Woodstock Keystone compared to Jotul Combifire - a Tale of Two Stoves

[jpl1nh]

I feel like I've had my Keystone long enough and through a wide enough range of winter conditions to draw a good comparison. The old stove was a Jotul Combifire, a medium size pre-EPA cast iron stove with a built in pipe collar damper. The new stove is a Woodstock Keystone, a catalytic soapstone stove with a relativley small 1.5 cubic ft firebox. The stoves are night and day different from each other. The Combifire could take the house from 60 to 70 in an hour with windchill values of -20. It could get the house to 80 in those conditions. The Combifire gave us a lot of quick heat but was really not good at long burns. While you could load it well for an over night burn, when you damped it down a bit, it would smoke away all night long. If you left the air open enough for a somewhat clean burn, the stove could be cold 8 hours later. When set up for the best long burns we could do, in 8 hours there would be a temperature of anywhere from 66 to 58. Not a problem though, fire it up and it would be 70 an hour later. Stand next to it and it would give you almost scalding heat. You'd move away within a couple of minutes. If the Combifire heated like the intense, tumultous ups and downs of a teenage romance, the Keystone is like the steady warmth of a lifelong love in it's later years. The Keystone just cannot give you quick heat. You must forgive it that and work with it to avoid that need. If our house is 60 with windchill values of -20 at 6 in the morning, by evening we might be approaching 70. Better to turn on the furnace and get the house near where you want it. Load this stove and it will burn and burn and burn on that one load. Damp it down and the combustor chews up any smoke the fire produces. Open the air up a bit and you'll increase the heat output..some. But once the house is up to temperature, keep the stove running through it's cycles and the house will always be within a few degrees of whatever you like. The heat is soft and subtle, stand next to it for a few minutes and you'll want to lie down right there with a pillow and go to sleep. I would say that I am going through wood about the same with the Keystone as I did with the Combifire. With the Combifire, we'd let the house temp drop when we weren't around, warmer weather the stove could go out, after all we could heat the place right back up in an hour or so. I'd relight the stove as much as 12- 14 times a week. House temps regularly fluctuated anywhwere from 58 to 76. With the Keystone, the last time I used a match to light it was October 25th, the stove has run ever since. House temps range from a rare 66 to 73. At times in warm weather it's nothing more than coals buried in ash, but the stove is always at least a little warm. In the frigid weather of the last 3 days, daytime temp of 10, nighttime of -5, my boys home from college were here all day. I left them about 2 wheelbarrows worth of assorted wood. I expected to come home and find most of it gone. With the Combifire the house would have been 76 and the wood would have been gone. Instead, they used only about a third of the wood and the house was about 70. They hadn't even burned the "good" wood ie; the black locust, red oak. They were burning pine, henlock, birch and red maple. In the coldest weather, I miss the sheer heat output of the Combifire, the Keystone will struggle to keep up. We would be probably be better off with the larger Fireview. At all other times, I and everyone here, LOVE this stove. My boys said it's like having 2 TV's. Often the mesmerizing fire display of the Keystone is more entertaining to watch than the other TV. The house is always warm though virtually never hot. It burns any type of wood thoroughly and with control. There is no smoke. We probably will need to turn on the furnace for 1/2 hour 15 -20 times this winter to warm the edges of the house in the coldest weather. For the privilage of having this beautiful, gentle, rugged and quietly reliable workhorse gracing center stage in our home life, it's so worth it.

 

[Todd]

Nice review. I like the part where you compare the two stoves to a teenage romance and lifelong love, funny but true.

Sounds like the stove is working out pretty well. What kind of stove temps are you burning? Give yourself a little more time and I bet your house temps will come up some. It takes a full season to learn these soapstone stoves. I'm still learning after 2 years.

 

[jpl1nh]

Thanks Todd, during the coldest weather, reloading and keeping the air fairly open would take the stove top up to 550 to 600. It would stay there until the wood was mostly coals and there were only small, transparent blueish green flames, at that point stove top would start to fall. We'd let it drop to around 450 which allowed the coals to burn down some. Then we'd start the process over. I did not burn much really good hardwood except for overnight burns. If we had been away during the day, would also have been using mostly oak and black locust. I'm sure you're right about learning more as time goes on. It is probably about as different from the Combifire as you could get.