crs7300 said:
If you use a indoor stove such as the Summit, how well does it heat the entire house? I have a 2 story house. Basically 3 rooms downstairs and bedrroms and bath upstairs. 1800 sq feet. Heating with forced air oil now.
If you put the stove in the center of the downstairs, how well does the heat radiat around the house? Hot and cold spots??
Depends on what you mean by "heat." If you want to heat the upstairs to the point where you can lounge around in your negligee in midwinter eating bon-bons, not gonna happen. Depending on how your ceiling/floor between the stories is constructed and how well insulated your attic is, you might get enough heat in the bedroom directly over the stove to sleep comfortably.
My 160-yo farmhouse never has had heat on the 2nd floor and I've found my small 1st floor woodstove actually sends a bit more heat upstairs than my oil-fired baseboard hot water system did. But in the depths of winter, it's definitely too chilly up there to do anything other than sleep. If I want to read in bed a bit before going to sleep, I put on a small space heater for 5 or 10 minutes to warm up the area right around the bed.
On the first floor, if you require all rooms to have temps in the 70s to be comfortable, you're not going to achieve that. Best you can probably do is bring your adjoining rooms up to mid-60s with the judicious placement of fans, would be my guess, but that depends on your storm windows, insulation, etc.
I've found, btw, that thermal curtains make a big difference with my older windows/storms, and I have them on all my windows and two glass-paned doors and pull them closed as it gets dark.
In most situations, a wood stove is never going to give you the even, consistent, all-around heat a central heating system does. If you have a reasonable tolerance for temperature variation, chilly spots here and there, and don't mind running a good space heater once in a while to supplement when you're using the adjoining spaces, you'll do fine. My kitchen is the farthest room from my stove and the least well-insulated, so I just bake a lot of casseroles and pies.