This is what we use to heat our house with.

[Frank S]

 I thought that I had posted this but like so many things in life thoughts are just that they are never actions
 After getting this house many things have required an upgrade. Much of which has been due to the house being left vacant for a number of years.
 It came with an Earth Stone wood stove made in the early 90s. First off the chimney pipe was rusted and burned out beyond belief  from the transition box through the roof and out was  8" triple pipe making it 12" od ,
 But it did not extend above the peak of the roof like it should. It was so rusted out that the center pipe was non existent. What was supposed to be a  transition box ws nothing more than a 4" deep 16" diameter metal can also rusted out. Rain had run down the pipe for many years leaving a thick layer of rust on the top of the stove.
SO I removed everything in 2016 we relied on the heat pump for heat the first winter.
 I refurbished the stove and painted it with KBS Heat resistant paint.
My wife moving the 300 lb stove on my 2 wheeler

 the new transition box 16" x16" x 16" tall hangs down 4 inches under the ceiling and is wrapped with 2 layers of concrete backer board.


 If your are thinking that the transition box extends almost to the roof decking you would be correct.

new SS 8" triple pipe installed and bagged

[Frank S]

 The heat barrier walls behind the stove have a 1" dead air space and 2 layers of 1/4" thick concrete backer board then covered with 3/8" thick ceramic  brick tiles

 On top of the stove is 200 lbs of ceramic tiles to act as a heat storage mass.
 this is a shot of  my thermometer mounted in the kitchen 30 feet away from the stove

[SparWeb]

You'll have to explain why you bagged the chimney to me... 

It sure looks cozy now.

Those are ceramic tiles also stacked on top of the stove, too, for extra thermal mass?

[Frank S]

 I bag the chimney in the late spring and leave it bagged until fall. to prevent the undesirables from building nest in there Not talking about birds either.
 Yes the ceramic tiles are there for thermal mass. and have added at least a 40% thermal transfer of heat in the house that otherwise quickly radiated off.
 The inside of the stove is lined with fire brick up about 2/3's of the sides these assist greatly in holding in heat for combustion allowing for building much smaller slow burning fires.
 I had built a heat recovery exchanger  for the flue pipe which did a good job of reclaiming a lot of the heat that normally went straight up the chimney but I was too efficient and pulled too much heat out of the exhaust which allowed buildup in the chimney. This required cleaning after every 5 to 10 fires  or it would quit drawing well. It did produce a lot of quick heat but again the fire had to be kept going extremely hot and fast burning leaving the damper open to achieve  as full combustion as possible. THe house would become unbearably hot and drop the humidity to near zero  the water in the coffee pot on top of the stove would boil away in minutes.
  This is why the ceramic tiles are in place and the recovery unit is in the pile of reclaimables 

[joestue]

I had built a heat recovery exchanger  for the flue pipe which did a good job of reclaiming a lot of the heat that normally went straight up the chimney but I was too efficient and pulled too much heat out of the exhaust which allowed buildup in the chimney. This required cleaning after every 5 to 10 fires  or it would quit drawing well. It did produce a lot of quick heat but again the fire had to be kept going extremely hot and fast burning leaving the damper open to achieve  as full combustion as possible. THe house would become unbearably hot and drop the humidity to near zero  the water in the coffee pot on top of the stove would boil away in minutes.

what i did with my folks wood stove (fisher papa bear) was to build a heat exchanger inside the stove. in the upper section there is nearly 20 feet of 1" sch 40 pipe that runs horizontally in 5 loops. it pulls just about the right amount of heat out of the fire. i'm of the opinion that the creosote buildup on the pipes is just about right, once it gets thick enough the heat transfer drops, and the creosote flakes off like scales. my brother is of the opinion that we should burn it off every week.. so we burn it off about every 2 weeks, light a fire getting the pipes red hot.

we have a thermal switch in the chinmney (tungsten Tig rod, stainless steel pipe, lever and microswitch) that turns the pump on and off automatically. 70AH of 12v battery (pump draws about .9 amps) for back up. a 10$ "solar" pump from ebay lasts about a year.

the pipes are like this with about 3/4" between them and 1" between the pipes and the side of the stove.
  000
 000
0000

for that particular wood stove i would recommend another set of pipes. so it would look like this:

          000
         000
       0000
00000000

and i would have them arranged in two parallel streams so you can drain one and burn it out while still collecting the heat from the other coils.
i've been thinking there may be a creative way to build a heat exchanger with vertical plates like this: ||||| but only one third full of water. so to burn the creosote off, you just pull it out and flip it over.

[Frank S]

 this was my heat exchanger unit

 I has a plate inside of it that fit the pipes a rod welded in its center so I could pull it back and forth to scrape the creosote worked fine the first few times but then got to the point that it took  some time to get it to move back and forth I suspect it warped and bound on the tubes.

[John Bouchard]

All good information on wood stove efficiency.  In Washington State requires all wood stoves sold to be high efficiency and they burn very hot and most all have  tubular enclosures that capture gasses with ceramic backing running atop in the fire box.  These systems will burn off much of the combustion gasses like a afterburner which reduces carbon particles like creosote.   The result is more btu from wood and smaller fire box.  I like the idea of stacking tiles to increase thermal mass as I also burn wood for heat.  BTW beautiful stove you got!

Cheers
John

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

I count 14 piles of 22 tiles each.

Great idea.  I'd been thinking about retrofitting thermal mass.

If I had the house building to do over I'd put several layers of drywall, rather than just one, on the greatroom walls, inside the Rmany wall insulation.

Fireproof gunsafes (much brick in their walls) help stabilize the office temp.

[Frank S]

 Actually there are 13 stacks of 22. This year I added 4 dead quiet muffin fans  at the entrance of the hall for circulation. leaving these plus the little 8" fan behind the stove and the ceiling fans in the living room kitchen and our bed room going 24/7 does a pretty good job of balancing the temperatures. The living room still gets a little toasty for me but the wife enjoys it being  warm around 80° at the couch where she sits  She is under weight and her 73 year old bones don't take to cold very well. the thermostat for the heat pump is located in the hall about 50 feet from the  wood stove it is set at 65° but even in the couple of days where the lows reached the teens so far and the high only got up to 25 it has not cycled on yet but our colder part of winter doesn't come until mid January
 These fans run on 12v so I have them on a  5 amp wall wart I could mount up to 8 more fans on the same transformer with no problems