My Hearthstone Clydesdale is absolutely all it was said to be. Bought it 6 years ago, it's big belly can take 60#s of wood; feed it twice a day . . .this has been the coldest winter I can recall in Quincy, Mass (just south of Boston, on the Atlantic, which one would think would be just a little warmer than inland). No complaints from me regarding the warmth it generates in our home These barrel cages scream, noise wise that is; two whining cages. I have vacuumed them, taken the housing apart during the summer and meticulously put it back. Three years ago I had a service person come out and do maintenance; he said the noise was 'normal'. Don't think so. Initially we sat in front of the fire with IPA in hand, but the noise has moved us to another room. Gives off mega heat, but I am sadly considering replacing the wood stove insert with gas . . .can someone give advice on this noise dilemma. . . gas would surely ruin any 'ambiance' we get from burning oak. . . .Uechii

This year I purchased my third insert in the past 12 months, so I've done a fair amount of investigation and shopping recently. I put one in the house that I sold and two in the house that I just bought. The main difference between an insert and a simple wood stove is the fan that an insert utilizes. Circulating the hot air into the living space is a huge efficiency advantage over just having a hot stove radiating heat. Believe it or not, the price between a good insert and stove is about the same. Of course, you can pay a little more for the blower and trim kits for the inserts, but it's not a huge difference. Try to get the dealer to include them in the deal and don't let him "nickle and dime" you on those items or the installation. Shop around and be sure to ask if the price that you are getting includes those things. The other issue is that an insert in your fireplace looks more "finished" sitting in the opening as opposed to the wood stove. If you have a standard masonary fireplace, chances are a wood stove would not fit inside the fireplace itself. Then you have the stove sitting out in the room and the fireplace opening left to deal with. My wife wouldn't go for that in her living room! And guests have commented on how nice the big glass doors make the fireplace look. There is a lot of info on the internet so do your homework and shop around.

I would worry about the boiler draft sucking air down your boiler's chimney. What kind of boiler do you have? With two zones taken out, you may be short-cycling more because you used to have two zones going at once fairly frequently. I really don't know how likely that would be. It would be more likely with a low-mass boiler. The trouble with low-mass boilers in highly zoned homes is that they can not both produce enough output for the whole house while avoiding short cycling when powering one or two zones -- short cycle can result. You are probably an example of too many zones. If you can effectively heat two of your zones with your stove, heat transfer is high so what's the point? Typically the better insulated a house is, and the more open inside it is, the less point there is to zoning. (Heat transfer between rooms is much faster than heat transfer to outside.) If you can combine zones, you might get less short cycling. You might consider adding a buffer tank to your hydronic system if the short cycling is not caused by a malfunction. Here is a test for you. Let the insert cool off and see if the boiler still short cycles. Try running it with all zones calling for heat.

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.