Earth stove?

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Anyone familiar with these?  There is a big one in the house we are looking at.  Looks too big for the space, but like the way it looks.

[Whitlock]

Had a 1900 in the last house, I loved the thing it would take a 24 inch log with no problem. No blower on it
But there would still be coals in the morning and a heated house to wake up to.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

I'll try to post a picture of it after I download from the camera.  It is a big stove with a nice big firebox.  The door has two handles that have to be turned at the same time to open it up, and then it swings down, IIRC.  I kind of doubt that it is efficient as some other stoves I've seen, but there is plenty of wood to burn on that place, especially after last year's ice storms.  I also like the wide, flat top, so you could put a teakettle or a pot of stew or beans on there in the winter.

[southernsis]

We had one in a house we rented. It put out a lot of heat. It would heat the whole house, but we had to put a fan behind it to get the heat to circulate, if not the room it was in would become way to hot. Always kept a kettle of water on it, nice way to put some humitity into the air.

[cordwood]

 We are using a Fisher right now that has a stair step top that gets a lot of use every winter as my main source of cooking !!! But it is not a catalyst type stove, Sooooooo instead of being a wood "Heater" it should be called a wood "EATER". When it gets real cold out it has an appetite like a new born T-Rex .
So it is kind of a trade off, When the storms come in and the power goes out we heat AND cook just fine, Just takes more wood. 
  We had a "Cat." stove before and it was great for heat and saved wood very well but it was not as easy to cook on, It would heat a tea kettle for house moisture but if you wanted to make hot tea you had better be patient

If I can get the scaner hooked back up I may have some pics. of the Fisher in action, Coffee, Bacon, Eggs, Fried Tatters, And a pot of beans goin all at the same time The best part of winter!

[MountainDon]

As far as catalyst vs non catalyst wood burning stoves goes, I vote for a non catalitic model that is designed to meet the EPA regs (without the need for a catalyst). We have one, a Vermont Casting Aspen and it works very well. To me the catalyst was a stop gap measure while the manufacturers figured out how to make wood burners that were clean enough for the EPA. Just my opinion.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

When I was a kid, my grandparents had a huge woodstove.  It was ugly, but it sure worked well.  I can remember during the holidays with the combination of the cooking going on, the heat from the stove, and all the bodies crammed into the house, we'd end up opening the doors and windows!

[Whitlock]

Well HG now I'm going to have to tell my wood stove story.
My Grandparents also had a huge wood stove in the kitchen. Looking back now it must of been built in the early 1800's.
One day when I was a kid my grandfather and I were at the house and we decided to go to town but, not until we loaded the stove with wood. It was snowing and we wanted the house to be warm when we got back.
So Gramps and I filled it up and headed to town. This is exactly what my grandmother had told us not to do time and time again.
We were gone about two hours and on or return my Gramps noticed that the stove pipe on the roof was at a angle?
He jumped out of the truck and ran in the house with me close behind.
What we found was the stove had caught the floor under it on fire and burned bad enough that the floor gave way and the wood stove was now standing upright in the basement still burning
My Gramps starts running around the house like a chicken with his head cut off until he came to his senses he just knew my grandmother was going to kill him.
We need a plan he told me if your grandmother finds out about this we are in big trouble.
Mind you I'm only about 10 years old how can I be accountable for anything??
Any way we got a bunch of meatel buckets into the basement and unloaded the burning wood out of the stove and into them. He then  dumped them out side.
Then it was my job to stand there with the spay bottle a squirt the stove every so often to cool it down.
At the time it didn't don on my Gramps that the stove wouldn't fit out of the door of the basement. The only way that stove would come out of there was back tough the floor. We soon figured this out.
As luck would have it my Grandmother came home early and he was busted!
She did get a new stove that she had wanted for a long time. so it all worked out.
To this day I wounder if that stove is still in that basement

[cordwood]

Well HG now I'm going to have to tell my wood stove story.
My Grandparents also had a huge wood stove in the kitchen. Looking back now it must of been built in the early 1800's.
One day when I was a kid my grandfather and I were at the house and we decided to go to town but, not until we loaded the stove with wood. It was snowing and we wanted the house to be warm when we got back.
So Gramps and I filled it up and headed to town. This is exactly what my grandmother had told us not to do time and time again.
We were gone about two hours and on or return my Gramps noticed that the stove pipe on the roof was at a angle?
He jumped out of the truck and ran in the house with me close behind.
What we found was the stove had caught the floor under it on fire and burned bad enough that the floor gave way and the wood stove was now standing upright in the basement still burning
My Gramps starts running around the house like a chicken with his head cut off until he came to his senses he just knew my grandmother was going to kill him.
We need a plan he told me if your grandmother finds out about this we are in big trouble.
Mind you I'm only about 10 years old how can I be accountable for anything??
Any way we got a bunch of meatel buckets into the basement and unloaded the burning wood out of the stove and into them. He then  dumped them out side.
Then it was my job to stand there with the spay bottle a squirt the stove every so often to cool it down.
At the time it didn't don on my Gramps that the stove wouldn't fit out of the door of the basement. The only way that stove would come out of there was back tough the floor. We soon figured this out.
As luck would have it my Grandmother came home early and he was busted!
She did get a new stove that she had wanted for a long time. so it all worked out.
To this day I wounder if that stove is still in that basement

That's why I always make the area around our stoves pretty burn proof,...... I am bad about getting cold working outside and coming in the house and "Stoking it up" till I get that beautiful jet engine sound going and about a foot of flame rolling around the rain cap And we never have a creosote problem in the flue pipe either but I DO NOT recommend others do as I do as I am a trained professional, Or at least that's what I tell every body After installing a couple dozen wood stoves in the last 30 years I guess I am pretty close to a pro.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Well HG now I'm going to have to tell my wood stove story.
My Grandparents also had a huge wood stove in the kitchen. Looking back now it must of been built in the early 1800's.
One day when I was a kid my grandfather and I were at the house and we decided to go to town but, not until we loaded the stove with wood. It was snowing and we wanted the house to be warm when we got back.
So Gramps and I filled it up and headed to town. This is exactly what my grandmother had told us not to do time and time again.
We were gone about two hours and on or return my Gramps noticed that the stove pipe on the roof was at a angle?
He jumped out of the truck and ran in the house with me close behind.
What we found was the stove had caught the floor under it on fire and burned bad enough that the floor gave way and the wood stove was now standing upright in the basement still burning
My Gramps starts running around the house like a chicken with his head cut off until he came to his senses he just knew my grandmother was going to kill him.
We need a plan he told me if your grandmother finds out about this we are in big trouble.
Mind you I'm only about 10 years old how can I be accountable for anything??
Any way we got a bunch of meatel buckets into the basement and unloaded the burning wood out of the stove and into them. He then  dumped them out side.
Then it was my job to stand there with the spay bottle a squirt the stove every so often to cool it down.
At the time it didn't don on my Gramps that the stove wouldn't fit out of the door of the basement. The only way that stove would come out of there was back tough the floor. We soon figured this out.
As luck would have it my Grandmother came home early and he was busted!
She did get a new stove that she had wanted for a long time. so it all worked out.
To this day I wounder if that stove is still in that basement

What a great story!   You have to be sure and pass that one down to your kids.  The one at my grandparents' house wasn't that old but it was enormous.  They had a doo-hickey (I don't know what it is called, sorry) that came off at an angle from the stove pipe, and I think the idea was that it would catch any cinders and a good deal of the cresote that went up the stove pipe.  One day I was painting the front room for grandma.  I think I was about 14-15 years old.  I heard what sounded like the wind rattling in the pipe.  At first I didn't think much about it, but it got louder and more insistent, and I looked up.  At the same moment, Grandma walked in the door, and we both hollered at the same time.  The thing on the stove pipe was red hot and shot off like a bottle rocket just about the time we both looked at it, and a ball of fire flew out.  I had a wet rag I was cleaning up paint spills with, and i whacked it good with the rag.  Meanwhile, fire was coming out of the hole in the stove pipe, so grandma threw open the firebox and started shoveling the fire into a bucket.  We hauled all the fire outside and threw it on the ash heap.  The roaring stopped in the stove pipe, and we looked at each other and busted up laughing.  I hurried and painted over the smoke marks on the ceiling, and when it cooled down, grandma cleaned out the attachment to the stove pipe and put it back up.   At supper, neither one of us said a word about it, because Grandpa had been saying he needed to clean the thing out, and Grandma had been sending him off to do stuff she deemed more important. She just couldn't stand to hear "I told you so!" 

[Whitlock]

I just remembered another wood stove story.
I rented a house up in Twain Harte, CA one winter I think it was january.The only heat in the house was from the wood stove.I had no wood and there was snow on the ground so I went to one of my friends house below the snow line to get some wood. He had plenty but it was all wet.
We loaded it up and headed back up the hill. I told my son that we would put a tarp down and stack the wood in the living room to dry after we got a fire going.(Renters do some crazy things)
I had never used this stove. We started the fire but it was not getting the house warm so we loaded more wood in it.
I decided to bring the wood in the house to dry (about a 1/2 cord).
We got it all in the house and ran over to the market to get a few things.
When we got back our house was a sauna, the wood stove finally kicked in and all the wood we had stacked in the front room was steaming. There was water dripping from everywhere.
I thought to myself thank God the landlords arn't here.
My son didn't stop laughing for sometime and he still brings it up.

Memories are the best treasures,W

[pickngrin]

Great stories Whitlock.  Both made me chuckle.  I think it's probably a good thing I don't have anything better to contribute.