Does anyone own a Hearthstone Castleton/Heritgae? I have some questions: Looking to find out if they reduce the amount of wood you burn in a season? With the TruHybrid is the wood stove difficult to keep at 400 degrees? How about lighting a fire? Finally the Heritage claims 24 hours of heating and the Castleton claims 20 hours of heating. Those figures most relate to the stone radiating heat after the fire has gone out. I'd like to know how long of a burn time do you get? Can you burn biobricks in this type of wood stove? Our current stove is easy to light, warms up quick and will last between 8-10 hours of burn time.(I know it takes a while for Soap Stone to warm up.) That said, I feel like our current wood stove consumes a great deal more wood than what our old Hearthstone II would burn in a really cold winter. I went from 2 cords to almost 4 per season with this current stove. I'd love to reduce the amount of wood/biobricks I need to burn. Keep in mind, this is a primary heat source for half of our house. Due to the layout of the house, the east end of the house does not benefit much if at all from this living room wood stove. If we get either a Heritage/Castleton wood stove, the current stove will go into the family room. I work in there all day, so lighting a fire in the morning to heat up the room for the day works for me. We have 2 electric infrared wall units that will come on to preheat the room in the am while the wood stove gets up to temp. They proved to be rather efficient last year reducing our electric bill during the heating months. Previous years of attempting to heat that room with one infrared electric space heater had the unit running full blast the whole time I was in the room. These new units get the room up to temp, and then come on as needed to maintain the temp in the room. If I don't put the wood stove in the family room, I'll be purely using the electric heaters. As for these electric heaters, I have considered putting them through out the house. With their app, you can build out zones that will heat to a certain temp and maintain it. The two in the family room is one zone. They come on at 8am and heat the room to 65. At 5:30pm, the app is scheduled to shut them down for now. When the temps drop to the 30's, I will run them at night maintaining 58 degrees. This makes it easier to bring the room temp up to 65. In the dead of winter running the wood stove would reduce the amount of electric used to heat the room. The east end of the house gets some benefit from the wood stove. That makes me think I might fill the wood stove in the am and then again in the afternoon at quitting time. Letting it go out around overnight. The wall heaters would come on when the room drops to 58. Jason from RI.
I would choose between Woodstock, Kuma, PE, or BlazeKing. Reported problems with Hearthstone are smoke roll out, defective hinges, and non responsive customer service. I was going to purchase a GM60. I had questions and CS did not respond to my emails. They lost my sale. I ended up with a BlazeKing. Glad that I did.
We’ve had a Castleton for about 10 years. Great stove. Not one issue to date. It does radiate heat for a very long time, but I can’t tell you if it’s 20 hours. I’ve never burned biobricks so I’ve no first hand info on that. I find it very easy to light, but I only use properly dried hardwoods. And it’s easy to keep at whatever temp you want. Again, I only burn dry hardwoods though. Good luck in your search.
Castleton 8031 here. Burn time 8-10 hrs using well seasoned oak. No problem getting to 400 STT. Stove lights easily and is easy to control. Shipping and uninstalling a Woodstock stove as well as cracked frames made me go with the Castleton over an Ideal Steel. Do you have a dealer nearby? A good dealer can help if needed.
I've been following the reports on these Hearthstone hybrids. Not a large number of users out there that have been posting. Some of the new Hybrid users are experiencing some trouble with excessive smoke rollout as mentioned. Very likely the new design is more dependent on a perfect venting system. What is the vent system you plan on using? Any 90's? Old masonry? Straight up and out? You may want to do some deep research on the GM models for more insight. On another note. What electric programmable heaters are you using? Curious.
Thank you. Let me take you back to before I went off on the tangent of getting a new wood stove for the first floor (what I often refer to as the downstairs.) My original thought was KISS (keep it simple stupid) and buy a small wood stove the family room. This way I could light it in the am and keep it going while I was in there. I turned my thoughts to the efficiencies of the new stoves out there, and that is what evolved into this thread. After doing some serious thinking about where our money would be best spent, we decided that some house renovations would be better in the long term. First let me thank you all for responding. I might have told you this in the past, but at nearly 52, I must say my memory is not what it use to be. The house (originally built in 1874 as a summer cottage) faces dead south with a granite foundation on a slab built into a hill (sloping towards the road. The second floor is on level with the backyard.) The original front door was on the east end of the second floor. At some point before my dad bought it, they put an addition on the west end of the house to be a garage and kitchen and living room on the second floor. My dad bought it in 1969 and had the first floor converted (Going east to west) into our kitchen/dining area and living room. The living room has a short 3' hall between it and the dining area. The east wall of the living room has exposed granite just above 5o% of the height of the wall. On the north east wall of the living room is an L-shaped cement stairway that leads to the second floor. We have a rug covering the cement for those stairs. The ceiling height (just below 7') downstairs is dictated by the ductwork for the forced hot air system that does not have cold air returns. My parents did another renovation in the 1980's to the kitchen/dining area and removed the drop down ceiling and putting in a frame to support a wallboard ceiling with light cans. The issue is that all of the mechanicals are in the ceiling downstairs with no access. When we had our main bathroom renovated, we put in electric floor heating in. That has yet to be tied in (2 years now) to the electric as there is no access. We decided that the money should go to putting in a new decorative drop ceiling(drop ceilings have come a long way.) to provide access to the mechanicals. The other update we'll do down stairs is to replace the living room picture window (at least 50 years old.) It's a single pane and needs to be replaced. We neglected to change out that window when we had all of the other windows replaced. Sorry that was long winded. I could have just said we are putting in a drop ceiling on the 1st floor and replacing the living room window. However; I wanted everyone to understand the need/thought process. Jason
