Hi Hollis, and welcome to hearth.com. This is a terrific place for questions, support, and camraderie, esp. if you take yours a bit on the goofy side.
This is my first year with a Heritage as well. 2000sf, pretty well insulated. I do not use a fan blowing on the glass, I get enough heat, and it gets pretty cold in central AK as well. I keep the house at about 70F when I'm awake, and usually awaken to about 65-68 when it's zero or above outside (in the morning. after I've had a good night's sleep. like this is supposed to work). This stove kept this house warm even during a recent extended cold snap (-20 to -30F). My wood is well-seasoned aspen and cottonwood, with the occasional stick of spruce thrown in. Reading about people burning wood that around here is used for fine furniture still seems a little unreal--birch is as good as it gets here, and I don't have any. Hoping next year I will.
I fill my stove at night, and get up to a warm house. The only thing that gets me up at night is my dog; when I'm up waiting for her to come back, sometimes I go down and check the fire while she's outside, and sometimes I just watch the secondaries dance. (I'm afraid to go back to bed and miss the dog scratching on the door. She could die out there. So I do something that keeps me awake until she comes back.)
I fill my stove in the morning, leave for work, and come home in the evening to a warm house.
Today was my first day back at work after a three-day storm kept me home-bound, and we had a power failure during the storm. Keeping the house warm was not one of my worries--thank goodness I had the stove, as I've said 100 times this winter. My boiler failed spectacularly in January--high drama, smoke and steam and green goo all over the garage--still not replaced it, so I haven't any choice but to get good at this.
Longest burn I had producing useable heat was an 11-1/2 hour burn at -20F, gone all day and came home to a 65F house. My temps upstairs and downstairs usually differ by 1-2 degrees. Eight hours is a piece of cake. So this is what the stove is capable of; given that your house is a mite smaller, in a warmer climate with more sunlight, and your wood is vastly superior to mine, my thought is that you should be getting the same or better results from your stove--it's just a matter of tweaking a few things. You can't keep getting up in the middle of the night--this is a stove, not a sick child. It's supposed to be taking care of you.
Unless you have three-hundredses to burn, I'd encourage you to learn more about operating it with what you have. I have had the dubious advantage of having to get good at this or have the house freeze up; you have a shivering parrot; we are both motivated learners. If I can be of service sharing what I have learned to get to this point, please let me know. Some of the things to consider are layout, siting, construction, and materials of house, stovepipe location and design, draft--for starters. If this is the sort of thing that amuses you, than yours is the sort of problem that can provide us with plenty of entertainment, and hopefully you with a solution.
This would then be my advice: learn more, tweak, and see if you can't up the performance of your stove before you go out and buy an accessory that keeps you electricity-dependent for heat. If you have a power failure, you're back where you started with a cold house and a cold bird and no furnace to fall back on.
ETA: Was just downstairs checking to see if the coals had burned down sufficiently to lay my night fire. To my annoyance, my son was running a fan pointed at his xbox (trying to waylay the `red eye of death' by keeping his unit cool) and the overblow was hitting my stovepipe. That's when I did the exaggerated headslap a la `I coulda-woulda-shouda . . . '--it irritates me when he does that because it cools off the stove. So my question for you: do you *always* have the fan blowing on the glass? What happens if you don't?
