth. Also, about how tall is the chimney?

Great questions! I'm on the road and can't supply dimensions until weekend. I can attach a rudimentary floorplan of first floor - upstairs is divided into 3 equal size sleeping areas. There is a grate covered hole in the kitchen ceiling to allow heated air to warm the bedroom directly above.View attachment 75811
 
The floorplan file didn't seem to make it. What format was it?
 
This is probably going against the grain here and is just my opinion, so take it for what it's worth: For me part of the pleasure of a woods cabin is sitting in front of the fire on a cold evening... and that old stone fireplace just looks right in that cabin. I'm guessing the Thermador wall heaters are electric? If so, and if you can get propane tanks in, you might consider replacing the heaters with new propane wall heaters, or perhaps a very small freestanding gas fireplace in the MBR.

My cabin is similar... there's an old, inefficient, freestanding wood fireplace in the living room, a 1950s propane range/oven in the kitchen (which I sometimes run with the oven door open for some quick heat when I first arrive), and an old small coal stove in the MBR. I have to bring 100# propane tanks in on a hand truck; the delivery truck hose won't reach.

One option to consider, though I've only ever seen one (in a nearby house) is a fireplace grate made of tubes that extend up in the back and then point back out of the fireplace at the top. A small blower outside of the fireplace pushes air through them to be heated, and it seems to work quite well, though I've never been in there in really cold weather. If the power goes out (ours does too, regularly) the blower won't work but there will still be some natural convection.
 
I'd go for a freestanding mdeium to large sized stove in the fireplace. I agree with FanMan that the fireplace has a lot more ambiance than a stove, but the fireplace probably doesn't heat the place very well and definitely uses a whole lot of wood for not much heat. I'd get a large stove with a nice big glass front to sort of make up for the loss of the open fire. You'll need a flue pipe in addition to the stove, and the pipe may be the more expensive part.

I have one room heated with propane and it is expensive. I wouldn't go for propane. Electric is cheaper. Maybe a propane stove for cooking is a good idea, but electric will work too. A medium to large stove should heat the cabin very well.
 
Sorry bout that - I'll try again.

Great, that worked fine. I think you will be fine with just an insert or stove in the living room. You could keep the kitchen cookstove as a supplemental backup for a year to see how it works out. If the kitchen/dining area is a little cool you can use a box or table fan at the outside wall near the screen porch door. Place it on the floor, pointing toward the woodstove. Run it on low speed. It will blow the cooler air down low, toward the woodstove. The denser cool air will be replaced with lighter warm air from the stove room. Running this way you should notice at least a 5F increase in the kitchen temp after about 30 minutes running.

For an insert I would get one that sticks out from the hearth and that will naturally convect well if the power is out. Or, do you have a small generator that you could use? I'm thinking the Regency H2100 Hearth Heater or a Pacific Energy Super. Another alternative would be to install an insert, with a blockoff plate at the lintel level and don't install the surround. That will help it convect better. In that case you have more choices. Maybe an Englander 13-NCi, Century CB00005, or Drolet 1400 insert or a Buck 74?
 
Not sure how much you're willing to spend, but if you go the woodstove-in-the-fireplace route, the Jotul F 3 CB would be a great choice. I owned one in my previous home and I think it has the smallest clearances of all of Jotul's stoves, so it won't stick out too far into the room. It's got a small firebox, but heats up to 1,300 square feet.
 
Killer cabin, by the way. I'm currently fixing up something similar with my brother-in-law up in Vermont but it's slow going. And it doesn't have a nice fireplace like that.
 
I have one room heated with propane and it is expensive. I wouldn't go for propane. Electric is cheaper. Maybe a propane stove for cooking is a good idea, but electric will work too. A medium to large stove should heat the cabin very well.

Huh? Nothing is more expensive than electric for heating. These days propane is even cheaper than oil, at least in my area. Or did you mean that the propane heaters themselves are expensive? That they are. Either way, the OP said he gets frequent power outages so electric probably isn't an option.
 
The harman insert has a screen option that allows you to open the door and use it as an open fireplace or close it and get the inefficiency you choose,but one drawback is in the closed position you would need to use the built in blowers. But not in the open position i suppose,its a Harman 300i its a beautiful insert!
 
Not sure how much you're willing to spend, but if you go the woodstove-in-the-fireplace route, the Jotul F 3 CB would be a great choice. I owned one in my previous home and I think it has the smallest clearances of all of Jotul's stoves, so it won't stick out too far into the room. It's got a small firebox, but heats up to 1,300 square feet.

We'll need to have some dimensions to know whether a freestander would work here and we need to know whether a hearth extension is an option for the OP. I'm not sure this would work in this situation. At 1 cu ft the F3CB needs to be refilled too frequently and run hard to warm the cabin up if it's cold. Extra cu ftg will help a lot with overnight burns and it will help get the cabin up to temp quicker.
 
We'll need to have some dimensions to know whether a freestander would work here and we need to know whether a hearth extension is an option for the OP. I'm not sure this would work in this situation. At 1 cu ft the F3CB needs to be refilled too frequently and run hard to warm the cabin up if it's cold. Extra cu ftg will help a lot with overnight burns and it will help get the cabin up to temp quicker.

Good point on the overnight burns. The next size up Jotul is the Castine, which is what we have now in our new house. It's inserted into our fireplace - though I had to buy the shorter legs for it so it would fit. That has a much shallower footprint [only 18.5 inches], so it also doesn't stick out very far into the room. Firebox is about 3 cubic feet, and it throws some serious heat, more than enough to warm up that cabin quickly.
 
I'd go for a freestanding mdeium to large sized stove in the fireplace. I agree with FanMan that the fireplace has a lot more ambiance than a stove, but the fireplace probably doesn't heat the place very well and definitely uses a whole lot of wood for not much heat. I'd get a large stove with a nice big glass front to sort of make up for the loss of the open fire.

I see this typed so many times here in this forum. Perhaps it's just vogue. I grew up in a house with three open fireplaces, and most of my extended family heated their respective 200 year old houses with open fireplaces, so I speak from fairly extensive experience when I say they do heat very well! They may use more wood than any stove you've ever seen, but make no mistake about it, an open fireplace can throw enormous amounts of heat into a room! The one in the family room of the house I grew up in threw so much heat we often found ourselves opening the windows to cool the room back down, when someone who wasn't used to that fireplace threw too many logs on the fire.
 
The F600 is Jotul's 3 cu ft stove. The Castine's firebox is around 1.7 cu ft. and if pushed it will need to be refilled every 4 hrs. when burning northwest softwoods base on our experience. We sold ours for a 3 cu ft stove to get true overnight burns.
 
The F600 is Jotul's 3 cu ft stove. The Castine's firebox is around 1.7 cu ft. and if pushed it will need to be refilled every 4 hrs. when burning northwest softwoods base on our experience. We sold ours for a 3 cu ft stove to get true overnight burns.

Sorry. My bad on that. I thought 3 cu ft seemed big. I misread this chart here: https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/jotul-f600-firelight-firebox-size.41483/

I was thinking the Castine was the f600 and not the f400.

Regardless, the Castine is more than big enough to do the job in a cabin like that. It heats our 1,700 SF house just fine and will hold a burn overnight. I'm guessing if the OP is interested in a woodstove that pipes into the fireplace, he's probably going to be concerned with how far it sticks out into the room - perhaps moreso than how often it has to be loaded.
 
Wow - you folks are awesome! Joyful s right about the fireplace forcing removal of layers and open windows. We do enjoy the monster but we go though about a dozen 22" quarter rounds a night in winter, and of course overnight burns only happen if someone adds fuel at 3 or AM. Begreen I'll be able to measure the fireplace tomorrow.

In the meantime here is a photo of the wood/cookstove in the kitchen. We really are looking for something easier to light and get going in winter. To light it we have to have both outside kitchen doors open which is a pain when the temps are in the teens or twenties. We've been thinking a small efficient, millivolt wood or propane stove to replace the cookstove could be through wall vented to the stair landing in the living room - warm air rising up the stairs for a temperature bump upstairs. Any thoughts on user friendly, easy and quick to light, small LP or wood stoves for the space where the old stove is now?
 

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If the main area stove could heat the place, what would be the purpose of the second stove? I'm not saying don't do it, but I want to understand the goal before making a recommendation. Some questions are:

Do you still want to be able to cook on it or bake in it? Are you looking for simple utility or do looks matter? How tall is the chimney that it is connected to, 2 story? What is the width of the space the current stove is in?

I'm thinking a Jotul 602 offhand, but it will need proper clearances.
 
I blew the cabin's SF in my 1st post - should be 2000sf. Here are the kitchen dimensions 9' wide x 23'3" long with 8'9"ceiling ht. We don't really care about cooking or baking on the stove. Kitchen is always cold when using just LR fireplace and no fire in kitchen cookstove.
The stone fireplace dimensions
fireplace - 43wide front
back27" wide
arch height 30-35-30
bottom depth 27" - top depth 16"
 

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Unless my eyes are playing tricks on me, that brick chimney stack is sitting on a wooden kitchen cupboard. Is gravity less significant in Oregon, or am I missing something in that photo?
 
With a proper insert you are going to realize a lot more heat in the house. You can go for a larger insert if you like to accommodate the 20" wood or it looks like you have enough room in there to put a full size stove. The Avalon Olympic can be installed either way and will handle 24" wood. That should heat the whole place. You might need the fan trick I mentioned, but it should work out.

But if you expect to usually be running a kitchen stove too, then you could get away with a medium sized living room stove and a smaller one in the kitchen. You'll probably need to cut the wood shorter for that stove.
 
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