I have a Keystoker Automatic Stoker Stove 105,000BTU. I've had it for 1.5yrs. I have it in my finished family room in the basement. I use it to heat both my first floor(1200 square feet) and my finished basement(700 square feet). This particular stove has no problem at all keeping both floors of my house at a cozy 75 degrees. I chose this stove because of the optional 6-inch top convection air vent. The stove has a blower which blows hot air out the front of the stove, but also has a 6 inch top vent that blows air out the top. I have 6 inch duct work hooked to the top vent, and vented to a register directly above the stove. Hot air blows 50/50 out the vents, but you can close either off to get 100 out of either vent. My only complaint is this: with my thermostat on the first floor and set at 74, the temp will rise and fall between 73 and 76. Downstairs, on the other hand, the temp will rise and fall between 65 and 80. It was a bad winter and I went through 5 tons of coal at 200/ton =1000. Would have spent 3000 in propane to heat my entire house at 75 degrees. My buddy has the same stove with same house size and heats the same way, only his duct work runs across the ceiling of his basement and into two seperate registers. I have no problem with using just the one.

You mention a "big" woodstove. Not a good idea if the home is small. You always size the stove to the size of the area you want to heat. A "big" stove will do nothing more than make you open the windows. From the photo, a woodstove wouldn't heat very well as it can't radiate fully. But that alcove will be very warm. You might want to look into an airtight fireplace instead.

I see that this in response to a month-old post and the purchase in question most likely has been already made, yet I feel compelled to provide some insight on my experience with our Oslo 500. This is the first and only review I've ever written about any purchase and hopefully that alone says something about this stove. I too live in (Northeastern) CT and our primary heat source is an Oslo 500. Our house is a 2900 sq. ft. 1992-built replica Cape Cod. It has installed, a 275 gal. oil tank and 6 zone oil burning System 2000 furnace which provides domestic hot water as well. This is our first year in the house. The Oslo was purchased new and I too had considered the Firelight 600, however the right-side load would not have worked for our installation location. The dealer also recommended the 500 over the 600 for a number of reasons. The stove is centrally located in the kitchen and thus heats the upstairs and surrounding areas surprisingly even. When outside temperatures are 26 degrees and above it has absolutely no problem keeping the entire house between 68 and 72 degrees. When the outside temp. dips into the teens and below however, it's had to work to keep it between 65 and 68. I work from home so I've had plenty of opportunity to experiment with different burn techniques as well and have been able to keep it running hot during the 2 or 3 very cold snaps we've had. Since initial burn-in firing in late August we've used just over 4 cords of wood, mostly seasoned oak and maple. I say mostly seasoned because we moved here in April and the majority of our supply wasn't cut/stacked until early June. It's a very efficient, evenly burning stove. Wide open it produces flu gasses anywhere between 300-450 degrees. It needs to be loaded every 1 1/2-2 1/2 hours to keep it running HOT, but when damped down to about half it will moderately burn easily for 4-5 hours. It holds large and hot coals overnight with no trouble. As Chris above had mentioned, it is quite messy to load from the front. The main reason for this is due to the front-to-back burn and air wash design which keeps the front glass mostly clear for many days. The gasses vent to the front of the stove just above the front door, then across the inside top of the stove between the top casting and the secondary burn tubes. The result is the deposit of ash between the inside of the glass and the front casting. I've found no way to avoid this, other than of course to load from the side. If that's a gripe, my only other would be the design of the ash removal setup. The stove has a large pan but it's very difficult to empty without being messy. The ashes drop from the firebox through the removable cast iron grate on the bottom located directly in the middle of the firebox. The problem with this is that it's impossible to empty the pan while the stove has any sort of sizable fuel or fire in it; It needs to be almost out in order to empty the pan. There's a small amount of room around the grate and any remaining hot embers can be cleared away to these edges. Otherwise, if small enough they risk falling through while the pan is removed making it impossible to reinsert the ash pan without first clearing these away. Additionally, it's not possible to simply let the ash build up so as to use a traditional ash shovel to clean large amounts of ash from the firebox through the loading door. The grate at the bottom between the firebox and ash pan needs to maintain a certain amount of air flow through it (likely due to the clean-burn design) to keep the stove burning optimally. As a result, one's required to let the fire burn down every 2 days or so in order to perform the task of emptying the ash pan. That's also a good time to give the front glass a quick wipe. I grew up with a smaller Morso in the house (which is still used by my parents everyday) and considered those along with VC, Harmon, Woodstock Soapstone and Hearthstone. While I liked many of the soapstone designs, I was unable to match aesthetics to our house style as well as heating capacity and output which needed to be enough in order to heat the entire house. I considered the new VC stoves, but after touching those vs. the Jotul there was really no other choice. The Jotul fit and finish is second to none, the castings are beautiful and the heat output is unbelievably consistency and cozy. The handle design is great and fuel usage is quite efficient. I've never second-guessed our choice, however I have done a fair amount of reading and poking around after the purchase and have found plenty of reviews, opinions and articles which have only bolstered my happiness with our stove. We have two young children and they tussle over the chair closest to the stove at the counter. We spend much of our time comfortably in the kitchen and it's a huge difference from the old house which used 275 gal. of oil in just under a month maintaining an inside temp. of 62-64 degrees. We've used this year just under 1/4 tank of oil since filling up in August. Obviously a HUGE difference. Bottom line, we couldn't be happier with the stove. I hope I've provided some clear and helpful information about our experiences with this fantastic appliance. There are plenty of quality wood stoves available on the market today. It's important to find one you'll be happy with for many years to come and I'm sure you will or already have. Good luck! -Will

We have the Jotul F400 and love it. I did not look at the soapstones because we wanted a traditional cast iron stove with an old-fashioned look - and picked Jotul because was the best looking one IMO. I prefer the radiant heating over the convection, mainly because I like being able to stand right next to the thing and thaw after being outside in the freezing cold. I also like that the Jotul doesn't have a catalytic converter - it burns well and is easy to use and maintain. Our house is 3000 sq ft, and when we get it cooking, the F400 heats the entire house -- we have a very open floorplan that allows the heat to travel (we had planned to use it to heat only the family room and kitchen, which is why we went with such a small stove - we weren't aware of how dramatically the heat would travel around the house), plus our winters aren't usually super-cold (we're in PA - usually in the 20s-30s during the day and teens at night). Today is colder than normal and very windy and I'm a little chillier than I prefer, but still no need to turn the furnace on. I will say that we tend to burn the stove pretty wide-open and maybe that's why we can heat so much more space than Jotul says the F400 is good for. Unlike the older cast iron stove I had in college, it seems impossible to overheat this stove, even when you stuff it to the gills and leave the damper wide open. And I guess because our house plan is so open, it seems that we really have to burn hot to feel warm in the room where the stove is - the heat dissipates through the house so quickly. So we burn usually at about 550 degrees (Jotul recommends 400-600) - we get great heating but we do blow through the wood - if I'm home, I'm usually reloading it every 2-3 hours to keep the house toasty. I would think that for your house, you could probably damp it back like it should be and get much longer burn times. We load it up for the last time at night around 11:30 and damp it way back and at 7am, there are still enough coals to relight quickly, although the house has gotten pretty cold by then. Depending on how whiney the kids are, I'll turn the furnace on to take the chill off in the morning but the stove has pretty much taken over by 8:30 or so and the furnace doesn't run for the rest of the day. We have it installed inside our masonry fireplace (it's freestanding but inside the firebox) and since the masonry heats up, we get a bit of the soapstone's extended heating in that the masonry continues to radiate heat after the stove has cooled down. Good luck!