Did you have lots of active flames in the box at that setting?
How many square feet are you heating?
Do you have a block off plate installed?
You may have said in a previous post, if so I missed it.
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2014-2015 Blaze King Performance thread (Everything BK)
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Did you have lots of active flames in the box at that setting?
How many square feet are you heating?
Do you have a block off plate installed?
You may have said in a previous post, if so I missed it.
Doug Morford
Member
You're saying there aren't a lot low density hardwoods in the area? I'm not too familiar with east coast forests. He seems to have some pretty light wood either way, that's a pretty quick burn in my limited experience with a cat stove.
Cherry and Silver Maple come to mind as examples of less dense hardwoods native to NJ. I've never been there but do know they share many species in common with my area.
Even with wood at .4g/cc that would seem to be a short burn time although I'm not sure the Princess inserts are quite as large as the free standing version.
Also we don't know how old the wood is. He only said he has had it six months.
Still not convinced the wood is the only problem. He only said he didn't have a good feeling about his wood.
Should edit to say that since Super Storm Sandy devistated that area in 2012 that is a big part of the reason I think he could have soft wood thought to be hardwood.
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Niko
Minister of Fire
The fan at the bottom of the stairs is not gonna work, How warm is the room with insert? Same room as stove I cut a 8x12 hole in my floor put a 12x8 duct in between the floors and then put a 8inch duct fan inside the duct and installed heavy duty registers. The duct fan blows the hot air up in the coldup stairsThen i took a small box fan and hung it upside down from my upstairs ceiling and angle it down a lil to blow the hot air towards the floors. It took about 6hrs to warm up but now my upstairs is 74 vs 64. As long as i keep loading the wood I keep the house very comfortable.
Get a temperature gauge from home depot or harbor freight(you need to do testing). Measure how hot the ceiling is the room the stove is in and you will see how much hot air is above your head
So glad we let this BK thread run every year. 900 posts would be a Mods nightmare in individual threads, 
Liquidskin, as you see on my signature, we heat the house in town with a Napoleon NPS40 free standing pellet stove. The NPS40 is rated to heat up to 2000 sq. ft. Our house in town is 1420 sq. ft. The Napoleon struggled with carrying the house until we got the attic well insulated and got a lot of the air leaks sealed up. Even now, if the temps dip into the teens overnight (it was 18'F here the other night) the house will dip to the mid to upper 60s with the NPS40 running at the top end of the recommended feed rate.
I'm learning about wood burners but my understanding is that an insert is not going to put out the heat that a free standing stove will. Others here can comment on the physics involved.
The Princess is rated to heat up to 2500 sq. ft. We hope our wood stove will carry 2000 sq. ft. here. We are learning about that now. It does take a while to bring this house up to comfortable temps when the house is cold. We keep the HVAC at 50'F when we aren't here. It's 25'F outside right now with a wind chill temp of 22'F. We lit the wood stove when we arrived and it's been burning for about 2.5 hours. This is new construction with good windows and good insulation and it does hold the heat pretty well. The house temp in the vicinity of the stove has risen a solid 15'F in 2.5 hours from a 50'F house and a stone cold stove.. This side of the house is open floor plan so it all comes up to temp pretty much at the same time. It'll be a couple more hours, I'm guessing, before the temps even out in the other end of the house, i.e. the bedrooms.
I doubt that we could have brought the house temp up 15'F in 2.5 hours with the propane furnace- so there's that. The floors, furniture, walls were all cold too so it will take a while.
I just told my husband that maybe we should have gotten a King instead of a Princess to bring the entire house up to temp fast on these cold weekends. We plan to move here full time in a few years so maybe we'll look into selling the Princess and buying a King then- or maybe not. We'll have a few years to work with it and to figure out what we're doing.
I give you all of this information so you can gauge your insert's performance against a free standing Princess. Hopefully it helps.
P.S. I'm sitting here browsing Blaze King wood furnaces and brainstorming the possibilities... although unless we were able to achieve a solar installation with enough juice to run the HVAC fan, we'd still have to install and run a propane fired generator to run the HVAC fan during a power outage.
What impresses me is that the APEX furnace is only slightly larger than the King stove.
But the possibilities of the APEX- it's a hybrid burner (secondary burn system plus catalytic combuster) that can be attached in tandem with an existing gas, oil or electric furnace. And it meets the new emissions guidelines for wood furnaces. And it has an over 90% efficiency.
I am fascinated.
What impresses me is that the APEX furnace is only slightly larger than the King stove.
But the possibilities of the APEX- it's a hybrid burner (secondary burn system plus catalytic combuster) that can be attached in tandem with an existing gas, oil or electric furnace. And it meets the new emissions guidelines for wood furnaces. And it has an over 90% efficiency.
I am fascinated.
@becasunshine, did you get blowers for your stove yet? I bet you would find it much easier to warm up a cold house.
You may find the Princess to be enough stove once you are there full time to keep the house warm vs warming it up on weekends.
Just throwing this out there but have you looked into linking your phone to your HVAC thermostat? I know very little about it but it seems like something that could work very well since you are only using the home on weekends.
Loaded the stove full of Beech this am. Ran the stove hard for a while to bring the house temps up. Shut the stove down to a little under 2 and have been getting some serious ghost flames.
I've seen the ghost flames in this stove before but this has been like secondaries lit off for over an hour now. Pretty cool! Temps have dropped a little but not more than 60*.
I've seen the ghost flames in this stove before but this has been like secondaries lit off for over an hour now. Pretty cool! Temps have dropped a little but not more than 60*.
Ya, I think you are right about the Princess being enough stove when we aren't faced with warming up a cold house fast on a regular basis. That being said, I doubt that the HVAC system could have warmed this house as quickly as the Princess did on Friday night. Temps dropped sharply on Friday when the sun when down so in addition to warming up the cold house, we were also working against the temperature gradient as it got colder after dark.
We don't have full time internet or a landline phone here. We use a MiFi for internet both here and when we travel with our camper. We've thought about the remote control HVAC thermostat but it's not worth enough to us to install a landline or full time internet here- particularly now that we have the Princess. We get here, fire up the wood stove, and within a couple of hours we are comfortable without paying to run the heat pump or the propane furnace in the process. Just takes a little bit of patience and, as I'm finding, elbow grease.
We left the stove on low with embers in the box when we left here a couple of weeks ago. I had a nice brown glaze to scrape off of the glass (ash on a damp paper towel wasn't going to cut in on this stuff) before I started the stove. I could have burned it off, I guess, but I do love the ambience of the fire through the glass, and I didn't want to risk adding any more glaze to that glass.
That furnace, though... what a concept!
Jeff t, not yet. The way the house is laid out we don't need to move the heat that far, initially, to be comfortable. The stove sits just opposite the living room area of the open floor plan, and it heats up quickly. If we get the fire started and the stove burning well we have pretty much immediate heat in the area that we'll occupy for the first couple of hours. I typically bring dinner in our thermal mass cooker, so it's cooked, hot and ready to eat, or we cook up or heat up something quickly when we get here. We plug in the t.v., scoop up dinner on a plate or in a bowl, curl up in the living room to watch "Grimm," and the stove has the place warmed up pretty quickly.
It does take a little bit for the heat to get back to the bedrooms but we put our electric mattress pad on the bed last night and turned it up to "hell." (There really is an "H" for the highest setting. Pretty sure that means "Hell.")
Good idea about the blowers, though. We won't hesitate to get the blowers if we find that we can't get the house warmed up quickly enough!
The only down side to the Apex I see is the burn times. Big box and only 8 to 10 hr burn time. That's if I have that correct.
I looked into the Apex. But my house Furnace is in the wrong place. (Cost allot to relocate etc)
The Apex will do 45hrs according to BK.
Also an odd ball 7' flue.
More of a 'New build' installation over
Retro fit IMO.
The best i can do today, only running these at 950 Deg. C
That temp is mesured in the center of the Catalysts.
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BKVP
Minister of Fire
There is a lot of parasitic loss depending upon the total amount of duct work involved in each install of the APEX. Also, we suggest it be sized for home around 1,200-1,500 square feet. Yes there are folks that have placed them in the basement and have a single floor register off the plenum and claim it heats more square footage.
The Apex does not run well on any size other than 7" which our friends to the north can vouch is not uncommon in the land of maple syrup and cheaseies (sp?).
Chris
BKVP
Minister of Fire
Well I tried a different approch today.
Only loaded the stove with 4 splits on the bottom N-S. Then two splits ontop E-W.
Getting good hot fires and I only use 1/2 the wood. It will go 6-8hrs this way and hot. If I loaded it full it's get longer burning this hot but not double the time. Weird.
It's around freezing so not to bad weather wise.
Only loaded the stove with 4 splits on the bottom N-S. Then two splits ontop E-W.
Getting good hot fires and I only use 1/2 the wood. It will go 6-8hrs this way and hot. If I loaded it full it's get longer burning this hot but not double the time. Weird.
It's around freezing so not to bad weather wise.
Doug Morford
Member
This made me laugh. I have the same name for the high setting. It doesn't keep my fiance from using it though. Waking up in a pool of my own sweat is close enough to hell for me.
I only have 1200 up so it would work good for me. If it could produce 1/2 the forced air could In a short period of time I would be impressed.
I kinda figured you guys would have R&D'ed the crap out of this unit hence the 7" flue.
Never seen a 7" flue here, well maybe On old smoke dragon, creosote factory's.
It was one of the reasons I wouldn't buy one. Relocating the furnace would be the easy part, paying $$$$ ontop of $$$$ for new chimney was another.
Side note, do you sell many? I have yet to find ANY info from users online. Not even a instal picture.
Doug Morford
Member
This is interesting. My current cat was not in the best shape, so I replaced my it yesterday with a new Steelcat and it changed the burn quite a bit. The temperature fluctuations are pretty much non-existent now. The cat went ape for the first few hours, but after that it smoothed right out. This was on a setting of 1.25 for the entire burn (which still has a lot left to go than the graph shows).
I think it takes less of a damper opening now to get the cat to burn hotter. Basically, the new cat is more responsive to increases in smoke, and it is awesome.
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I think it takes less of a damper opening now to get the cat to burn hotter. Basically, the new cat is more responsive to increases in smoke, and it is awesome.
BKVP
Minister of Fire
Some in the USA but vastly more in Canada. Warm air furnaces are quite popular up north.
I'm still fascinated by the idea that I can put a wood stove in my house (King) that is just shy of the size of a wood furnace (Apex) and both have catalytic combustors in them.
I'm just completely taken with these stoves.
BTW we see NO smoke coming out of our chimney- NONE- unless one of us happens to be outside when the other person disengages the CAT and opens the stove to reload it. Otherwise there is no smoke and even very little aroma coming out of the chimney- and we've been burning in the "normal" range on the thermostat dial since last night.
I'm just completely taken with these stoves.
BTW we see NO smoke coming out of our chimney- NONE- unless one of us happens to be outside when the other person disengages the CAT and opens the stove to reload it. Otherwise there is no smoke and even very little aroma coming out of the chimney- and we've been burning in the "normal" range on the thermostat dial since last night.
Also, today- the Princess not only heated the house, but she cooked our dinner (spaghetti meat sauce with tortellini, steamed broccoli and re-heated home made rolls) and she dried a load of clothes on a rack set at a safe distance from the stove. Pretty amazing in terms of costs savings in propane for us. If we were willing to heat our water on the stove top, haul it to the bathroom and take a bath instead of a shower we would have used NO propane and very little electricity since arriving last night.
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