Finally warm

I have had a small electric wood stove with thermostat control for around six years now and it has kept my living room warm in the winter. However, the bedroom has either been too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter. Now it's juuuuust right. I contacted Ron Magen (Go Solar on the Chapala.com forum) and his head electrician installed a Mirage Inverter 22 in the bedroom that provides both heating and cooling. It is energy efficient with a high SEER value and incredibly quiet. It is discreetly connected through the conduit running from my solar panels to the inside. SO HAPPY and comfortably cozy in this miserable weather!

Got me confused....:

"electric wood stove"?
Like this, with a cord??

LOL! No. Exactly like this https://www.amazon.com/Duraflame-Infrared-Electric-Fireplace-Control/dp/B01N7ZEO7D/ref=sr_1_2?crid=TH83GX79UHOD&keywords=duraflame%2Belectric%2Bwood%2Bstove&qid=1701711095&sprefix=Duraflame%2Belectric%2Bwood%2B%2Caps%2C130&sr=8-2&th=1

Cute stove, ferret. I'll probably be wishing I had one of those this winter.

But that isn't an "electric wood stove". A wood stove burns wood as fuel. Yours just looks like a wood stove.

Be sure to inform Amazon of your beliefs mudgirl because searching for "electric wood stove" is the only way you'll find them on their website.

Well, I suspect that whoever at Amazon came up with those search designations has never used an actual wood stove in their life. :-)

You notice that the ad for the product that you posted doesn't call it an electric wood stove, they call it an electric fireplace stove.

It's described the same way on Amazon Canada. And it's not a fireplace either nor are electric fireplaces actually fireplaces as we know them. It looks like a wood stove but it's operated by electricity and has a thermostat which a real wood stove does not. Happy now?

Oh, I'm just being nit-picky, ferret. You can call it anything you want.
Funny story- a friend of mine, years ago, was chronically ill and spent a lot of time in bed, and discovered Ebay. She saw an old-fashioned wood cook stove for sale and she had always wanted one. She couldn't believe how cheap it was, including the shipping, when they are huge and weigh a ton.
She ordered it, thinking she had scored an incredible deal. But she had neglected to read the fine print. It arrived, and turned out to be a miniature, about 3 inches big, for a dollhouse.

Now that's funny! If you want a real wood stove that's made for RV's, the mini cube (Grizzly model) is 13 inches by 15 inches and cost 699.00 dollars (on sale) plus extra for the flue pipe. No thermostat though but it's very cute and very efficient.
https://cubicminiwoodstoves.com/collections/all

I heated with a woodstove for 30 years when I lived in Canada. I've never heard of a thermostat on a woodstove (although maybe new ones have them).The temperature is usually controlled by adjusting the flue in the stove pipe. I used to close the flue at night before going to bed, and in the morning, there were still coals, so I just had to throw in some more wood, wait 15 minutes until it caught fire, then open the flue. I loved the wood heat, but I don't miss dealing with firewood.

I remember the single-walled wood stoves from back in the 70's called "Airtights". AKA "hippie killers.

We lived in a 120 year old farm house in Northern Ontario that had a wood burning behemoth of a furnace in the basement. Something very primeval about creeping down the stairs every morning to shove huge logs onto the glowing coals. The walls of the house were two feet thick slip form poured concrete and the basement walls were three feet thick field stone. It was a bunker and that furnace kept the whole two story house warm. But, I don't miss stacking the two cords of wood required every fall in preparation.

My house on Vancouver Island was 80 years old when I bought it, was a 2 story wood frame house, had no insulation and drafty single pane windows. There was an insulation grant available, so it got fully insulated, but I never replaced the single pane windows, although I had curtains. (I tried a window film kit one winter, but the cat poked holes in it) It didn't have a basement, just a crawl space.

I used to go through 5-6 cords in the winter!

I always thought that Vancouver Island had the mildest climate in all of Canada...warm, dry summers and mild, rainy winters. Not so? Maybe that's just on the coast?

Almost all of the inhabited parts of Vancouver Island are "on the coast"- it's 150 kms wide and 400 km long and there are large mountains in the interior part.
Yes, it has the mildest climate of Canada, but it snowed almost every winter where I lived, about halfway up the island. Now, with climate change, it snows more. My daughter, who lives there, had to spend 45 minutes digging her car out of the snow last winter.

And "mild" doesn't just have to do with temperature- cold winter rains are bone-chilling. Whereas in other areas of Canada, even though the temperature may be much colder, the sun is usually shining- it's cold, but dry.

Sort of like Mexico in reverse- in the summer, the thermometer temp. might be similar Lakeside as PV, but it's so humid on the coast, it feels much hotter.

Yes, been there several times... just not in the 'bone-chilling winter'. Nothing worse.

I'll take cold and dry any time. Two winters in Vancouver were enough for me 'cuz the rain is really depressing.

One winter up there it dumped a ton of snow and stayed cold enough that it stayed on the ground for 3 weeks (it usually warms up again within a few days and starts to melt- think lots of black ice and ice-covered trees whose branches break because of the weight of ice).
I had shovelled a path from my back door to the shed, where the firewood was stacked. My cat, who normally spent a lot of time outdoors and didn't have a litter box, took a look at the snow banked up a meter high on both sides of the path when I opened the door for her to go out, and looked up at me like, "You have GOT to be kidding".

ferret wrote:I'll take cold and dry any time. Two winters in Vancouver were enough for me 'cuz the rain is really depressing.

I actually like dark, rainy days, in moderation, as long as I don't have to go out in them. But when you go 40 days without ever seeing the sun, as I counted one winter, yeah, it gets depressing.

My oldest daughter, who grew up on Vancouver Island, now lives in Gatineau. She loves it- the fall colors, the crisp cold winters with the sun shining. She says she never, ever wants to move back to the west coast.

I spent 3 years in England and while there they did a survey. Over 60% of the English people wanted to leave the country. Where did they want to go? Anywhere there was sunshine!

rafterbr wrote:I spent 3 years in England and while there they did a survey.  Over 60% of the English people wanted to leave the country.  Where did they want to go?   Anywhere there was sunshine!

That's why we left Vancouver..........lol. Very much like London weather.

At least in Canada people turn the heat on when it's cold and rainy. I've never been to the UK and would never even consider going there in the winter, because Brits seem to think it's normal to be cold indoors and are super chintzy with heat, as far as I'm aware, often turning it completely off during the night, so you wake up in a freezing cold house.
A British Airbnb host asked on a forum if it was okay for her to limit her guests' use of heat to 4 hours a day! (She got a resounding NO from hosts around the world who responded- up your nightly rate to cover the heating bill, dear.)

Not quite true. Heaters are generally set on a timer and come on about an hour before you got up. Of course being non-brit I left mine on all the time. Stayed in a castle one time and liked to have froze to death. They did not want to modify the castle so there was no heat in the bedrooms.

rafterbr wrote:Not quite true.  Heaters are generally set on a timer and come on about an hour before you got up.  Of course being non-brit I left mine on all the time.  Stayed in a castle one time and liked to have froze to death.  They did not want to modify the castle so there was no heat in the bedrooms.

Well, as an Airbnb host myself, I read a lot of host posts on forums and it seems most British hosts talk about only having the heat on for a certain amount of hours a day. If you found the heat came on an hour before waking time, that sounds at least more reasonable. But it takes time for a place that's had the heat turned off all night to warm up to a comfortable temperature.

Stiff upper lip, put on some sweaters and woolies, sleep under piles of blankets, old chap, seems to be the attitude.

And drink hot tea...

Yes the British thought it ridiculous I left the heat on all the time in the winter. Even in summer is cool. One time it got to 88 degrees and the highways started to melt. When I was there many of the cottages had coin machines in them. You had to pay with coins as you used electric or gas.