Corie -
I agree that too much of anything is not good... I wouldn't push much beyond what you have with Woodstock's setup, with that representing one extreme of the market. At some point, yea, you might have a stove that can burn for 36 hours, but it'll make so little heat per hour that it would get silly.
One way you could approach it is figure out how much you'd have to reduce the k-value of an existing steel stove to line up with the approximate k-value of the Woodstock setup. It would be a fun experiment if you had an outside air feed connection where you could install a flowmeter to measure the oxygen feed rate, and then monitor the stack and firebox temperatures. Then you'd be able to quickly see if you were really accomplishing extended lower output burn times with equal firebox/stack temps. I'd also guess many woodstove manufacturers have thought about this at length, but then again, you never know - they may assume the market is dominated by desire for fast hot output where max BTU ratings sell stoves. Who knows how many of them are reading the endless hearth.com debates where clearly a large minority is looking for something else.
I'm sure your new employer has all the fun lab toys to look at this in great detail - sounds like you will have a good time at that job!
-Colin
I agree that too much of anything is not good... I wouldn't push much beyond what you have with Woodstock's setup, with that representing one extreme of the market. At some point, yea, you might have a stove that can burn for 36 hours, but it'll make so little heat per hour that it would get silly.
One way you could approach it is figure out how much you'd have to reduce the k-value of an existing steel stove to line up with the approximate k-value of the Woodstock setup. It would be a fun experiment if you had an outside air feed connection where you could install a flowmeter to measure the oxygen feed rate, and then monitor the stack and firebox temperatures. Then you'd be able to quickly see if you were really accomplishing extended lower output burn times with equal firebox/stack temps. I'd also guess many woodstove manufacturers have thought about this at length, but then again, you never know - they may assume the market is dominated by desire for fast hot output where max BTU ratings sell stoves. Who knows how many of them are reading the endless hearth.com debates where clearly a large minority is looking for something else.
I'm sure your new employer has all the fun lab toys to look at this in great detail - sounds like you will have a good time at that job!
-Colin
