Original Jotul 8 -- Cracked interior

[jorfjorf]

Hello friends. This is my first post on the forum so excuse any ignorance on rules.

I have just purchased an old 1930's WPA house in upstate New York, which has a new addition from the 80s. In the addition, there is a long great room that wraps around the old house in an "L" shape. In the bottom of that L, the shorter side, is this old Jotul 8 wood stove. The external wall of the L is drywall. The interior wall of the L is the old house's exterior wall, which is flagstone. Ceiling is wood beams. Flooring is wood. Stove is against the interior wall halfway through the bottom of the L.

I've had the chimney/flue properly set up in the first few weeks of owning the home, but the stove itself seems to be in bad shape. The stove is close to the stairs to the upper floor. The entire house is 3000 sqft. The downstairs is probably 60% of that, but we have a big stone wall that the stove isnt going to heat through (the only door through is on the other side of the first floor). I'd say the stove is in an open space where it can heat about 1000sqft on the first floor, and then the upper floor which is about another 1000 sqft. We have a rinnai propane wall heater in the same room, so we're not going to freeze to death this winter. Currently we are chewing through propane quite quickly due to the old house being poorly insulated. If we heat the great room up to around 65F at 11pm, it will stay at around 56F overnight at 9am. The old house is hard to heat past 50F. We're gonna be doing a lot of insulating work once the winter ends, but for now this is our situation.

I went ahead and tried to run it around 500-600F (off a reading on the stove front) yesterday, and it kept reasonable heat for maybe 4 hours, but then petered out. This is the old jotul 8, which only has the lower door air control, and even fully closed, the air flow is very hard to control. I would assume the huge hole in the back is not helping.

I've priced out the right side and back replacement parts, about $200 w/o shipping or install if it's something a tech should do, but I've seen a number of posts on this forum that the jotul 8 is not really worth it to repair, as an upgrade will operate for longer and more efficiently.

So the questions:

1) Looking at the photos I provided, is this stove obviously inoperable? Should I not run it until repaired or replaced?
2) Since the stove is at the short end of the "L" room, is it even worth it to run, even if upgraded? I think the adjacent stone wall could be a nice heat sink if we could actually run some heat out of it. Or is it basically going to be ornamental?
3) Not really a stove question, but what would you do for the rest of the season? I'm trying to accept that I may be paying 300 bucks every month for propane if we can't get this working well enough to defray that cost.
4) What questions would you ask if you were me? I'm pretty handy but new to wood stoves and old houses.

Thanks a ton in advance.

 

[begreen]

Is the stone wall an exterior wall or entirely interior? If it's an exterior wall it is going to be a giant heat suck.

The parts that are going on the old stove are sacrificial. It's a decent old stove, simple, but not terribly efficient. If the goal is to heat then I would sell the stove as is for about $300 and get a big radiant heater like a Drolet Austral III or Englander 32-NC to replace it. Given the cost of propane, the new stove should pay itself off pretty quickly.

If you want to just limp through this season you could try packing the hole with furnace cement and live with the cracked sideplate for the rest of the winter, but not longer.

 

[jorfjorf]

Hi there begreen. Adding in a little diagram of the house. The architecture is pretty unique. The shaded bit is the old house exterior, some of which now is an interior wall to the addition. The stone wall near the heater gets warm to the touch when the wood stove is going, but the portion near the windows (little boxes in the diagram) and the chimney is fairly cold.

I would like to have a cheaper heating option like you describe, and it's really a lovely place to sit and hang out. The fiance is very into the aesthetics of the current stove -- likes sitting by it and reading. Also very much enjoy the ritual of waking up and restarting a fire and bringing firewood in.

I'll take a look at those stoves in a bit when I can get a break from work. Thanks for the recommendations!

 

[begreen]

The model 8 evolved into the Jotul Castine (F400) which was a more efficient, secondary burn, heater. But that still is an under 2 cu ft stove. The stoves I suggested are radiant, budget workhorses. If aesthetics are essential and the budget can bear it, then consider the 3 cu ft Hearthstone Manchester or the smaller Jotul F500 v3.
Another stove to look at would be the Woodstock Progress Hybrid.

 

[defiant3]

The old 8's were wonderfully simple hesters, but you'd need 2 or 3 of them goinh at once to keep that place warm. No reason not to patch it up as Begreen suggested, or buy the parts and a gasket kit if you want and do the whole thing, but the stove is in over its little Norwegian head rn. Just get through the winter with it.