Anybody running a Blaze King princess wood stove?

[Cguignard]

After heating my 1500sqft (stove in basement, so heating 3000sqft) foot ranch with a two door old mill wood stove, it is time to upgrade. I am tired of cleaning the chimney twice a winter and the stove door has a crack in it.  Heating in the Basement has worked very well for me. I have looked at the Blaze King princess I like the larger fire box than most stoves on the market and longer burn times.  Also the dealer said I can get a solid steel door with out glass in it. This is a cat stove and i have never run one. My questions is how long do cats last, do you run them different than a traditional air tight stove. And has anyone replaced a cat on a BK stove?  If you are running on what type of wood savings did you see, and how much build up in your chimney do you have?

[dcast99]

Don't have a BK stove but my XL Dutchwest is a cat stove. How long the cat lasts depends on how much wood you burn a year and how you burn it. Mine lasts 5 years. I heat a 2600sf house entirely by the stove and go thru about 5-6 cords of hardwood a year. The cat in my stove is a 6" round model that is about $90 - 100. I have to take 4 bolts off, then lift the top of the stove off. The cat just pulls out. Time to replace it is about 15 minutes. My fire box is large enough to get a 8 - 10 hour burn time when it's cold out. On marginal days it's better to have small, hot fires than to load the stove up and let it smolder. The cat needs the stove to be about 500 degrees so it can reburn the smoke. Mine is also in the basement so having the stove burn hot then dying down does not create a problem upstairs int he living area. You will definitely notices when your cat is going bad. You won't get much heat out of the stove. The cat should run about 1000 degrees.

[Brad_S.]

 I have the  BK Ashford 20. I use it to heat my shop and I don't keep it fired all the time. I have no benchmark to compare to as far as wood usage but a little wood goes along way. I regularly get 10 hour burns out of it and  enough calls to stoke another fire after 12 to 14 hours although when I reload I do have to let it burn for a while to get the cat temperature back up. It was an expensive stove but I am very happy with it.

[starmac]

I can't answer your question, but I do know in the Alaska interior blaze kings are the most favored stove by far. People will pay more and wait when they are sold out when there are other stoves available.

[ST Ranch]

I have a BK Princess that is a non-cat model. It is 30 yrs old and heats my 1300 sf 125 year old house fairly well, given my poor insulation and windows.
I avoided the CAT model because I was told you can not burn any "dirty" wood, especially anything with metal - it will react with the ceramic afterburner element and ruin it.  I do not know if newer models use different process now.
My stove also has the fan blower which is essential.
My burn time at 0 F is about 6 hours with softwood and about 8 with Tamarac.
I clean my chimney 3 times a winter [it is metal chimney with 10 feet above the roof [cools quickly at top end and creosotes up].


  .

Tom

[Marshy]

I can probably add some insight for your consideration as I have a King. I have a ranch style house on a full basement. The main living space is a touch over 1800 sqft and I heated my whole house for 5 years with a Shenandoah woodstove from the basement. In all fairness, I did have to fire my oil boiler to help it on the worst parts of the winter. My basement is uninsulated and has a walkout man door and a garage door. The chimney is 30' and has a clay tile liner (8x8" square), runs from the basement up through a fire chase all the way to the top of the chimney. The spring of 2016 I decided I needed to do something different, I was just pushing the Shenandoah too hard and I was tired of putting wood in it every 4 hours in the coldest part of the season. I bought a Blaze King Ultra with hopes that it would give the same performance or better and possibly use less wood. Unfortunately that is not what I experienced. I used the same amount of wood and overall felt it made less heat. 

First of all, you need to realize that if you have an old non-EPA type stove they give off heat in a completely different way than the new EPA stoves. The old stoves are radiant heaters, you can stand 10 feet from them and feel the heat on face. The Blaze King and other stoves will not do the same unless you are directly in front of the loading door. They are shielded on the sides to help reduce clearance to combustibles and to help insulate the firebox to keep the combustion temperature high, that partially how they meet emission standards and improve efficiency. The new ones heat the space by heating the air and to do that they need fans. I'd strongly recommend you consider the fans a requirement not optional per the manufacture. I bough my King without the fans and found the output somewhat disappointing. I put the fans on and got quite a lot more heat from the stove.

Secondly, you need to be cautious the type of chimney you are going to hook the stove into. If you have a masonry chimney like mine I would strongly recommend you get an insulated stainless liner installed. The King requires a 8" round (or equivalent) flue. The princess requires a 6" round (or equivalent). That means if you have a 8x8 square tiled chimney you will not have enough room to fit an insulated 8" round liner. You might be ok fitting a 6" round insulated liner into the 8x8 square depending on how plumb the tiles are if there is no mortar protruding into the flue. I personally would not mess around with any of the new EPA stoves unless you have an insulated SS liner or are using the triple wall chimney pipe, the flue gasses are just way too low. The thermal mass of a masonry chimney plays hell on the low flue gas temperatures of the Blaze King stoves. Even if you have the proper recommended draft you still run the risk of making creosote. Even if you have the most ideal masonry chimney configuration, like mine through the center of the house in a chase way, it may still be an issue.

All of that said, Im not bashing the BK stoves they are great stoves and I like the construction and ease of operation. If you buy the stove new they come with a 10 year warrantee on the combustor (cat). From what I see they are very easy to change and they also stand behind the product and the warrantee of the cat. Keep in mind, they will send the cat out to have it analyzed before they will warrantee it.
I like the stove and wish my configuration was per the manufactures recommendations, maybe then I wouldn't have a small creosote issue in the top 2-3 feet of my chimney.  Keep I mind, heating my house the way I am is basically asking my free standing stove to function like a furnace. The setup just lacks the heat distribution I'd like it to have.
I ran my BK King on high all season last winter and ran out of wood before I got to shoulder season. I normally burn 18-21 face cord per year (cut to 20" average length) and this year was no exception. You can count on even heat output because of the thermostatic controlled air damper and my King averaged 7-8 hour loading cycles while running on High. The Princess will have the same approximate heat output rate but because of the smaller fire box will need more frequent loadings if ran on high like my King. Hope that helps. BTW, Im selling the King and going to get a boiler. 
   

[sawdust]

I have a BK King, cat is there and the fan, as well it has the glass door. The door is pointless, the fire when burning correctly has no open flame, the converter is visible through the glass and has a cheery glow if you crouch down and look up. I cut into our forced air main duct and have ducting to scavenge air from directly above the stove into our house system. 1300 feet on each level.
The stove will keep the house toasty unless we have a nasty south wind. The furnace is in the NW corner of the basement. I burn spruce, pine and poplar. I clean the chimney twice per year just because I want too. There is never more than 1/8 inch of fine grey dust at the top of the 15 foot chimney.
When it was new I did some playing with it. Once it got hot I could stuff if full of big birch and come back 48 hours later, it still had enough coals to restart. It runs constantly from late October until April, I would have run longer but ran out of wood. Still not warm here, season is really late.
David

[woodworker9]

I had a different experience than Marshy with my BK King model.  To be fair, mine was an older catalytic stove, 1982...IIRC.  Had the built in fan and the ceramic cat.

I paid $100 for mine because the previous owner didn't take care of it, and literally rusted out the housing where the catalytic insert goes.  The cats are expensive as heck at $275, and I had to fabricate a new housing for it out of steel, which I did, and welded it all in place.

Once I fixed the stove, man oh man, did that thing put out the heat.  I was using it to heat my workshop in Northern Illinois.....1600 s.f. woodshop with 12' ceilings, well insulated.  It was too much stove for my space.  It was getting the shop temp up to 80° in many instances, and I didn't want to ruin it, so I sold it and got a smaller stove.

I would load it up and it would burn for 24 hours and have coals left the next morning to re-start.  I never had to re-light except when it was time to clean the box of ash.

A princess would probably be perfect for my shop, but I've got a Fisher Grandma Bear that I made some alterations to, and it works just fine.  Uses a lot more wood, though, but I do enjoy seeing the fire.  Trade-off.