Woodstock Stove: Survival Hybrid

This morning I woke up and the outside temps were 31*F, upstairs 64 and downstairs 70. The stove top was somewhere around 100. I put in 4 splits but this time no kindling or paper, took a shower and by the time I got out the firebox was in a full rolling burn. Next week they're calling for snow, and temps that will be in the 20's at night with day time temps in the 30's. I'll give maybe as detailed an account when we get there- and I'll post some pictures.

 

What's your work schedule, is the house empty from morning till early evening? If it is, it's not that you need heat then, but you'll pay for heat if you have to use your heating system. But if you can get home before the stove dies completely you'll likely be able to make a 24X7 burn routine. The only time you'll really shorten this is when you start burning much hotter, like when were down in single digits or below 0'F.

Hopefully you don't get hit with heavy snow this week. damm, last year I got snow here in October and it never ended till April.

Here's a pic I took this AM

 

When it gets really cold I predict lots of tending and ultimately a decision that the stove is too small. In fact, a drop of 10-15 degrees, and staying there for a week, will likely begin to change your mind. I hope I am wrong.

 

That's what makes this site so great. It really is like one big family (dysfunctional at times but still a family )

Dont mean to hijack your thread RGrant but.....
Oldhippie what camera did you take this pic with? The pic quality looks phenomenal!

 

Canon 60D (which is a older generation of the model line) but a very nice camera, with a Canon EFS 17-85 macro/telephoto lens. (quite expensive lens)

Thank you.

 

Congrats on your Woodstock Stove and I do hope it continues to pour on the heat! Last year my wife and I purchased the Woodstock Progress Hybrid. We took a trip to the factory to pick it up and spent a night in the area at a pretty nice hotel. The drive there from Farmington Maine was lovely through the mountains. It was quite an investment compared to many other stoves we had looked at but people were raving about this stove and the EPA ratings for efficiency proved what people were saying. I think what put my wife over the edge was the look of the stove. For me the thought of burning half the amount of wood was the attraction as I harvest and process our own wood. Last year I am pretty sure we did not even burn 2 cord. Now, we did not get the stove until mid November but pretty much ran it 24/7 through April. I will say this stove does not heat up quick but once going it doesn't cool down quickly either. The stove we had before was an antique wood cook stove. She loved the novelty of cooking on it but never really used it that way. A fire lit in that thing might go 3 hours. Spring last year I had to cut down 5 very large ash trees to be able to run power to my garage. So, amongst some other wood we burned a lot of that for our first year w this stove. You may doubt what I am about to say but if I loaded that stove with ash and these were some pretty large splits it was pretty easy to get a 16 hour burn out of that stove. It really runs for a very long time with a good bed of coals and I can choke the draft right down. Now, at the end of the year when I pulled the pipe to clean it was pretty loaded with creosote so I may have been shutting down the draft too soon or had some wet wood in the pile. This year I have much dryer wood and am letting the fire recover longer after a reload. Right now I am still trying to burn off some pine and poplar I have in mixed loads so we shall see what I get for burns with better wood and use habits this year.

 

Welcome to FHC Bigkahuna427 ...nice first post!

 

X2

 

Woodstock has the Keystone and Palladian stoves, which fit the next sized down category very nicely. I'm guessing they probably don't want to compete with themselves and both the Keystone and Palladian have beautiful classic looks that make for some sweet installations.

 

I heard somewhere on here, nearly certain it was Dennis, say that there was a Fireview hybrid in the works.

 

First cold snap update.
Going to kind of toggle back and forth from my old experience with the Vigilant for comparison sake.
I have been burning around the clock for the last week or so, and I've found that now that there is a decent bed of coals down, I don't need to use kindling to get the fire going anymore, I just put a few splits in and it usually takes off pretty quick. Sometimes I grab the bellows and get some air going and it takes off, but otherwise it is a 1 step process: Step 1, add wood.
My old stove, as I have stated early and often in this thread was the Vermont Castings just couldn't get through the night, but it was non cat. So this new catalytic stove is allowing me to put the stove to low during the evening when I'm asleep and during the day when I'm at work and it's frankly everything I wanted it to be. I'm adding wood at 3 points in a day. First around 5 am when we're getting ready for work. Next around 3/4 when I'm home from work and last around 9 or so. The main floor of the house is in the upper 70's and the upstairs is in the upper 60's.
This morning the outside temps were 30, but it was 64 upstairs and 68 downstairs. In comparison to my old stove it would be in the low 50's upstairs when we'd wake up and it would get so cold downstairs that the furnace would kick on just about every morning.
I know there's some people who suggest I'm going to want a bigger stove or advise I'm going to need to add wood more often with this smaller stove. I appreciate your points of view and experience, and while I'm open to whatever happens in the future- this is already a world of difference from my last stove and experience.
If you're concerned that this stove isn't going to suit my needs- stay tuned and find out.

One quick addendum- and not to be a wise-guy... I researched for a stove for a while. I drove to the Woodstock Soapstone HQ twice. I asked questions and zeroed in on this model for a few reasons. Two main reasons were (*/**)- its a hybrid, and while many people at first think that means it burns both wood and coal, it's actually that it has a secondary baffle(*) and a catalyst(**) much like the Ideal Steel and the Absolute Steel. It is efficient across a range of temperatures. If I'm home and I need it to get the house warmer and I desire, I can bypass the cat and get it rocking and exploit that part of the stove. If I'm going to be at work and just want the stove to be cruising along and going for time I can engage the cat and lower the air to get some more time out of it. I used to start a cold stove 3 times a day with my old stove. Now I'm about a week in on one start and really enjoying this.
Everyone has their own opinions and their own ways of operating- and that's totally fine. We see that also with the saws we use, the splitters we use and the trucks people drive. I also get an earful from people on another forum about motorcycles- lol, everyone has something to say about something. I love it here - you guys have a tremendous wealth of knowledge and information and I'm trying to add to the collective with my experience and in reviewing this stove.

 

Edit to my above post... I would have to start a cold stove twice a day. Not three times. Sorry for the inaccuracy.

 

Do you have to bypass the cat to push it or is that just what you've been doing ?

 

I grew up around wood heat but as an adult really have had little experience. These EPA stoves really need very dry wood. I was told this but last year, (my first year with the Woodstock Progress Hybrid), I did not have great wood and I guess I really was trying to push it with burning greener that I was supposed to. I am trying to get into better wood habits myself. Bring in the wood 3 days ahead of use and making sure I have really well seasoned wood. My next year wood is all cut and in a stack. I think even if I were buying wood I would get green and dry it for a year myself. I see a lot of people around me buying cut split delivered wood that they were probably told was seasoned but it does not look it to me. I now have a moisture meter and will be monitoring my wood. We cut down a few dead standing trees a few days ago. These were grey in color and bark coming off and very dry. I can trow that wood onto hot coals and feel like I can flip to the cat pretty quickly. The stove just performs so much better. Just my experience! Woodstock definitely has something going with these hybrid stoves.

 

Thanks for the question. I went back and re-read a previous post to make sure I didn't word something inaccurately or make an assertion that would contradict myself. The vast majority of the time I am running this stove with the catalyst engaged. There are a few times when I bypass it however: when bringing the stove up to operating temp in the morning, when reloading when I get home from work and any other time when I'm reloading the stove with wood. There have also been a few times in the last week when the stove was "dying down" and getting below the catalyst range when I took it off the catalyst to help burn down the coals before I loaded any more wood, but that wasn't to get the stove any hotter.
I was saying in the other post that the option to burn it "wide open" is there, but I personally haven't been in that situation yet. It got as low as 19*F the other night but I didn't seem to have any problems. If one of those polar vortex events makes its way to Connecticut I'll see what sort of mettle this stove has.
I will say this.... The Progress and the Fireview are simply works of art. They're beautiful. The Ideal also in my opinion is gorgeous. I'm not particularly wild about the Absolute or the Survival's looks but the color scheme I have does... blend well? Matches? I don't know the right term, it flows well with the kitchen and living room. This thing is definitely more utilitarian than some of the other stoves.
I also want to say I don't think this will be for most people. It's not the prettiest girl at the dance, and is made for a smaller space, however I'm in a 1200sqft home and my wife and I were just saying yesterday that the house feels a more consistent temp from room to room than I did last winter.

By the looks of the avatar- looks like you have quite the wood supply going!

I'm a huge fan already. And its funny because what I'm noticing about my reply in the first part of this message is that I'm almost exclusively running on the catalyst. I might not fully understand how the secondary works or if it really is helping the fire along while the catalyst is engaged and I just don't recognize that it's doing it. I do however really like that (assuming I know what I'm talking about ) I have the ability to bypass the catalyst and get the stove up to a higher temp should I want/need.

 

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I don't think you (should) need to bypass the catalyst to get more heat out of the stove.

My understanding of the advantage of a hybrid stove is thus:

If:
secondary combustion requires wood gas being produced by a good burn, the presence of a new supply of oxygen and 1100ºF.

If:
catalyst combustion requires wood gas produced by even a low burn but not exclusively, a fresh supply of O and 500ºF

Then:
Both post combustions will burn off the wood gas as long as they have the requirements to function, but the difference (and advantage) to a hybrid comes with not just the redundancy for burning wood gas but the incineration of fine particulates matter or PM which irritates mammal's lungs and is considered an unwelcome pollutant. At low temps (500ºF and up) the catalyst will incinerate at least the smaller particles as they pass thru and do some damage to the larger ones. At the higher 1100ºF temps the secondary combustion will get some of the smaller ones but isn't as effective as the catalyst because the catalyst honeycomb is increasing the contact area for which the particles has to pass and is capable of doing a much more effective job and is why hybrid stoves are garnering such low PM numbers as they are compared to secondary only stoves.
Most secondary only stoves seem to be just squeeking by at 1.9grams of PM/hr and some hybrid stoves are hitting numbers below 1.0 and some as low as 0.04.

So, I don't understand opening the bypass on high unless that big round catalyst is much smaller than the bypass as the heat pumping off an ignited catalyst should be an advantage for heat output not a hindrance. But I haven't seen the difference in bypass/catalyst size. And I don't have one in front of me trying to squeeze heat out of it.

 

I agree, the bypass is only there to allow the stove to get to operating temps for the catalyst as the draft usually isn't strong enough at that time to pull through the cat, nor hot enough to ignite it. I think you're loosing energy and wasting it up the chimney when you keep it open. It's a two tiered system to be the most efficient the stove can be, not run it one way or the other for efficiency. On the rare occasion my wife runs the Ideal Steel she always forgets to close the bypass and I can tell, the stove burns through the wood a lot quicker, with less heat produced.

Just don't want you to miss out on your hard earned BTUs!!!

 

billb3 NVhunter Thanks guys! I have a long ways to go and plenty of reading to do to understand how this stove really works.
Nothing more to report at the moment other than a warm home and a smokeless chimney pipe.

 

For the few above tips and pointers on the nature of the hybrid stove stuff, thank you guys. I appreciate the input greatly!
I'll admit that I don't know or understand this stove inside and out- and I'll dial it in better over the next year or two, or probably more.
But this is what I feel pretty confident to say at this point having come through an evidently record breaking cold snap for November. This isn't the coldest I've ever seen, because I do remember negative numbers around these parts in the last couple of years when I had the old smoke dragon, so I have heated with wood in the negatives before.
This stove is not for everyone. I'm kind of imagining that most of the people who are reading this.. it isn't for you. You wouldn't like it. The output isn't high enough. I can say that with some confidence, but not with total confidence.
Here's kind of why I'm going to say this at this point: This is what I wanted- not what I read other guys wanted.
I absolutely- completely- 100% understand the wanting the home to be 75-80 all winter. Not wanting the stove to battle the outside temps. Heat you out of the room. Hot hot heat. Totally understand that. I had that at times with my old stove, but I mostly had it on its way to reaching that temperature, then falling away from it rather quickly.
Where I found myself was really desiring the ability to not have to restart the stove morning and afternoon. And I'm there. This thing was started 2 friday's ago and hasn't gone out yet.
I didn't want to push myself to needing to open the door or window for some immediate relief. And I haven't had to do that in this cold snap. A few times I opened the storm door and pulled the screen open for some fresh air. But not since it's been cold.
A thought I keep in my mind is that when guys suggest I'll need a bigger stove for more heat, what they are really saying is that I'll need a bigger stove to burn more wood- and my heart is after greater efficiency. More heat from less wood.
But for other folks, they want to be warm, get that thing blasting... I get it- I totally understand.
My wife works long hours and is gone for unfortunately too long during the day for my liking, and we go to bed on the early side, so there's only maybe a 3 or 5 hour period of time in the evening when she's home to enjoy the fire, and perhaps an hour in the morning to enjoy it before she leaves. I on the other hand LOVE messing with the stove. Putting the wood in. Stacking it. Tinkering with the controls. Letting it run wide open, then dampering it down (I know its the wrong term with this new stove) and controlling the flame. I like messing with it. But I also really wanted to be able to get the fire established, cut the air back to almost nothing, and let it creep along at its most modest setting so when I get home from work I can fling it open, bring it back to life and get that stove roaring.
To date the coldest I've come down in the morning to find the house was 63 after a night of burning on low. That's way better than the 47 I found myself at the night my furnace went out. With this new stove the furnace hasn't come on once.
I'm in man. This is the stove for me. And I want to thank you guys. You all chimed in and gave me suggestions to think about. Gave me scenarios to consider. Encouraged me. Allowed me to work out my thought process.
This whole experience was awesome. I kept saying I wanted to review this stove for others to learn from, but as I'm sure you can understand and relate- I learned an unbelievable amount. Thanks to you all!
Lots of love from me and Ellen (my wife) to all of you. This has really been a fantastic experience.

I have one more post that I'm trying to figure out how to word that I'll put up in a little bit, but I don't have anything at the moment that I'm planning on posting. There will be more... lol...so don't worry too much. But I want to find myself at a final conclusion to tie up how I started this. For now, I fully believe this is the stove for me, and seriously doubt its the stove for most others.