My wife and neighbors don’t really care much about my new stove, so I figured I’d try here and just report how pleased I’m with my new Jotul 500.
I installed the stove Saturday before hurricane Sandy and lost power that Monday night (and gained about 50 cords of fallen trees). I have a generator- but told my family it would not run the furnaces- I figured a perfect test for the stove. For 13 days no heat other than the Jotul 500.
My house is large 4400 sq ft and I put the stove in the unfinished basement, making a total of 6400 sq ft of heated space. The outside temperatures were mostly in the low 40’s at night (2 nights dipping into the 30’s) and my house never got lower than 64 and that was only 1st thing in the morning on one occasion. With the outside in the low 40’s it appears I can easily keep the house at 68 (by keeping the stove provisioned), except 1st thing in morning, since I’m not getting up at 2:00 am to fill the stove.
My home is well insulated and added basement wall insulation just prior to the stove installation. I also added a blower fan to one of the supply trunks in my basement (only turned on after power came back), which does a great job of getting heat to the 1st floor. It did tend to suck a slight smokey odor from the stove, but I solved that by installing outside air (I read a lot of pro and cons on that. But when I built the house a lot effort went into making a tight house, many high efficiency furnaces now use outside air, so it made sense to me and works great.)
My goal is to reduce my oil consumption by 50% so far I’m well ahead of that.
I installed the stove Saturday before hurricane Sandy and lost power that Monday night (and gained about 50 cords of fallen trees). I have a generator- but told my family it would not run the furnaces- I figured a perfect test for the stove. For 13 days no heat other than the Jotul 500.
My house is large 4400 sq ft and I put the stove in the unfinished basement, making a total of 6400 sq ft of heated space. The outside temperatures were mostly in the low 40’s at night (2 nights dipping into the 30’s) and my house never got lower than 64 and that was only 1st thing in the morning on one occasion. With the outside in the low 40’s it appears I can easily keep the house at 68 (by keeping the stove provisioned), except 1st thing in morning, since I’m not getting up at 2:00 am to fill the stove.
My home is well insulated and added basement wall insulation just prior to the stove installation. I also added a blower fan to one of the supply trunks in my basement (only turned on after power came back), which does a great job of getting heat to the 1st floor. It did tend to suck a slight smokey odor from the stove, but I solved that by installing outside air (I read a lot of pro and cons on that. But when I built the house a lot effort went into making a tight house, many high efficiency furnaces now use outside air, so it made sense to me and works great.)
My goal is to reduce my oil consumption by 50% so far I’m well ahead of that.