I did exactly the same thing except I used some kindling from a bundle of softwood that I purchased and I went straight to live oak. My heater has not came on once since I started the stove yesterday. The temperature in the hallway, which is 30' away from the FP is staying at 72-74.
I am going through a learning curve with the insert. I am used to burning lots of wood in the masonry FP and not having to worry about coals and ash falling out. How do you manage the coals and keep them from rolling out when you open the door? It's not a fire hazard since everything is stone and tile. It gets in the way of the door closing against the seal if you don't bush it away. How often do you remove some of the coals during use, or do you ?
We try not ever to remove a significant amount of coals from the stove, but some small ones do come out on occasion if we remove ash during a long streak of burning. (This was common for us in Virginia when we rarely let the stove go out in winter. Here we'll burn for several days but have some several day streaks where we don't, it seems, so we try to save our cleanouts for times when the stove is cold.)
It's good to let a layer of ash build up on the bottom of the firebox. About the only tools we use in our stove are an ash rake, something like this:
Amazon product ASIN B005S4LINQand a shovel or special scoop to remove ash.
We use it to push everything to the back of the firebox, and then we can rake coals to the front (or sometimes all the way to one side if there are a lot) for a reload. If we need to clean out ash, we try to do it from the pile that has had all the large coals removed.
Do you have a metal bucket with a lid and a non-combustible surface outside for storing it? You do need to have a good ash/coal disposal system with a woodstove.
Does your stove load primarily E/W (wood parallel to glass) or N/S (cut ends facing the glass)? We load ours mostly N/S, and I find I'm more likely to end up with some ash coming out the door if I put wood too close to the glass, or if I've had an E/W piece that has rolled forward. It does happen on occasion, and I have a little hearth brush that I use to sweep it into our metal coal shovel like a dustpan, and I return it to the stove. I don't think we've ever had a coal fall out of the stove. We try to remove ash before it comes up to the level of the protective lip inside our door, and we try to keep wood behind that, not on top of it. (I just loaded the stove with a slightly too long cedar split, though. It fit, but it's too close to the glass, so it will probably give us a dark spot and some ash on the gasket in the morning. I find that when I first open the stove, if I leave the door cracked just a hair, sometimes some ash that may be on the gasket will get caught in the draft and fly back into the stove.)
I'm just watching our nighttime load take off. We never did get out of the thirties today, and it's already below freezing. I'm sure thankful for wood heat. It doesn't heat our whole house, but it makes it a whole lot nicer in the winter than it ever used to be.
