bearkiller...do you know much about the Baker's Choice...

[tiffer]

in comparison w/ the Pioneer Maid? I can't tell a lot from the pictures. How many burners does your PM have?

If you are using it to cook, it still gets warm in your house even w/o opening up the oven door, right??? Or when you said that you would open the door to heat your house and that it's air tight would you say it puts off more (or less) heat than an electric/gas stove would when in operation?

thanks!

[bearkiller]

tiffer,

Well gosh, ma'am, The Pioneer Maid doesn't have "burners"...it has a large flat stainless steel top that gets HOT over the firebox and then grades to warm at the other end of the stove. Mine has the water reservoir which stays relatively cool. I don't have the exact numbers, but the top is somewhere near 22 inches deep by 50 inches wide. But avoid the water reservoir unless you really need it, I have found it is superfluous.

If you look at Lehman's site (I think it is there) thay have a size comparison chart showing several stoves. The Bakers Choice is the Maid's "baby sister", but that is about all I can really tell you. Given what I know (the Maid) I would again purchase this stove because it is so darn good.

One trick I like is the loading plate for the firebox is 11 inches in diameter...I simply take it out and put my wok in the hole and does it ever work well that way. Yes! You load the firebox through the top...no "front door."

You bet it warms the house just by cooking on it. Only when it gets cold outside do I leave the oven door open. And as it warms up in the spring I do more cooking without circulating the heat around the oven and just dump more heat straight up the chimney. Can't bake bread that way as well though!

Come summer time outside temps are cool enough in the morning, but by afternoon it may hit 100 F. Cook in the morning and the house is too darn hot to live in for the afternoon. So I burn propane then. And use solar to heat the hot water instead of the Maid. Yes! When in operation it is MUCH warmer than any gas or electric stove. It is not something you will want to do when summer heat is upon you. One way around this is to build an outdoor add on to your house. Some friends here have a screened porch. Stove is near the house wall and windows can be opened to dump the heat into the house when it is wanted.

A wood cookstove offers many benefits, but NOT heating up your house when you don't want heat is not one of their virtues. Planning can avoid even those negatives, but all in all the Pioneer Maid is by several orders of magnitude the very best stove I have ever cooked on in my life and that includes the Wolf commercial gas stoves.

bearkiller

[tiffer]

Thanks bearkiller. I couldn't tell in the picture what those round circles on top were, and so you cleared it up for me. That's where you put the wood in from.

I'm learning! I didn't realize you could cook anywhere on top of the stove either....I guess I'll get to reading those books I checked out at the library.

Thanks

[raymilosh]

hi there
i called lehman's planning to order a baker's choice. (I wanted a pioneer maid, but it just wouldn't fit where i needed it.) the fellow i talked to there basically talked me out of it. He said it was good for its price, but was not going to last the rest of my life like a other stoves would. He suggested not getting the water tank either b/c if it runs out of water, the solder melts and it leaks water. He convinced me to buy a waterford stanley. I definately couldn't afford one and they weren't in stock, but i soon found one on Ebay.
i have no experience with any other stove to tell you, though.
ray

[tiffer]

Hey Ray
Thanks for the info! I'll keep looking on ebay.

Tiffer