Woodstove suggestions and thinning of forest

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Tbob

New Member
Sep 16, 2025
3
Washington
Hello - new here, I am looking for some guidance and suggestions on our situation. Sorry if this is a little long, trying to give you all the information. Thanks for all the help and the knowledge!

Our experience- We have had wood stoves in past houses but always bought logs or split wood. We usually would only purchase by the cord.

We purchased a fixer upper cabin in NE Washington on almost 8 acres surrounded by the national forest, which we love. This time of year we try to figure out the priority for next year, how we are going to pull it off and budget it. There are currently four major fires in our region and one near by, this has increased our concern about our forest and what we can do to help prevent fires. After meeting with a couple different experts, retired fire chief, wild fire fireman, a couple old time locals 🙂, and a retired ranger from the national forest, we were given a handful of suggestions. We are planning on trying to execute those over the next couple years. We will be thinning out certain trees, removing a handful of dead trees, and pruning up the trees. The question is what do we do with the wood? We plan taking at least three big trees down and about 10-20 smaller trees next spring. How should we be storing the wood? How long does firewood store? What is the minimum diameter log diameter for a woodstove? Is there a wood we shouldn’t be burning?

Since we are not there full time, we currently keep the cabin at 50 with a lopi cast iron propane stove and some wall heaters. We like the idea of different forms of heat in case power goes out or run into issue with gas we have backup heating options. The cabin is long with three sections, on one end is a living room, were the propane stove is, than in the middle is hallway with bedroom, laundry room and bath off, than the other end is kitchen and dinning room. While we are there we do use our big e pellet stove which is located in kitchen and dinning area to help with heating. We do get down to negatives but on average we are in the teens with a good amount of snow in the winter. Between the big e and lopi the cabin stays really nice no matter outside temperature. We are thinking of moving the big e to our small shop and installing a woodstove in kitchen dining area. We were suggested a couple different brands, Drolet and blaze king kept coming up. Still trying to figure that out, our hesitation with blaze king is the amount of heat it would put out might be too much. Our cabin is about 1400, the area where the wood stove would be is about 500 square feet with a doorway that leads to hallway. Any suggestions on what woodstove you would get, is greatly appreciated! We don’t mind investing to a better stove if it will last but also don’t want to spend an arm and a leg 😜.
Thank you!