About 5 years ago I bough a Sedore 2000
https://transnorth.ca/product/sedore-canadian-2000-multi-fuel-biomass-stove/ and I love it. I have a small 1500 sqf well insulated passive solar house and other stoves just could nt keep it warm enough and everyday that I got home from work I'd have to relight the stove. Well not so for the Sedore, it burns at least 12 hours when fed good dry hardwords while keeping the house toasty warm (ok sometimes too warm!).
The most amazing thing about the Sedore is how well it burns shitty wood! Last year was not a good year for me , no need to get into details but suffice to say that life got in the way and I wasnt able to get wood that I had cut & split in 2022 stacked inside. Instead it sat on the ground in a pile getting rained on. So here I am in mid January 2024, -7C and my house is comfortably warm whilts my Sedore burns punky poplar. Any other stove would sputter and hiss but the Sedore is a top load bottom burn unit very reminiscent of an RMH. The fire is always on the bottom log, this means that the wet wood I load in on the top is baked dry by the time it hits the flame and so it burns clean. It is always better to burn dry wood, dry wood will yield more useable heat since it does nt have to boil off that water which can cause creosote in the chimney. The stove is very heavily built out of quarter inch steel that is corrugated so it can take alot of heat stress. I take advantage of that , especially when burning suboptimal wood like I am this year and leave the draft wide open so it burns very hot, thereby cleaning my chimney pipes.
There are a few downsides to the Sedore though I must say. First and most obvious is there is no fire viewing window. While in this review I have been calling the Sedore a stove it is really more of a furnace, and how many time do you go look at your oil furnace? More significantly the Sedore is not an airtight unit. For most this is probably a 'meh so what?' but for me , who when designing my house designed for optimal draft with my insulated chimney going through my house from the peak to the basement of my 2 story walk out, I have excellent draft. It has happened to me when burning nice dry hardwoods during a windstorm that I could not damp down the fire enough and I had a scary experience of the stove glowing red and a block of wood 2 feet away began to char ! Luckily for me because of how I manage creosote by having daily over firing of the Sedore and regular chimney cleaning that I was nt at risk of a chimney fire .
While that story may be a deal breaker, I think its like most things and people in our lives, once you learn their idiosyncrasies you can work around them. I personally love having a wood FURNACE that can burn the worst wood on your property turning junk into heat.
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