is a cat stove really worth the hassle?

[BroRalph]

So I started looking at the EPA certified stoves, both the current 2020 list, then the list after checking the box including older stoves out of production.
Not sure why they would tweak the 91; The Buck 91 Bay I was burning at my MIL's had 1.2 gm. emissions according to the old EPA test. Maybe they wanted to switch to the cord wood test option for whatever reason, and that necessitated a tweak? Where did you hear that
The output numbers seem all over the board, when they got to choose for the new tests, crib wood or cord wood. But overall the output numbers look to be higher in the new tests with cord wood.
BTW, that 91 Bay also tested at 8800 BTU low burn; That's pretty low. But I couldn't turn mine down as low as I wanted, owing to the air control slider plates not sealing as tightly as needed (right slider.) The design of their system, it seemed to me, could allow for some variance when assembled at the factory. One Buck owner had a very simple solution; remove the rod that holds the two primary air plates, and bend it slightly over your knee so that the plates fit tighter to the air inlet holes. Unfortunately I never get that done before she sold the house, and the stove stayed. I had come up with a different solution. It helped but it needed refining. The single boost air plate (left slider) sealed its port pretty well, on my particular 91.
I hesitate to ask the Buck dealer here if they were tweaked; He struck me as a know-it-all that didn't actually know all that much. I tried to tell him last year that the federal tax rebate was going up to 30% this year, but he told me I waswrong. I told him to look it up, but I doubt he ever did.

Woodstove Database | Burnwise | US EPA

Hmmm, the Woodstock IS doesn't look to have gone up all that much, but the AS more substantially, if I'm remembering the old prices right.

You were paying like $550 a week to heat that place (using $3/gal price??) Good grief!! 😲


If you get cat scratch fever, you won't need a stove either.. you'll be hot as hell!🔥😏

 

[joop]

these old stone houses do NOT hold heat in .everybody talks about thermal mass i'm still waiting lol .just using electric baseboard heating wich i have 16 costs about 5000 per winter depends on temps.i used to buy 11 cords burn them all,,to much work lol now i buy 5 and supplement the heaters

 

[Ashful]

You were paying like $550 a week to heat that place (using $3/gal price??) Good grief!! 😲

During the coldest several weeks of winter, yes... something like that. Hence why I got two stoves installed PDQ, after moving in! Oil was running about $3.25 to $3.65/gal back then, prior to the 2015/16 dip, when my price went down as low as $1.79/gal.

 

[Ashful]

these old stone houses do NOT hold heat in .everybody talks about thermal mass i'm still waiting lol .just using electric baseboard heating wich i have 16 costs about 5000 per winter depends on temps.i used to buy 11 cords burn them all,,to much work lol now i buy 5 and supplement the heaters

Well, it's colder up where you are, so you might be seeing some more benefit from the stone, than those of us down here at 40°N. Ever shoot your walls with an IR thermometer? What do they read in your normal winter weather?

The interior plaster on the old stone walls of my house hold pretty close to 53F all winter. The result of that is it's costlier to heat these places when it's 30 - 60F outside, because I'm still working a tendency for our interior temperature to run toward 53F, versus a well-insulated framed wall not having a fixed temperature. But on the flip side, when we get a 3 day excursion down into single digits, my heating system doesn't see nearly the increase in load experienced in a modern house. Aside from colder windows, it's still just fighting that same 53F it was seeing on a 60F day, even when it's 0F outside.

What we can say is that probably only people in old stone houses continue to load their stoves on 60F days. It might be 60F outside, but putting aside the heat of normal human activity, the room temperature would find itself somewhere just above 53F with such little added heat at the windows.

 

[ratsrepus]

Not according to the latest JD Powers owner reports. Top luxury car brands did not fare well.

I said most of the time

 

[joop]

ya 35c outside i can were a coat and be comfortable it's nuts.idid the thermal on the wall when i first moved in a while ago if i remember it was 21c or 13 lol getting old

 

[EatenByLimestone]

The house next to me was the local farmhouse for the area. It’s stick built, but the original first floor/original house had brick interior walls. I bet they held the radiant heat fairly well when it was heated by fireplace.

Unfortunately it wasn’t kept up and was sold to a flipper. Those brick walls were torn out.

 

[Ashful]

I bet they held the radiant heat fairly well when it was heated by fireplace.

Yeah, taking this back to the "is a cat stove really worth the hassle", we can't ignore that one of (maybe the by sales volume?) leading cat stoves is made of soapstone. Until just recently (Ideal Steel), their entire marketing and lineup was based entirely on soapstone, as is the company name.

Soapstone does have somewhat higher heat capacity than cast iron, so in the most technical sense, it does hold a bit more heat for a little bit longer than an iron stove of similar weight. But when put up against the mass and heat demand of the house surrounding it, you wouldn't think that's going to amount to much.

What's ironic is that, if there's really any merit to the idea of soapstone leveling off heat output, it would be put to better use against a non-cat stove. Cat stoves already put out more even heat throughout the burn cycle, leaving less benefit to the soapstone itself. I guess that's why Hearthstone has as much popularity as they do, they're mixing the right material with the tech that actually benefits most from it.

Those brick walls you mention, if entirely interior and if facing a radiant stove surface, could do quite well as radiators. Each of my stoves stuffed back into a fireplace is directly adjacent to approximately 15,000 lb. of stone, as ~114 cubic feet of mixed granite (103 lb/ft3) and red shale (166 lb/ft3). That stone facing a mostly-convective stove doesn't get nearly as warm as the soapstone body of a stove, but it does heat up nicely to about 80F by the end of a load. It is still noticeably warmer than the rest of the stone and plaster walls in this house, a full day after the fire has gone out, even though almost half of that stonework is exterior-facing.

Just as a quick comparison (OT), when I had radiant cemented iron stoves in these fireplaces, the stone behind them would heat up so much you could not touch it. I don't know the temperature, but maybe even approaching 150F on the interior surface directly behind the stove. That heat was largely lost to the back yard

 

[Easy Livin’ 3000]

you get what you pay for, well most of the time you do

I think the same people who came up with this gem also gave us the "diamonds are forever" slop. A clever little saying that helps separate fools from their money.

I like this one better- The best things in life are free!

 

[Ashful]

I like this one better- The best things in life are free!

True... but unrelated. A young child yelling "daddy!" with glee when you get home from work is priceless. Or is it?

How much does it cost to raise a child in 2024? Things for prospective parents to consider.

The cost of raising a child in 2024 can be expensive. We’ve covered the eight major expenses parents need to consider when budgeting for their child’s future.

mint.intuit.com

In any case, I think you're giving @ratsrepus an unnecessarily hard time. While material cost (often called "cost-plus") pricing is no great measure of an item's performance or suitability, there are many expensive high quality widgets on this rock, pricing items of a kind eventually drift from cost-plus, and settle into what the market will bear. And what the market will bear is almost invariably tied to desirability, driven by such performance and suitability.

Long way of saying, expensive things that don't outperform cheap things, eventually fall by the wayside. The only problem with your example of a diamond is that you've misinterpreted the metric by which their performance is being measured.

 

[Easy Livin’ 3000]

True... but unrelated. A young child yelling "daddy!" with glee when you get home from work is priceless. Or is it?

How much does it cost to raise a child in 2024? Things for prospective parents to consider.

The cost of raising a child in 2024 can be expensive. We’ve covered the eight major expenses parents need to consider when budgeting for their child’s future.

mint.intuit.com

In any case, I think you're giving @ratsrepus an unnecessarily hard time. While material cost (often called "cost-plus") pricing is no great measure of an item's performance or suitability, there are many expensive high quality widgets on this rock, pricing items of a kind eventually drift from cost-plus, and settle into what the market will bear. And what the market will bear is almost invariably tied to desirability, driven by such performance and suitability.

Long way of saying, expensive things that don't outperform cheap things, eventually fall by the wayside. The only problem with your example of a diamond is that you've misinterpreted the metric by which their performance is being measured.

Truisms created and used by marketing people. I rarely pass on the chance to point it out when folks repeat and perpetuate such nonsense in our zeitgeist. Alas, as we have recently seen all too well, lots of folks are very attracted to simple, catchy, sayings, regardless of their utility or truth. The "you get what you pay for" does an enormous amount of harm to people, at least to their financial well being, and probably their sense of self worth.

Simple solutions to complicated problems, like, just buy the more expensive stuff because its obviously better than the cheaper options, are worse than useless, and such thinking allows crap like cryptocurrency to spring up to keep people from ever having a chance.

Our university system has also done a masterful job at this. Convince most of society that an education is never a waste, that they can't take it away from you, etc. Now we have a bunch of folks who have signed up for a crushing debt burden that they will never escape from, barring debt forgiveness.

I wonder, how much of the outcome of a child's life is driven by how much money thier parents spent on getting them launched in the real world, once the basic needs are covered? If my childhood friends are an example, there's actually an inverse relationship.

Regarding the measure of utility for a pretty rock, I don't know what the current divorce rate is these days, has been around 50%. Hardly seems like forever to me! Can I get my money back?

 

[Woody Stover]

I knew you would come around sooner or later....you should change your name to BK Holler

Pretty sure he hasn't jumped on the bandwagon to that degree. He's said that he's waiting for a stove to become available to him that will better meet his needs. In the meantime, he's not averse to making use of a free stove, even if it doesn't quite do the job in his situation.

you get what you pay for, well most of the time you do

Not according to the latest JD Powers owner reports. Top luxury car brands did not fare well.

I knew there was gonna be a good reason for me not to buy one (beside the fact that I can't spare that kind of coin.) 😏

 

[Rich L]

Check out The Reco-heat if you want longer heat times with good heat using less wood.I'll be getting one for next season.

 

[bholler]

Check out The Reco-heat if you want longer heat times with good heat using less wood.I'll be getting one for next season.

How does it extend burn times???

 

[kborndale]

Check out The Reco-heat if you want longer heat times with good heat using less wood.I'll be getting one for next season.

No it won't. It may put a little more heat into your house during your normal burn but it won't extend your burn time. While doing that it will also drastically increase the amount of creosote in your chimney so make sure you sweep monthly.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

The creosote cooking off could put a lot more heat into the home!

 

[begreen]

we can't ignore that one of (maybe the by sales volume?) leading cat stoves is made of soapstone.

Do you have sales figures? I always thought that they were quite low volume comparatively, more like Kuma. It wouldn't surprise me if BK outsold them 3:1. Now that all Hearthstones are cat hybrids I would expect their sales to be much larger though my thought is that soapstone stoves in general are more of a niche market.

 

[Ashful]

Do you have sales figures? I always thought that they were quite low volume comparatively, more like Kuma. It wouldn't surprise me if BK outsold them 3:1. Now that all Hearthstones are cat hybrids I would expect their sales to be much larger though my thought is that soapstone stoves in general are more of a niche market.

Good question. I just spent a few minutes digging on Google, and it seems the various public aggregators on the interweb estimate Woodstock revenue around $4.0M, and BK at $4.2M. I suspect these numbers may be accurate for some period in each company's history, but knowing the way things can change as market forces and regulations shove stove sales around, I don't know if those numbers are current or old.

 

[begreen]

That is a surprise. It piqued my interest. I compared to the revenue of Lopi (Travis Industries) at $71 M, Pacific Energy at $53 M and SBI at $47M.

 

[Ashful]

That is a surprise. It piqued my interest.

Yeah, actually, it surprises me too. I know Woodstock is very popular, within the scale of the cat stove market. Heck, there's an entire competing woodstove forum basically dedicated to them. But like you, had expected BK claimed a much bigger fraction of the market than Woodstock.

I guess @BKVP could probably tell us if we're even in the ballpark, without disclosing exact figures. A VP of marketing would surely know their own as well as their competition's approximate revenue.

 

[BKVP]

Yeah, actually, it surprises me too. I know Woodstock is very popular, within the scale of the cat stove market. Heck, there's an entire competing woodstove forum basically dedicated to them. But like you, had expected BK claimed a much bigger fraction of the market than Woodstock.

I guess @BKVP could probably tell us if we're even in the ballpark, without disclosing exact figures. A VP of marketing would surely know their own as well as their competition's approximate revenue.

We are a publicly held company. Owned by Decisive Divided Corporation and traded on the TSX. Our annual sales are available with this information. I think you sleuths will find $4M is a tad bit 🤭.

BKVP

 

[BKVP]

Remember some of us report in Canadian dollars!

 

[56night]

My experience with a post 2020 cat stove has been horrendous, and that's being very polite. We purchased a 2021 Hearthstone Manchester and what a disappointing and frustrating purchase it has been. Let me count the ways:

1. After a total of 8 months of use over two seasons the air control mechanism on the front of the stove failed and required disassembling 1/2 of the stove to repair. This issue was further complicated by the fact that none of the local wood stove/fireplace techs were familiar with this procedure and it took a long time to find someone willing to take on the job.

2. Since we heat exclusively with our stove we do burn 24/7 when it's cold and unfortunately the catalysts require cleaning every 3 weeks. And this means the stove needs to be nearly cold so you can access the cats and vacuum them clean--brushing the cats is pointless and only buys about 1 week of decent, not optimal, operation.

3. After two seasons of use our spark arrester was nearly totally clogged with deposits and this never happened even ONCE in 26 years with an older Regency stove. Boy I miss that stove.

4. The Manchester is a messy stove. The front door is designed in such a way that ash gets trapped in a crevice and every time you open it ash drops on the hearth.

5. The front door on the Manchester is basically useless once the fire is started because regardless of how well the fire is burning or how clean the cats and stovepipe are a large amount of smoke will escape into the room so for adding wood the side door is necessary 100% of the time.

6. Now after almost 4 seasons of use, usually we burn a lot between November and March/April, the catalysts' performance has dropped dramatically. I tried removing the cats and cleaning with a diluted vinegar solution as the manual described and this did make a large improvement but still probably need new cats at around $400 US for the pair.

Now for the good. When EVERYTHING is clean and in PERFECT condition the stove does heat up quickly and radiates heat for a long time once max safe temps have been reached. The problem is that the stove seems to be very high maintenance and performance seems to degrade very quickly. All we burn is seasoned Live Oak, Tan Oak, and Madrone.

Maybe other companies put together a better catalyst stove than Hearthstone, and it wouldn't take much to be better than our Manchester. I can't financially justify getting a new stove yet but I would not shed a tear if our Manchester fell apart and I was forced to. I guess my advice would be to only buy a stove that had a bypass mechanism so you can keep burning even with the cats clogged and non-functional.

 

[Todd]

My experience with a post 2020 cat stove has been horrendous, and that's being very polite. We purchased a 2021 Hearthstone Manchester and what a disappointing and frustrating purchase it has been. Let me count the ways:

1. After a total of 8 months of use over two seasons the air control mechanism on the front of the stove failed and required disassembling 1/2 of the stove to repair. This issue was further complicated by the fact that none of the local wood stove/fireplace techs were familiar with this procedure and it took a long time to find someone willing to take on the job.

2. Since we heat exclusively with our stove we do burn 24/7 when it's cold and unfortunately the catalysts require cleaning every 3 weeks. And this means the stove needs to be nearly cold so you can access the cats and vacuum them clean--brushing the cats is pointless and only buys about 1 week of decent, not optimal, operation.

3. After two seasons of use our spark arrester was nearly totally clogged with deposits and this never happened even ONCE in 26 years with an older Regency stove. Boy I miss that stove.

4. The Manchester is a messy stove. The front door is designed in such a way that ash gets trapped in a crevice and every time you open it ash drops on the hearth.

5. The front door on the Manchester is basically useless once the fire is started because regardless of how well the fire is burning or how clean the cats and stovepipe are a large amount of smoke will escape into the room so for adding wood the side door is necessary 100% of the time.

6. Now after almost 4 seasons of use, usually we burn a lot between November and March/April, the catalysts' performance has dropped dramatically. I tried removing the cats and cleaning with a diluted vinegar solution as the manual described and this did make a large improvement but still probably need new cats at around $400 US for the pair.

Now for the good. When EVERYTHING is clean and in PERFECT condition the stove does heat up quickly and radiates heat for a long time once max safe temps have been reached. The problem is that the stove seems to be very high maintenance and performance seems to degrade very quickly. All we burn is seasoned Live Oak, Tan Oak, and Madrone.

Maybe other companies put together a better catalyst stove than Hearthstone, and it wouldn't take much to be better than our Manchester. I can't financially justify getting a new stove yet but I would not shed a tear if our Manchester fell apart and I was forced to. I guess my advice would be to only buy a stove that had a bypass mechanism so you can keep burning even with the cats clogged and non-functional.

I think I would remove the cat and see how she runs without. These hybrids still have secondary burn before it hits the cat to clean up the rest.

 

[BC_Josh]

If I had the space and the bucks, I'd install a Temp Cast wood stove, the kind that have the firebricks that hold the heat in. They're beautiful and you will find that they leave the cleanest chimneys of all the woodstoves. You burn a hot fire or two a day and it radiates the heat all day. My dad has one and I love it!

I have a small cat stove and it works well for my old, small house. I wouldn't want to keep on loading a non-cat stove and have the room get too hot. Mind you, I live in the interior rain forest area of south eastern BC where it hovers just below freezing most of the winter, so I can get away with burning two cords a year.