The main concern and question I have is this: What is the cushion consumers have between proper operating temperatures and over-firing? Just how small or large is this temperature window? Many of the stoves built to meet today’s standards, and likely tomorrow’s standards, have a small proper operating temperature window. The above article already admits that more modern stoves are more complicated to operate and when you think about that coupled with a small operating temperature window, then all the responsibility is put on the consumers shoulders with regard to stove warranty’s. You’re basically on your own. If you make a mistake or some unknown causes a stove to over-fire, well that’s too bad. It sort of defeats the entire purpose of trying to buy a quality made product if they’re so fragile to run. Now before I get jumped on, not all these stoves are complicated, but some are and it’s those few that will likely harm the reputation of the best of them, at the least make people skeptical. One particular modern stove is a prime example. All a person has to do is look on YouTube for problems with this stove and you’ll find people that have run these stoves for years and they buy a new one, that’s ran the same way, and for no apparent reason they over-fire and the company won’t help the people with the problem. The warranty is now void and the new owner has $2000-$4000 boat anchor.
The new emissions seem to me to be an overkill. In addition, the cost to have a stove tested is outrageous and might very well put some stove makers out of business and certainly will bring the cost up and they are high enough already.
Less manufactures means less salesman to sell all over the country. Hmmnnn...big oil and electric would love that. Salesman often talk us into buying things we may not need, or they convince us we do need them and when we do we recognize the benefit. Yeah...less salesman over all leads to less total sales...not reaching as many people. Green freaks love that thought! With everything there needs to be a balance.
I put an catalytic insert into a friend's fireplace years ago. It burned ok, but the catalytic converter needed changing (or cleaning?) after a few years.
Buyers of automobiles feared improvements in efficiency for decades. I still see an awful lot of them being used despite how pricey they have become. If too many people don't maintain them our future Green New Deal Overlords will just ban them and along with no natural gas, home heating oil nor propane we'll all be riding stationary bikes in our homes connected to generators powering electric heaters. Unless taxing the CO2 molecules emanating from chimneys and exhausts becomes far too lucrative.
I remember reading about this same BS during the Obomber regime. All these claims about particulates from wood stoves causing respiratory disease & killing everybody's children but not a word about the emissions from the coal fired powerplants belching sulfur dioxide all over the north east. Not a single mention of the gas fracking fires burning round the clock in across wide swaths of many midwest states, to such an extent they can be seen from space. In the end, most of the stoves couldn't meet the new standards, so they changed the testing protocols to make them pass anyway. Just so long as it looked like Washington DC inflicted it's will successfully... Meanwhile, Walmart & Garbage Depot et al, are importing crap from China on enormous cargo ships that burn something like 50 gallons of diesel to move five feet forward through the water, all the way across oceans. My Vermont Castings Vigilant is over 30 years old and you can't typically see anything more than heat mirage coming from that chimney. Oil companies aren't getting my money.
Just read this article, and thought it made a lot of good points that I feel are true as a stove retailer. My biggest fears about the NSPS 2020 standards, and the stoves that meet it, are that some manufacturers have significantly reduced the BTU range at both ends of the spectrum in an effort to pass testing. So, shorter burn times, and fewer BTUs when the stove is wide open. Also, some manufacturers are still testing with crib wood (dimensional lumber stapled to ensure a uniform burn) as with the old standard, and some are testing under the new rules that allow cord wood, which to my mind is a method that more accurately approximates real-world use. All of the testing data is available online here via the EPA - do your research and think about what you are giving up with the new ones vs the older models: Woodstove Database | Burnwise | US EPA Just my two cents.
That's the trick. Turns out that in the past, there was no actual btu test so the stove makers could write whatever they wanted in that specification. Lots of misleading trickery, mostly on the high end of output capability. What you are seeing now, thankfully, is the results of a standardized test which is designed to allow consumers to make apples to apples comparisons. As you noted, there is still the stupid (IMO) allowance for the manufacturer to select crib wood or cordwood. Whichever you believe is the appropriate fuel source, the test method is different so the resulting BTU range is not comparable between crib and cord tests.
