Who uses wood, and what kind of stove?

This will be our first winter in our new house we built with our own 4 hands. haha. We installed a Kitchen Queen 480. Have had several fires in it and think we are going to love it. It is our ONLY heat source. We have a lotto learn but are loving it already! Our house is a 2100sq ft ranch with good insulation. We get all our wood from locals that want trees gone and local tree guy who gives it away. Got a splitter on trade and I am glad I did, have 7 full cords stacked and seasoned!

We've had a Regency stove now for about 15 years. We burn 3 1/2-4 cords a year. I cut it on our land and haul it out with the atv and cart. Work it up on the splitter that attaches to our Ingersoll tractor. We burn a mix of poplar, maple, birch, a little softwood if it needs to be cleaned up.

We like the Regency, which is in the living room, because it has a glass front and we like watching the fire. Fella wanted to sell us one of them pellet stoves but I thought it would be wasteful and take a lot of time to cut pellets in the woodlot with the chainsaw.

We don't feed the stove after we go to bed and on nights that are below zero the furnace may kick on at 0400 hrs or so reminding me that its time to get up and start the stove. We love the wood heat and will keep using it until we're not able to anymore.

I'm waiting to get my shop building built.. Once I do, I've got a Bat Cave brand stove I plan to put in it to heat in the winter... Hoping it will do well since it's got a big blower on the back of it and huge vents on the front...

I don't know much about that brand of stove other than it's HEAVY, although a small firebox... A friend gave it to me. He used to have it in his shop until he put in a huge gas fired heater...

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We heat with wood.

We have a two-barrel Vogelzang, that heats water. The heated water circulates through a thermal-bank, and that circulates through our radiant flooring.

We live in Maine, in a 2400 sq ft house, we go through 3 to 3 1/2 cords of wood each winter.

The total cost for our entire heating system, was close to $1500.

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I gave some thought to a double barrel kit with water heating from it in the concrete pad for my shop building... You think something like that would be doable?

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A concrete pad can become a HUGE thermal-mass. It would need to have a serious thermal-break underneath it. Maybe 4 inches of foam laid under the concrete. Otherwise all of that heat will sink away into the sub-soil, and it will be lost.

My flooring is wood. My PEX tubing is under the floor, between floor joists.

If you want the concrete to become your thermal-mass, then great go for it. That is certainly an option.

You can also put foam on top of a concrete slab, then PEX and a hardwood floor on top of the PEX. But with this option there is very little thermal-mass. So like in my house, you need a separate thermal-mass tank.

I gathered old dead electric water-heaters. They are insulated, they hold pressure, and they are easy to plumb. I have 4 of them plumbed in series with a taco-7 pump, as my thermal-bank.

Thankfully none of this is expensive.


Our Vogelzang is in the center of our house. It directly radiates a lot of heat.

Plus we save a lot of heat in the water. By circulating that water, we control when the heat is used, and we control where that heat is used. If you ever had any need to circulate heat to a remote location, you can.

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Ah.. yeah, I didn't give thought to the heat ending up going into the ground... Seems it would cost a fortune to insulate the concrete from the ground..

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Never let your fear decide your fate!
Kein Mitleid für die Mehrheit

I've got the mid sized stove of the same VC Dutch West series you bought. It's very efficient with wood, and I burn whatever dies or blows down on the farm. I probably burn more red oak than anything else, but also some red maple, hickory, and even tulip poplar. I do have two propane fueled gas furnaces, but I try to use the woodstove as much as possible.

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I heat and cook only with wood. I have a Franklin fireplace (freestanding, not the insert), a 5'h x 6'w kitchen fireplace with oven, a wood burning cook stove and a small fireplace in the bedroom. In addition I have a clay "beehive" oven out back. I also use a fair amount of wood to make maple syrup and sugar, sorghum syrup, apple butter, scalding water for pig butchering, and to boil laundry.

All told I use about 10 cords of wood a year on average. I have a seventy acre wood lot so I can get more than I need from my own property just by thinning and using dead and downed trees.

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You WILL love the kitchen queen. We have had one for a few years and it is absolutely my favorite "appliance". We also have a Vermont castings defiance for the very cold winter months/ weeks, but it doesn't compare to the kitchen queen. It never fails to amaze me how long the kitchen queen holds the hot coals and how quickly it roars back to life, even with only a few embers. It responds quickly to the airflow and draft adjustments. I can't imagine living without it.

Vogelzang Performer here. This is our first full winter, and we suspect we'll need 5 cords. This year we had logs delivered since work on the property kept me busy. 10 loggers cords of mostly maple, but some birch as well. It's a little greener than I'd like, but heats our 2000 sq/ft well so far. I am 1/3rd owner of a Norstar 30 ton splitter with a Honda engine. I added the wings to split 4 ways this year, and they are great. Stihl ms180 and 290 do the bucking. I just switched to professional (non safety) chains after cutting most of the wood, what a difference they make.

We have a Woodstock Soapstone Fireview.


We use 3 to 4 cords a year, depending on the winter. We get a load from an Amish sawmill and scrounge other wood whenever we can. Before this stove, we had a Vermont Castings Resolute Acclaim. It was an excellent stove but did not hold the warmth like a soapstone stove does. We heat only with wood.

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We just installed a Woodstock Ideal Steel, and will be heating with mostly red oak and black walnut. The wood will be greener than I'd like this year, but some people (DH) have to learn the hard way. We have a heat pump, but hope to avoid using it except if we're gone overnight.

For the pat 26 years, we have had the same stove that is on another thread, the one from Lowes. It was just a stop gap because we had mostly run out of money when we had finished building our house and didn't have enough cash to afford what I wanted.

Two months ago, dh and I bought the stove we wanted, it is a Hearthstone stove, the Mansfield soapstone. We've fired up a few small fires so far, it's been to warm to do much, so I was wondering how it would do?

Do you think the soapstone is worth it? Ours is beautiful, it's in the stone arch in our living room which means everyone at the house sees it. But how well does it heat and how well does it hold the heat?

I sure hope it was worth the bucks we shelled out. The last stove worked fine for what we payed for it and it lasted for all of those years. THen we sold it for $150 to someone on The Valley Trader

I have a 70's Resolute by Vermont Castings, no catalyst or blower by choice. The peace and warmth from that stove just burning away silently is part of winter that I love.
We cut some and buy some from guy across the street. All hand split. Last year in a very cold winter we used 10 cord in an 1100 sq ft modular house with mediocre insulation and no basement. We use a mix of oak, maple and some locust.

Carol K

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We heat with wood, that is our main source and our backup. Otherwise it's body heat and dogs.

We burn about 0.75 cord of wood a year, mostly sugar maple, some ash. It's what we have mostly from dead wood.

We use a very simple box stove that is set into a masonry shroud that is part of our house so it is a high mass stove. We burn it pretty much at full bore, typically just in the morning and the heat is then stored in the masonry to keep our house warm.

Our house is fairly small (252 sq-ft) and very high thermal mass (100,000 lbs) as it is made out of masonry (floating foundation, block and poured walls, ferro-cement arched roof) with a good insulating blanket and then a half inch of fiber adobe parge on the outside. The result is it is pretty easy to heat and it keeps its heat well.

We live in the mountains of northern Vermont, Zone 3 so fairly cool much of the year. We'll probably start building fires in a week or two. Because of the way the house stores heat we don't tend to need to build a fire until late in the fall.

See: http://SugarMtnFarm.com/cottage

-Walter
in Vermont

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I have a Jotul Greenville stove. It is a newer, ultra-efficient model. This will be my first year with it and I am planning to heat 100% with wood. We live in a 1600 sq ft log ranch that holds onto heat like crazy. We ran it the other day for the first time and it burned for about eight hours and kept the house at about 85 degrees. I'm hoping that it won't make it quite 85 degrees in here once it is actually freezing outside

As I wrote earlier in this thread, I've had a Hearthstone for over 30 years. I'll probably will it to the kids when I'm gone (hopefully that won't be for another 20 years, or so).

Soapstone doesn't work like a cast iron stove and it certainly doesn't work like steel plate. I can build a good fire in my cold stove and still lay my hands on top almost thirty minutes after I start the fire. Running the stove is all about thermal mass and anticipation. I like to say I run it about an hour ahead of where I want to be, if that makes any sense.

They don't make my exact model anymore, but it's similar to the Heritage. On the new stove, they talk about an 8 hour burn time, but a 12 hour heat life. And heat life is what we're really concerned with (although I think the burn time is about right, the heat life may be a little optimistic).

Learn how to run your stove to get the heat you want, when you want it. After you learn what it likes and how it likes to do it, I think you will really enjoy it.

Besides, they are pretty, aren't they?

You are going to love your soapstone. I had to fire it today, and it is too warm in here, even though it is getting colder and really windy. Our power is out right now. Once the really cold weather hits, we are nice and comfy. The stove radiates warmth all night. All we have to do is spread the coals and add more wood in the morning. My brother had a Hearthstone at his other house and really loved it.

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We have a Jotul F500, we have not had the heater on since we bought the stove. We heat a modern 2400sq. ft. house. The house stays much warmer than it would if I had the heater on. We cut all of our own wood, I cut all of our wood at least a year a head of time and keep it covered up until it is needed.