bwood, I understood you from the start, but maybe because I have one. Of course, I've also never heard of someone heating their home with an actual wood stove, installed outside. I have heard many people refer to the outdoor wood burning furnace as "wood stove". We affectionately refer to ours as "the outhouse", due to it's size and shape. :) Ours is used to heat water, which circulates through radiant floor tubes. I believe, based on the link you referenced, you are considering hooking it to your forced-air furnace. I cannot give you feedback on the forced air aspect, although our system is set up to be able to be hooked up to the furnace if need be. I have to admit that I have no qualms about making sure I have options in the future, so my opinion is to install whatever inside components you need, so it's an option in the future. There is an expensive "hose", for lack of a better word, that carries the water inside. If the forced air system you are considering needs that hose (it's about 6" in diameter, and has a very hard outer shell, insulation, and two pex pipes inside for the "in" and "out" water) it would be better to put that in now. It can be spliced wherever later, but putting it in through your basement foundation would be easier before your concrete is poured. Ours is dual-fuel, so if the wood fire burns out, it automatically switches to propane. There are a few little tricks that you learn when loading the wood, and that just comes with use. We did burn a lot of wood our first season, but our house was nice and toasty, too. I believe we went through 4 cords last year. That also heats our water. The outside of the unit is not hot to the touch. I'm not worried about my dogs being around it, and it certainly did not do anything to melt the snow that was drifted 3' around it for most of the winter. If you can afford the option, I say go for it. We bought the best model Central Boiler had at the time. They may have something better now. This one qualified for the energy credit of $1500, so the step up from the next model down was a no brainer. The furnace itself was no issue. We poured a pad for it, about 40 feet from the house. The hookups were no big deal. Our major time was spent on the radiant tubes that run through each floor joist, as well as the concrete floor. Since you aren't doing that, you're really just talking about the unit itself. If you have plenty of wood, and the time/energy to cut it, I think it's a good investment. For us, it's a great investment. It heats our house and water for the time/energy it takes to cut wood. We have enough dead trees each year that we're not looking for firewood. The pumps that circulate our water loops can be run with a car battery, so if the power goes out, we're still warm. That's a big deal when you live in the country, and especially in the part of the country that gets ice storms. We load it once a day in the winter. We actually shut it off during the summer, but we know people that fill it once a week through the summer to heat their water.

Personally, I LOVE my woodstove. I have waited YEARS to "trade in" my DV Gas stoves (old house) for a real wood stove. It was put in the week after we closed on the house-I spent a chunk of vacation time doing the stone work on the hearth pad that DH built (he made the frame, I set and grouted the stones). We CSS our own wood and are hopefully (depending on the weather) about 7 to 10 years ahead so we'll have good seasoned wood to burn. Just doing that was pretty hard work (we put up in the range of 30 cords in the past two years). We heat exclusively with wood, with two small backup propane heaters (one 10K BTU blue flame in the utility area and a small VF "fireplace" in the dining room) just in case. But otherwise we have no other heat source-no furnace whatsoever. Here's my opinion of what it's worth having lived this way now going on three years. I don't know if I would have done anything differently. Right now we don't have the budget to put in a secondary heating system-we're discussing splits because there's really no space for ducting and we don't really want pipes everywhere again for radiant. HOWEVER, not having a "true" back up system makes going away midwinter pretty difficult. It's not like a typical "hey can you stop by and pick up my mail" kind of thing to ask family/friends, someone would need to really come by at least 2x a day to feed it. On the other hand, we paid maybe $100 for heat last season if you figure the cost of fuel for the saws and splitter and truck (we "scrounge" our wood-meaning, we pick up wood people are giving away) and chain sharpenings. We need to get our own sharpener. We also get to see the flames dancing away in the stove all winter. Our stove is a main feature of our living room, and because of how our house is set up, you see it right when you walk in the house too. It heats whether there's electric or not and we can cook on it also. I don't find it terribly messy. I use a wood bag to bring the wood in, and an old wood crate on the hearth pad to store about a day's worth. I have a little dust vac to clean up any hearth mess (**being careful to do so BEFORE loading the stove so no embers might accidently get vaccumed up). When run and installed properly there's no smoke or anything in the house.

I want to thank everyone for their responses. I got a lot of information that I wasn't expecting. We made an offer on the house we were looking at and it got turned down- too big a difference between what we thought it was worth and what the seller thought it was worth. I'll still keep all of these suggestions in mind as we look at other properties. Of all the ideas we were given, I think the masonry stove is still very interesting- yes I know it takes more work than the other heaters take, but I just like the idea. I think we'd need to build a house to get something like that to fit in it in a way that makes sense. I also liked the other ideas- I never considered coal and will look into that more. I never heard of mini-split heat pumps, and they sound kind of intriguing. Also the wood furnace looked good (especially if retrofitting in an existing house). For reasons I can't explain, I'm not a big fan of the outdoor burners. I couldn't have pictured it in the neighborhood we were looking at anyway. If something happens that's worth reporting on, I'll put in more comments. For now, thanks again.

dalter, You can use a typical screw in thermometer if you cut in a tee with a female thread. Also there are strap on thermometers which can be relocated easily. Hope that helps, Dan Martyn Here is a link that might be useful: Typical Thermometer