My next door neighbor has a Fisher stove. The Rolls Royce of stoves in the 80s. But when she damps it down it shuts off all the air and the wood smolders... and smokes. When the EPA regulated woodstoves, Fisher went out of business. As did 90% of stove manufacturers. Now there are some great old Vermont Castings stoves still out there as many of my neighbors have had them since the 70s. But most of the old steel stoves are better off scrapped. Parts are a major problem with the defunct brands today and then some amateur jury rigs a repair and the house burns down.

You might want to post your questions at hearth.com, which has a very active forum discussing just these types of issues. For the record, we just put in an insert and paid $150 for delivery to our door, and another $1000 for installation. The installation price seemed steep but it actually took them nearly three full days (mostly due to mistakes they made and not having the right parts on hand). One thing to make sure of: you want to have a full stainless steel vent that runs from the insert all the way to the top of your chimney. Some installers try to do this on the cheap by just running the vent part way up the chimney and letting the smoke vent out in the middle of the chimney.

@Annie: Thank you for the link, it's from a reliable source so I am considering carefully what it says. Both of our stoves are connected to outside air and have been for decades. The inlets are on the typically upwind side of the house. Except of course, when we're having a Nor'easter. This house was built before the Civil War and has no insulation in its wall cavities (and none is possible due to the contruction of the wall assembly). So it defines a "leaky house". No problems here with "sick-building" issues related to being too tightly sealed. Sometimes I think we might as well be living outside! When we installed the O/A inlets it made an immediate difference in the draftiness of the rooms so I would be reluctant to go back, but fire safety is a paramount concern for us so I will be talking to my husband about this. We have no other combustion stacks (obviously no furnace or boiler, and our DHW is electric) so we have no carbon monoxide risks with or withhut the OCA. But I am planning on installing powerful vent fan in the current kitchen which is where the wood-burning stove is. (I'm moving the kitchen to another room to get away from the woodstove, but it will still close enough to be affected by the fan's power, I think.) I'm picturing in my mind the pathway of the combustion air within our stove and trying to decide if I have a risk of drawing super-heated air or coals back down into the combustion inlet piping (which is utterly unshielded along its entire length as it lies slap up against the wood sheathing of the wood room) if the system was depressurized, and I think not. But this is particular to my stove, and model, and not true for many other stoves that would simply feed the air directly into the firebox. I really appreciate the heads up and will ponder it some more, especially as we are slowly getting around to installing the new stove (which likely has an intake air pathway that is completely different.) @mjlb: LOL at your DH's association to arched doors and a crematorium. Fortunately the woodburning stoves like the Jotul, while perhaps slightly arched on top have lovely glass doors that don't seem like crematoria, at least to me. Soapstone (or other masonry) thermal mass stoves are fab, but not really the same fire-appreciation sense as any fire place or regular woodstove. They are intended to burn much smaller, hotter fires, often only a couple of times per day. They also are not really retrofitable into an existing hearth and chimney stack since they require different stack pathways and massing. Plus they are extremely heavy and must have a substantial foundation. I love them though, and am considering converting from woodstoves to masonry as we age in place. Woodstoves require such constant vigilance for safety and a considerable amount of physical activity to attend (even leaving aside processing the fuel from tree to firewood) that I can see it may be a problem at some point. We're in our 60's now. With no other source of heat if we couldn't burn wood we'd have to leave the house. My late MIL in the last year or two before she died had issues around her wood heating and cooking arrangements. Her cognition was becoming muzzy enough that I had decided she couldn't live alone there another heating season. Plus as she became frailer just loading the logs into her stove started to become a problem. I remember one miserable day when I split her entire winter's wood down into smaller pieces because she was forbidden to pick up anything more than 2 lbs. She wept the whole time I did it, and I felt so sad for her. A masonry stove since it is fired only two, or at most three times a day could be managed by someone paid to come in and attend to it. The rest of the day it just radiates heat, mildly enough so that you can sit on it safely. I considered getting a soapstone-walled woodstove before choosing the cast-iron Jotul. The soapstone walls are NOT safer to touch than cast-iron (unlike a masonry heater made of soapstone which relies on thermal mass). And having looked at several in the shop being repaired (cracking) we decided to stick with the familar cast-iron. There is one nagging issue for me around wood-burning: it can contribute to diminshed air quality from particulates in the smoke. When you get a whiff of a wood-burn, it usually smells quite pleasant, but in truth you are inhaling particulates and smoke, even in the cleanest, most efficient burning ones. One wood-stove is a trivial air degradation, but wood-burners in every household is a community problem. In many parts of the UK (and some cities here in the US) wood-burning, not to mention coal which is even worse air-quality-wise, is illegal. Stilll this is a harsh climate and some form of heat is necessary. As we have the woods (and generally only use thinnings and blow-downs), and process it on the farm, it seems environmentally better than oil or worse, fracked gas. But it is not totally environmentally benign. We have installed more solar panels to make power, and will add more to provide some electric heating capacity as well. There are no free lunches when it comes to heating in a cold climate. L.

Wood stoves do burn clean. Yes, they emit CO2, but it's the same amount of CO2 the tree would emit as it decays in the woods. Once the fire is going and the stove is functioning, you can go outside and see nothing coming from the chimney as the new stoves have "clean burn" technology which has smoke reenter the burn chamber, as smoke is unburned gas that would normally go up the chimney. The old stoves were just fire boxes with ways to limit the air to the fire. So when the owner closed off the air, all the fire did was smolder, which caused smoke. Hence the name given them today, "Smoke Dragons". When you look into a stove or insert, bigger is not better! These are appliances and must be sized to the area you plan to heat. Let's say you have a 2,000 SF home. You don't necessarily want a unit that will heat the entire home to 70 degrees, as the bedrooms should be cooler, etc. So do some research before going forward.