Who could blame her? It's mighty hot in there!
LOL!!
I assume you've been looking at the EPA BTU output ratings. If so, take these with a grain of salt. I've found several rating that seem not to be in line with prevailing wisdom here. I would dig up some examples but I'm kinda busy right now...
But I 'm sure they have sophisticated test equipment that they use to come up with the ratings. Not sure why their results wouldn't reflect real life but apparently that's the case.
Actually, I have not been focusing on any particular rating per say, but I was focusing on the relationship between the BTU ratings and the claimed square footage to be heated. It's too bad there is not a better more acurate measurement of how much heat one will get from a stove. It makes it very difficult to choose the correct sized stove for a given space. I found a calculator on Woodstocks site that lets you put in the size of your room, then select ceiling height, then the basic insulation (Poor, ok, Good, extremely good), and it tells you the estimated BTU's you require. So that is what got me thinking about this.... I also watched the Woodstock video of them testing the low burn emmisions of the Progress hybrid with cord wood. So it's easy to see how they measure emmisions, they measure what particles are going out the stack. But, what do you measure for BTU's?
What is needed is a set space (say 1000 sq feet) at a set temperature and atmosphere (temp, humidity, pressure...). Then set each stove in the room and burn preset amounts of EPA style wood based on the firebox size. Then graph the rooms temp. rise and fall over the time of the burn. Then pick a temp, say 70 degrees and rate each stove for how long it can hold that "test" room environment at that temperature or above. And or just average the temp the stove kept the room over it's burn time. So you would end up with something like:
Rating method one (how long did the stove hold the setpoint temp):
Stove 1 rating: 3 hours
Stove 2 rating: 9 hours
Stove 3 rating: 4 hours
Rating method two (Average room temp / hours of burn time) = what it tells us about the stove:
Stove 1 rating: 75/2 (brought room to an avg of 75 degree's for 2 hours) = Avg heat, with short burn time
Stove 2 rating: 74/8 (brought room to an avg of 74 degree's for 8 hours) = Avg heat., long burn time
Stove 3 rating: 95/3 (brought room to an avg of 95 degree's for 3 hours) = hot stove, but short burn time
And we would get each stoves graph, so we can see how linear or non-linear the heat curve is with each stove.