New wood burning - trying to "size" a stove - considering the Englander

No plans to insulate the floor in the barn. I should ask about the vapor barrier idea. Well it is in the Ozark Mountains, we get 41-44 inches of rainfall a year. The USDA zone is a 6B. Only get average of 15 inches of snow a year if the online data is correct. I am not originally from the area, but the neighbor tells me it rarely freezes long enough for the shallow ponds to freeze solid, and it looks like we are really talking about 3 months of below freezing temps(again if the online data is correct). So that is the bright side of things and will hopefully make it easier to heat the place.

 

I can vouch for this stove. It heats my 1100sq.ft. house at the Illinois/Wisconsin border no problem. Even last winter.................though long burn times would've been nice. With a load of good seasoned oak I'll get a good 7-8 hours of usable heat and can have coals for a reload out to 9-10 hours. For 600sq.ft. in the Ozarks, this little stove will do it no problem.

 

Huntindog1 and oldspark both have drolets too.

 

Thanks for the suggestions guys I will be taking a look at the links you provided. That $1000 is just the stove, I have priced out what looks to be another $1000 for the pipe/chimney. I really don't want to go the pellet route and would prefer to be able to use wood that I have on our land. So the pellet stove thing would be a non-starter.

 

He should be able to go online and order all that.
Good idea Pete, and the same thought I had.
http://www.menards.com Longsnowsm, then search for Selkirk pipe. They have everything you need.
Don't know how tall you're ceiling is, but I did my ceiling box and everything above that to the cap for about $350 if my memory is functioning.

 

Longsnowsm , you have my attention on your dream stove for the house, once it's built. Can I ask you what brought you to liking a WS IS? And where did you hear about it?

 

I would look harder at the 30, too. If you plan on leaving it there long term and using the place as a work shop, it will allow quick warm ups when you aren't trying to heat the place constantly. In the short-term, you can always regulate temp with a door or window.

 

Thanks again for all the great replies, I took a break for dinner, and been doing some digging on the stoves suggested here, and started digging through the EPA certification list online to get a better idea just how clean these stove options are.

Thanks for the lead on Menards for the pipe. I have been looking at the Duravent stuff on Home Depot which will lead me to another thread I will want to start talking about pipe, chimney, and draft. But I will save that for a separate thread

The barn is a 40 x 30 with a 10 ft sidewall height. My thinking was that we would be able open up the doors from the shop and push some of that heat out into the rest of the barn to knock off the chill and make that entire space warm enough to be able to work in there in the winter if I needed to. Then at night just button down to the workshop area and let the stove burn low all night an only heat the workshop. The current plan is to have that stove available for next spring when I will be heading back there and to have the stove again for the fall. We won't be staying there during the winter this year for sure, and we won't know about next winter until we see how far along we get with the projects.

http://www.epa.gov/Compliance/resources/publications/monitoring/caa/woodstoves/certifiedwood.pdf
Looking at the EPA sheet they list the BTU range for these stoves with a low number and a high number. However that number looks nothing like the figures published by the manufacturers. Is that low number supposed to represent how low/slow you could burn the stove and the measurable heat? The EPA site doesn't really explain this very well.

DexterDay, What your saying is exactly been my thought process on this, but I really wanted to get the feedback from you guys since I know you understand this far more than I do. Once I am using the stove as a full time resident I would like to be able to keep it burning and heating through the night, and be able to load it up in the morning before I head to work and still have it producing when I get home from work. So we are talking 8-10 hour burn times. Then I started looking at the larger firebox stoves to get those burn times as that seems to be the key. That lead me to the NC30. I am however wondering if I can throttle these non-cat stoves back enough to slow burn through the night and not roast us out of the place. Since we are starting out with little to no insulation I seriously doubt that is going to be the problem, but as we start to button the place up and insulate it then I am starting to wonder. The barn will never be as tight and efficient as a house and that isn't the intent of the building. We are just trying to improvise while we work on getting something more permanent setup there and this looked like a good way to do it. I am concerned the NC13 may not be up to the long burn times I am hoping to get with the smaller firebox.

My IS heats my home, On the topic of the Ideal Steel. As I was researching these stoves I ran across the decathalon info from 2013 and the Ideal Steel. I spent a lot of time on the Woodstock web site, watching the testing videos, and reading the blog. I love the R&D that is going on over at Woodstock. I like the hybrid design. It just makes sense to me after watching the data from the tests and the emissions figures on low slow burns and on high and intense burns that emissions are a lot higher. The stoves just don't handle that very well, they all have a sweet spot where they like to burn the best. The emissions data bears that out. The secondary gas burn really is effective as specific temps and burn rates, the cats really are effective in their own specific temps and burn rates. The combination of the two really can overlap and can make the stove far more efficient. So overall I thought that the information and research being done with the Ideal Steel is really good and it shows real leadership, innovation, and a push for what will be cleaner, more efficient stoves for customers in the future. I also ran across some of the testers for these stoves posts and read all the threads I could find and the data that was recorded for the Ideal Steel. The burn times seem impressive, the temps seemed to be pretty even without a lot of huge spikes or dips. The stove sounds like it can be managed and controlled very well. Overall just a pretty good piece of stove technology. Now reading some of the new comments from Woodstock it sounds like they think they can improve even more based on what they have learned from the Ideal Steel. So I am very interested. The emissions data is very impressive. So that put the Ideal Steel at the top of my stove list. I don't really think it is a beautiful stove by any stretch from appearances so it isn't going to win any prizes around my house for its stunning good looks, but it certainly scores high marks in practicality, efficiency, and functionality. So I am paying attention to Woodstock and their stoves and the direction they are going. The Ideal Steel or one of it's successors will likely end up in my home provided they hold up well. I have some concerns about gaskets and cats from some threads I have run across on Blaze Kings, so I am watching the Ideal Steel to see how owners like them and how they hold up, how much maint is involved, and the real long term cost of ownership.

So one of the things everyone says is look for a firebox over 2cf. That is harder than it sounds! At least when your on a budget it is! There are stoves out there, but most are outside of my price range for this particular purchase at this time. Each of them that have a larger firebox also have the higher BTU and SF ratings which puts me back to the question about the NC30 possibly being too large. I looked at the Drolet which has a 2.4cf firebox and a 2100sf rating which is in line with what the NC30 is rated to do, but it has a much bigger firebox. So maybe I am asking the wrong question. Maybe I should be asking about burn times. Thoughts?

 

different ways of looking at burn times. From the time you light up till it goes out or usable heat time. The second is what is important, the first is mostly advertising hype. That said I had a small stove rated at about 1000 sq ft late 90's mfg. with secondary burn tubes. Here in Wi. it would heat a 900 sq trailer pretty well until things got to the sub artic range. ( old trailer lousy insulation) I could hold the trailer above 60 deg. on a full load in the morning leaving around 5 am until I got back around 5 pm. Sub zero temps about 1/2 that span. Currently running nc30 in a 2000 sq ft 60's ranch I can for the most part keep the place above 65 degs for about a 12 hr span again sub zero temps the stove is going to need support. For your 600 the 13 might be enough but I would guess only a 4-6 hour max usable heat time- alot depends on fuel, climate, temp preference. Relativly mild by your property compared to here so the NC13 or similar units might be enough.

 

Gooder points Dex.
Usable heat also is dependent on how well a house is insulated.
If mine was better insulated, my "burn times" would improve because the house would hold the heat longer.
A 350 deg stove in another house might be fine in the dead of winter for a while, but in mine, I need to reload before the stove gets much cooler than that.

 

Yes, the variables are many in this scenario... I understand it is hard to place times, numbers etc to a stove when "it all depends", outside temps, moisture content in wood, what type of wood, the exact configuration of the stove and the air-fuel ratios. Sorting through it all and trying to make an educated guess which is about what it amounts to is more challenging than it would seem!

If folks that own the NC30 don't feel it can be throttled back well enough to keep the temps reasonable in the 1200sf of space that it will be heating then I will heed your advise. Granted we are talking about a barn here with almost no insulation at the moment, but once we start to button it up it sounds like the NC30 might be too much even for a place that is not exactly "tight" when talking 1200SF barn. I am not sure the NC13 will be able to throttle back and burn through a night given the size of the firebox.

It sounds like you guys are trying to politely steer me away from the NC30 for my application so I will adjust the game plan here. So far the stoves that have been mentioned within my $1000 budget, the PE and Drolet that have been mentioned don't look like they would be much different than the Englander for my application. So it is really looking like I need to suck it up and get a CAT stove so that I have the ability to do low and slow if I don't need the heat and get longer burns, and if my barn shockingly turns out to behave like "a barn" then I still have the ability to crank it up to meet the need.

 

That's the big advantage of the 30NC................the size and depth of the box making be convenient to load NS and being able to stuff it to the gills!!!! I cannot load my 13NC NS unless I cut 10" logs. That'd be a PITA. The same amount of logs will burn longer with EW loading vs. NS loading; but you run the risk of the load shifting and hitting the glass if'n you try to "stuff" it full!!!

The 13NC is more than capable of heating the space the OP has in the area he is talking about.....................but it does have it's limitations/nuances etc.!!