Originally Posted by
ms ann thrope
Nice Russian stoves. I did a remodel in Washington and hired a guy who made a gorgeous river-rock-clad small Russian stove, with a heated hearth. It had a damper that shut like a car door. A friend built a staircase that spiraled up over the mantle area to teh loft.
The woman who owned the house resented the fact that the stove was built to be efficient and fired only once a day. Radiant heat meant nothing to her: she wanted a by-god fireplace.
And that's the way she ran it: damper wide open, fire crackling away in the hearth.
I was putting in the floor when the stove needed breaking in, though, and fired it with increasing loads every day for a week. It was winter and butt-cold. I'll never forget the day I first felt the heat radiating from teh stove like it was supposed to: all the way across the room from it, it felt like the sun coming out.
And it felt the same three feet from the stove as it did twenty feet from it, once it got going. A truly amazing way to heat. That was from one bundle of wood, sticks no bigger than a forearm, in a firebox at most two square feet, fired once in the morning.