Jotul F 602 lights like a charm
After
nearly two weeks of laboring over her new home, we fired up the
princess for the first time Friday afternoon. The instructions
admonished us to light five progressively larger fires, allowing the
stove to cool completely between each one, before burning a
full-fledged fire, so we haven't yet tested how much heat our Jotul
F 602 will put off
at full speed. So far, though, I can tell you that she's a joy to
work with.
I'm
a very inexperienced fire-maker, and starting our exterior
wood furnace (aka
the beast) was nearly always beyond my ability. Mark could get
the beast going with judicious application of storebought firestarter
logs (wax and sawdust), but even he had to labor quite a bit to build
the fire to the point where it wouldn't go out when he shut the
door. There was no point in leaving a small fire burning in the
furnace because you'd come back to unburnt kindling and a cold stove.
The princess is nothing
like that. I crumbled up several sheets of newsprint, topped them
off with about a dozen mostly dry twigs and a few thinly chopped bits
of box elder kindling, and lit her up. The Jotul is completely
airtight and is designed so that the air intake at the front of the
stove forms a roaring wind inside as soon as you close the glass
door. By the second of the five mini fires, I had figured out
that I could just close the door soon after lighting the paper, and 
the stove would do the rest
of the fire-starting by herself. Within minutes, the flames were
so well established that I felt quite confident leaving her alone ---
no babysitting involved.
Clearly, the princess is
going to be the cure to my constant winter refrain --- "Honey, sweetie
pie, darling, will you please light me a fire?" We may be
fighting over who gets to light the fire this
season.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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It looks really nice. We've got the Jotul F3 TD, and we're extremely happy with it. The build quality seems great, it heats beautifully, and it's easy to clean.
Of course, we're heading into summer now so ours has been retired for the season, just as yours is firing up. The good thing is that we can hang our Christmas stockings on it without worrying about heat!