I will be building a new house starting in the spring of 2017 and I'm looking for recommendations for wood heat. Stand Alone or Insert? I've never had any experience with inserts. I currently have one of the old square stand alone Ashleys that does great but was really looking to install something a little more modern in my new house. Any ideas? House will be approx. 1700 sq ft well insulated with wood heat as the primary heating source. We hardly ever drop below 10 degrees here usually only see a handful of nights that drop down into the teens.
It all depends. Budget, desire, application, etc. Will it be your primary heat source? Or just an occasional heater? We have a freestanding Napoleon 1900p in the kitchen and a modern Napoleon NZ3000 Zero Clearance fireplace in our living room. Both are AMAZING heaters and very efficient. I love the look of a traditional fireplace but wanted a high efficiency stove and that's why we went with a ZC unit for the living room.....it looks old fashioned but is VERY modern and efficient.
Had an insert in my last house. I'm installing a freestanding in my current house. I'm just not thrilled with fans used on inserts. They're noisy and just don't seem to produce the same heat as a freestanding stove does. I liked using an existing fireplace with an insert, and it looked good, and it heated our 1500 sq ft home, but I'd rather a stove. Just my 2 cents
Free standing usually will give more heat. They will take up more room than in insert but it all depends upon what you want. I too do not like fans running on a stove or insert and love the radiant heat we get from our soapstone. We used to have one of those Ashley stoves and was extremely happy to get rid of it. We put a Woodstock Soapstone Fireview in it's place. Difference? We now stay warm all winter even if it drops into the -20 degree range (we keep the house around 80 all winter). One of the best parts is we get more heat and still cut our wood use to 50% of what we used to burn. Sweet. Good luck.
An insert is a compromise. It's for the guy who wants to make use of his existing masonry fireplace but doesn't want to lose floor space. They are inferior in every way to a freestanding stove except for footprint. Now if you're building new and desire the flush look then a zc fireplace makes much more sense than to build a behemoth masonry fireplace just to put in the retrofit device known as an insert. I ripped out a whole masonry fireplace with a modern look insert to replace it with pipe and a freestanding stove. So much more effective.
Welcome to the hoard Jim1978 As others have said, an insert is a compromise designed to make an open fireplace more efficient. And they do a very decent job of it. If building new, no point in building an expensive FP, then buying an expensive insert to make it efficient. If you like the flush look, go with a ZC FP. A stand alone stove gives you the most bang for your buck. I live a few hours north of you. If you are wanting to heat 1700 sqft of new/efficient home with primarily wood heat, you will need the ability to burn Very low and slow. Otherwise you'll overheat your home every time you build a fire, or be building a tiny fire every few hours from scratch. Its a very different ballgame than the Ashley and King "wood circulators" in older less efficient/insulated houses that I grew up in. Catalytic stoves stoves shine at low and slow, steady heat. For example: I heat 1536 sqft of newer, very tight, well insulated home. Sunday morning it will be 6F, with a high of 21F and 8F Monday morning. I will burn 2 loads in that 24 hours. 4-5 pieces of wood each, one load Sun morning and one Sun night will get me through until Mon morning. My cat stove will stretch the loads out providing even heat and plenty of coals to reload on. That's probably hard to picture. I've had this house and stove for 4 winters and I still have a hard time getting used to it. Another thing that you will need, regardless of which stove you choose, is DRY wood. This is also very different from the good old days. Modern EPA rated burning devices are very efficient burning dry wood but won't burn wet wood worth a flip. Start CSSing (cutting, splitting and stacking) your wood now or you will be very disappointed with the performance of your new stove. Oak (one of the slowest drying woods) takes two years minimum CSSed to dry. Good luck.
Well it's already been said but I agree an insert is to retrofit an existing fireplace when one can't easily accommodate a freestanding stove. It doesn't really make sense to build new and use an insert. A zero clearance fireplace maybe, but not an insert. Scotty Overkill yours does look very fantastic. My preference is freestanding stove. Besides radiating heat a bit better and not needing any electric blowers, I really appreciate the large cooking surface of the stove, and easier to access parts if need be or add things like pipe dampers, flue probes etc. With the insert I had you couldn't even access the secondary air intake. I had a few overfires that I would have plugged the secondary air intake to stop feeding the fire but I couldn't, only thing I could do was open up the door and let cooler room air rush in, but that is a bit scary when the stove is at 1,000ยบ+ and when flaming logs might be ready to roll out. Some stoves have warming/drying racks, tool holders, etc. If your designing the home I hope the layout is good for heating from a single source. If things are fairly open and heat doesn't have to go down hallways and around bends, a nice radiant stove without even using fans is quite possible. My folks house every single room opens to the stove room with the exception of the dining room which has to pass through the kitchen and is always cold, and the upstairs which is still only 1 room away but with the stairway in between. They usually don't even run a single fan and nice and toasty except for the dinning room which they rarely use. My house... all added on, hallways and bends, giant great room where all the heat goes up where no one is at, 2 stoves and 6-8 fans running usually. I really look forward to designing my next home, but I think it's not going to happen until my son graduates school, so got to deal with this place for 7 more years or so.