Buying a Wood Stove | How to Buy a Wood Stove

Buying A Wood Stove | How to Buy a Wood Stove

Like all major appliance purchases, buying a wood stove is not an easy decision. There are many to choose from and the cost can run from a few hundred dollars for a good used wood stove stove to as high as three thousand dollars for the so-called "state of the art" wood stove.

Before deciding on buying a wood stove, you should ask yourself a few questions. First, what type of wood stove do I want, air-tight or simple up-draft? Second, where am I going to use it, in a living area of the house or in an unfinished part of the basement? Third, am I looking for aesthetics or am I only concerned about augmenting the primary heat system? Fourth, is my chimney adequate to accommodate a woodstove? Finally, how much can I afford to spend on a woodstove?

Tips on Buying a Wood Burning Stove

First, if you are buying a wood stove that was made after 1990 it is probably an air-tight stove. Air-tight implies that there are one or more sources of air to the firebox. The firebox is designed with one or more baffles to provide a secondary burning chamber for the gases to burn rather than being exhausted up the chimney.

The EPA established emission guidelines for wood stoves in the 1990s limiting smoke emissions to 2-5 grams per hour with virtually no ash. This amounts to 90 percent fewer emissions and 33% more fuel efficiency than the older up-draft stoves. I do not recommend an up-draft stove. They are extremely inefficient.

How and where are you going to use the wood stove? It is assumed that your underlying purpose for buying a wood stove is to augment your primary heating system, and therefore we will not consider aesthetics. Placing it in the living space or the basement will provide heat system augmentation; however, there are a couple of key issues to consider.

First there is the issue of the location of the chimney and how will wood be hauled through the house, which is an arduous and messy chore. The best place to store wood is in the basement. Storing wood in the basement will greatly reduce the mess in the living area as well as having the wood supply nearby.

The next major issue, is in determining if your chimney is of adequate size to support a woodstove? If it was built in the last twenty years, it probably is. Most wood burning stoves have a six-inch outlet pipe. A six or eight inch chimney with a liner is adequate.

The third key issue is in regards to how much you want to spend on a wood stove? A used wood stove can be inexpensive and there are many good ones on the market. If a stove was built before the 1990s, and has a baffle system to increase burning efficiency, it can be considered a good stove. Most of the older stoves are built of 3/16th to 1/4 inch rolled steel. Others were built of cast iron. In either case, they were built to last for many years.

If you search long and hard, you may find some good buys for these stoves for under $200. The new stoves with fancy glass doors, and that sit on a pedestal style stand, run from $500 to as much as $3000.00 for the soapstone styles. However, you can find a good wood stove in the range of $800 to $1,000.

Personally, I would settle for the older stove with a front loading door that can accommodate 20 to 24 inch wood lengths, and that can be placed in a non-living area, such as the basement.

To increase the heat to the living area above the basement, I would suggest placing a hood over the stove and ducting it to the upstairs living area as suggested in the "Installation of Hood over Wood Stove Ebook" at http://www.homeadditionplus.com