Bulldogmoose,
I've got a Jotul Rockland 550 insert upstairs and an old smoke monster stove in the basement. The free stander produces twice as much heat as the insert, maybe more. Anyway, there's no comparison. Freestander can run you out of the room, and the insert takes pretty special consideration to make uncomfortably hot. I have gotten the 550 stove room to 72-74 degrees eventually, but the freestander takes no work to achieve 80 degrees in the same room.
For 550 success, I need dry wood, an established coal bed, then 3-4 new splits with the door cracked open, let them get engulfed in flames (slightly char-coaled), close the door, and start cutting the air back until the flames mysteriously rise off the logs and float around in the firebox, disembodied from the wood. Now the insert is working.
Get an IR gun (Kintrex), and use it to calibrate the location of the magnetic one. If it reads 75 degrees too low, it'll always be 75 degrees too low. Also use the IR gun to discover how many temp zones the stove can have and that it varies inch by inch. It's an education.
Also might want to consider that thing is probably moving a ton of air to feed the blowers. That's pretty cold air going across the floor to be heated and blown back out. And you may have a good layer of warm air 6" down from the ceiling. Check ceiling temps with the IR gun. Run your house's HVAC fan to break up holding areas for heat and disrupt cold flows returning to the fan blower.
I've really struggled to make this thing run me out of the room it's in, but it takes a few hours, and I'm still pretty chicken about it. But we're making progress. I'm going to start another thread about a very small IR aim point that ALWAYS has the highest temp reading on the stove, even though the temps under the cowling are always lower there, and maybe folks with similar machines can help prove/disprove this single teeny aim point I discovered.
Keep us posted.
Thanks,
Greg
