Happiness Is A New Wood Stove
Posted By Jessica |
26. Feb, 2010
6 Comments
This is pretty much the mother of all “Happiness Is” posts. Currently, I’m sitting in my new favorite chair next to our new wood stove, drinking coffee and looking out the window as the snow lazily drifts about. Can you say COZY? I thought so.
It only took a little bit of convincing on my part before Dave agreed that our first major house purchase should be a wood stove. Although this winter has been relatively mild, we found ourselves burning through kerosene like there’s no tomorrow. It doesn’t help that we’re both home all of the time – as in, all day every day. It was getting expensive, not to mention kerosene is not so good for the ol’ the environment. A wood stove was the obvious solution to supplement our heating. Plus, we live in a log cabin. A log cabin NEEDS a wood stove. It’s like law or something.
As if those weren’t reason enough, NOW is the time to buy a wood stove. There’s a nifty little tax credit available right now as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. To promote the use of renewable, domestically produced, carbon neutral fuels, the Act offers a credit of 30% (up to $1500) of the purchase price of any new wood or pellet stove – including installation and materials – that achieves at least 75% efficiency. It’s kind of a good deal and it seemed silly not to take advantage of it. Of course, we won’t see that money back until next year, but I can be patient.
So, yesterday was a good day around here. Well, it was a good day except for discovering that our front porch is falling off, the power flickering on and off all day, our cable cutting out just before Bill Demong’s historic Nordic combined gold medal race, and getting stuck in our driveway in the wet, heavy snow after unsuccessfully finding a bar that was A. open and B. had a functional television to watch said historic race. Oh well. Can’t win ‘em all.
Oh yeah – pictures!
My boys, trying to get the first fire going.
All fired up.
Ah, yes, happiness is definitely a new wood stove.
The stove is the awesomest! Even in my rather makeshift little cabin/studio, I love it. And thanks for the reminder. I need to go out there and light the stove to enjoy myself sometimes, rather than just going out there for work.
Hellooooo! Bobby and I are doing a wood stove search right NOW! Because I know you guys did your research, we have a coupla questions.
(1) What is your hearth made of, and do you like it?
(2) Did you consider soap-stone stoves?
(3) Is your stove your primary source of heat now (well, not now because it’s spring, but you know what I mean).
Thanks guys!
Linnea
Hi! Ok, so a little disclaimer: we DID do our research, but a little bit backwards than we normally do for a purchase like this. I started poking around online a bit, promptly got overwhelmed by all of the options and the frustration of trying to find any useful information out there, and then decided to pop into the one dealer in town to see what he had available. Well, we decided we liked the guy and really wanted to give him our business, so right off the bat our choices were limited to whatever he carried (which was mainly the Lopi brand).
So, to answer your questions out of order:
I did consider soapstone in the beginning, but I’m cheap and decided the extra cost wasn’t worth the benefits of it. Plus, we kind of dig the old fashioned look of cast iron. The radiant heating of soapstone is pretty cool, though. From what I hear, soapstone can also take longer to come up to temp (which isn’t good for my personality), but the result is more “even,” longer-lasting heat. And the stove itself doesn’t get as hot, which is nice if you’re accident prone. Anyway, the dealer we went through didn’t carry any soapstone stoves, so the temptation was never there. But, like I said, had it been an option for us I’m not sure I would have sprung for the extra cost.
Yes, our stove is now our primary source of heat! It’s great. Although, we didn’t have it during the absolute coldest part of the winter, so we may find ourselves supplementing with our other heater next year. Hard to tell. We don’t burn the stove overnight, though. We experimented with that for a couple of nights, but decided it was a waste of wood since the temperature in our house wasn’t dropping below our nighttime thermostat setting on our regular heater anyway.
Ok, the hearth. We opted to go with just a hearth pad instead of building one because 1) it was less $$$, and 2) we were in a hurry to install the stove because we were blowing through heating oil like no one’s business. The hearth we picked is slate and I like the looks of it just fine. That said, this is something that we’d like to change in the future. When cash is more plentiful and time is on our side, we’d LOVE to build a custom hearth. We never got to the point of researching materials, though.
As for the stove itself, there are a couple of features that I’m really glad we have – top-loading and an ash pan. Wood stoves are messy enough as is and the ash pan seems like a way easier and cleaner alternative to sweeping and vacuuming the ashes out. Top-loading also cuts down on the mess and, again, it just seems easier to drop a log on top of the fire from a safe distance instead of opening the front doors and sticking your hand into a raging inferno (which, come to think of it, is probably a plus for Bobby). Anyhow, I obviously don’t have anything to compare it to, but those two features sold us on this particular model and they’ve turned out to be really nice to have.
Good luck! Let us know what you decide on.
Wait, one more thing about the hearth. You can see in the pics above that it actually sits a couple of inches out from the wall. That really bugs me, but we had to do it that way in order to get the required clearance from the front edge of the hearth to the stove and the side walls to the stove. Safety first, you know.
Thanks for all the info! We are heading up to New Hampshire next weekend to look at soapstone stoves and get one on sale, I think. It will be our *only* source of heat (though we will probably build a small electric heater into the bathroom wall for chilly mornings). We also want to do a custom hearth, but like you, will have to wait for time and money to make a comeback
Awesome! You’ll love it. Getting the fire going has become a nice part of our morning routine.