The new stove is pumping out heat (and stink) RIGHT now!
To catch you up, last year we used the old KOZI 100 pellet stove that came with the house. It was old and messy and didn’t heat the house well (we lived at 16°C last winter) so this summer we bought a Napoleon 1900 wood stove.
A week ago the installers finally were able to come by to hook up the new stove, and to remove the old pellet stove. They are REALLY busy. Most rural people here heat their houses with wood already – and the few that didn’t are ditching their oil furnaces and moving back to wood. The installers told Jeff that some people just won’t get their stoves installed before it is cold. They are already working long days and weekends and are burning themselves out. I believe they are doing 3 installs a day right now.
Here are a few photos of the stove after installation. Now we have to mop up all the soot and dirt left from the messy pellet stove.
The first few fires are supposed to be hot kindling fires to season the fire bricks inside. The paint stinks too. The manual says we shouldn’t expect good heat from it until it has burned for 30-40 hours total.
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scott
Scroll to bottom of this page to see my installation.
I did my own installation and rated the stove on a couple of sites. Then a bunch of people started asking me if I was still happy with the stove.
Last night I replied as follows to one guy. I just cut and pasted my response below. It has some tips that you might all ready know about but if not they are helpful:
I’ve had my stove almost exactly one year now and I still love it. I can’t say anything bad. I’ve got a 3600 square foot house which it easily heats. But of course I live in the California wine country where the lowest it gets is in the lo 20s (Farenheit). Here is a link to pictures of mine after I was completely done with the installation:
http://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/9392/P22/
Scroll to the bottom of the page.
Anyway I will pass on advise/observations:
1) The plastic gold colored trim which is to be applied to the bottom of the stove – between the petastil and the base platform should be warmed up before installed. It gets much more flexable when its warm and much easier to apply – do not attempt to apply this trim if it is cold and stiff.
2) Go to harbor freight and buy some welders gloves ($7.00 buys 3 pairs). Always wear them when filling the stove with wood when its is hot. Besides the obviouse, to keep from insinerating your hands, you will not want to “throw” large logs into the fire box – as one not wearing gloves would do to avoid burns. If one does throw such logs, they will hit the bricks at the back of the fire box and cracking will occur.
3) I typically burn my stove at full throttle – 900 degrees below the trivet, 700 degrees on the stove pipe, and 600 degrees on the steel viser above the window. People on the hearth.com forum (URL above) will say that this is too hot but since I am an engineer and have carefully monitored the chimney temperatures as well as those of the surrounding combustable materials and found there to be no high temperature hazzards that would cause a structural fire. Basically I don’t aggree with those guys.
4) My research indicates that stoves with very large fire boxes, like the 1900, provide high heating capacity but not necessarily long burn times. I have found that I get both. The fire gets hot enough to melt glass bottels and in the morning there is always a lot of coals left to start the next fire. If I burn eucolyptus or oak, then there are at least 3 inches of coals and the stove is still far to hot to touch.
5) The front window always stays clean but every three weeks or so I will let it cool down and wipe it with some windex to get off any haze. This takes about 45 seconds – even after burning the nastiest sappy pine or cypris.
6) I ordered the cooking trivet, which I would still have bought if I had to do it all over again. I use it to heat spagetting or tea water, cook artichokes and chestnuts. But I can’t say that it will heat water to a rolling boil in a reasonable time unless you burn it at 900 degrees for a hour or so. At these temps the trivet gets to about 350 degrees and will boil two gallons of water in about 1 hour.
7) The fire box is so large that I saw and split I half as much as I used to.
8) I burn 24/7 and I only have to empty the ashes once every three weeks and I don’t use the built in ash catcher. I just use a metal shovel and bucket to scope them out.
Hope this helps.
Scott