The ULTIMATE Wood stove! #offgrid

it's all about wood stoves today guys with a little bit of bonus content on wood stove fans we're going to be looking at three different wood stoves we're going to be talking about what you should be looking for if you are in the market for a new wood stove and we're going to be talking about what it's like to practically live with one of these things in a real world application from different people that do this this is not going to be like going to a store and having a salesperson talk you through features and things like that this is going to be hey our heat Our Lives depend on this thing working here's what we use this is why we use it and we're going to end this video with what I consider to be probably one of the most versatile and probably functional stoves for a lot of different situations right there Frankie you've had wood burners your whole life haven't you pretty much yeah you know what would you tell people the the main thing to understand when they're looking at buying a wood stove Frankie square footage of your house for the size of the stove you know okay or the room that you're Heating you want as large of a wood box as you possibly can because you at night you want to stick as much wood in there you want to get your coals hot fill that up with wood as much as you can and then dampen it down so that it just steadily produces heat without a flame right because this small box will have to get up in the middle of night and soak it up you know you won't make it all night long you won't make it all night long the smaller the Box the more often you're waking up and throwing wood in here I'm a True Believer in these yeah you like these seed exchanges or whatever they're called yeah because everything that's going out that stove pipe is just going out well this takes it this takes all the heat that's going out your roof back into your house so we used to have a 55 gallon drum we would use a 55 gallon drum for one and heat with another 55 gallon drum all right so let's go look at the other one that was so this one is ready to go Frankie yeah I mean we can start a fire anytime so this is an older stove but it's actually got a heat recirculator built right into the top and the Beautiful part about stoves like this is that you can put a pot of water on the top and now you're humidifying this one's got the damper built right into the stove yep built right there and a stove like this doesn't cost an urban Lake to do I mean no you can pick these up off a Facebook Marketplace for three to six hundred bucks a pop roughly yeah there's your drafts right there [Music] so that's a that's an important element that's that draft we were talking about the ability to control the draft because you don't got drafted it's gonna be harder to start your fire and your fire ain't gonna want to stay going you know and you're going to get a reverse draft into the house I have what I've done in the past when I've had a reverse draft coming into the house I open up a door if it's bellowing into the house go open up a door and hopefully that'll you open up the right door window go higher on your roof you got to be over your Peak over your peak of your house the stool pipe should be the stove pipe has to be yeah yeah otherwise you get down draft and that's what that's what makes you get a hard draft I'll yep you're also going to need a heat perforated uh boot chimney you can see it up there it's orange it has to be heat rated it can't you can't just use anyone there's gray ones everywhere you can get those those are not difficult to find you need the orange ones all right for this last stove it's the main source of heating and cooking the primary source for both in the place that we're going to but to get there we got to take this so let's hop in it and let's get the let's get going down to get to the next place we have to take all back Trails there's no electricity no running water and this is the place that Cassidy and Tarzan have opted to make their home and we're going to check in with them and see how this next stove is performing in real world conditions [Music] the next wood stove that we're going to be looking at is the one that I personally picked out for the kids and it's called a nectar 550 Wood-Fired oven and what it is it's both a wood stove and a Baker's oven built together it can heat up to 2 500 square feet and kicks out 65 000 BTUs it has both a built-in thermometer so that you know where your oven is at it has a built-in cooktop and acts as the primary heat source for the place so it does two things in one but let's just check out how it actually performs in real life and see how the kids are doing with this thing oh yeah who's a good guard dog oh are you a good guard dog yeah all right we made it out into the middle of uh we call this the home place it's our back 80 acres of land we have no power period and uh the only primary source of heating cooking fuel anything is right there and so in a situation like this you want to pick the absolute right stove because it's got to do everything [Music] knock knock is anybody home [Music] hippies wake up it's noon hippies you know noon hippies don't wake up you know because it's nude good morning you guys I mean afternoon oh thanks Cass so here's the yurt uh as you can see their only source of power is whatever they bring in so you guys have been living with this wood stove now for a while and it's January coldest month out of the Year tell me about how things have been going in here with that great it's like hot in here all the time yeah really okay so even when it's like 20 degrees out yeah no when it's 20 degrees out that's when it's nice in here when it's like negative 20 that's when it sucks and that's when I wish we would have more insulation but yeah like any other times higher than that it's it's really nice so you have you guys have you guys cooked on it at all yeah yeah yeah we've cooked everything on it and like everything inside the oven too so your your Firebox is on the top and this is this does everything your cooktop is here and then your baking stove is down here but that also does something that other stoves don't do and that's a heat recirculator so that's giving you extra heat inside of it but what this one does this takes the Heat forces it down around the bake stove and then back up through the flue so it actually becomes almost like a high efficiency wood burning stove at that point but does this does the baking part actually bake like you would think oh yeah definitely Biggs yeah he's baked like everything in there and it works so well and it tastes like real food you want a brownie we've made like cakes and like winds and pizzas and I don't know okay okay how often do you have to redo the Firebox how often do you have to soak it up if we're just hanging out maybe like one decent sized log per hour or less maybe three logs for two hours or so okay um if we're trying to cook we'll throw we'll get it running like it is now um but if we're gonna bake something it's usually at the end of the day because it takes a few hours to get it up to the good cooking making so you're using this thermostat down here for that right now it's probably about like 150 because we just woke up um but in let's say three or four hours it'll probably be up to 300 350. and does it stay pretty consistent that temperature yeah once it gets up there it's it's not coming down until the next morning how about the flues now I know there was you guys had to and we talked about it you're gonna have to get used to how the flu on each wood stove works if you guys got that kind of dialed in yet so you can tamper the stove down at night yeah yeah so I bring this down a little bit and that'll decrease the amount of air coming in through the top and then I'll close the front a little bit and then I'll get to a nice burn it's basically like you want it open you get more airflow and closed less airflow right so open it when you want the fire to get bigger and close it once it's big you know and that this one stove has been keeping up just fine I mean it's hot in here right now yeah we woke up this morning I woke up a few hours ago actually and um the fire was out and I was like asleep in bed and I looked at and I was like it's like warm in here already so and then we got this going and last night it was even warmer outside I'm pretty sure yeah and freaking Sunoco I could not be in here she was like we had to let her out like all night basically and yeah it was like it was kind of unbearable so that's a good thing because we've been freezing in here and before we figured out the Hearth like how to work it we could see our breath in here like when we woke up in the morning okay so it took you a while and we anticipated every stove it takes a bit I mean it took me a good solid season to figure out my own fireplace so so that I could throw logs on it at night fine tune it to where it needs to be so it would cook all morning all night long and then wake up in the morning and then have just enough Embers that I could throw something on and not have to worry about getting it going again so when you you wake up in the morning it wouldn't be like a fire it would be Embers Embers okay yeah that's that's what happened oh okay so you get a nice hot bed of coals that's perfect because that means it's heating throughout the entire night and you can just toss stuff back on and you're good to go then right yeah all right you guys well thankfully that wood stove has been working out good for the kids I wanted to bring you this video a lot sooner but I also didn't want to jump the gun and start to recommend something if we hadn't actually put it through the test and found out just exactly how good it would work so they've been living with this thing using it as a primary source for both Heating and cooking and it's been performing phenomenally now I bought mine directly from a place called bbqdirect.com there's not a lot of places that sell these things but these guys have been phenomenal to work with so I would feel very comfortable buying another one from them and I just might be doing that because I've got another project in the process right now but that's all I got free on this video hope you guys found something useful out of it we've got we're going back to our regularly scheduled program where it's snow plowing action new tour reviews and things like that but I also want to try to bring you an off-the-grid living lifestyle because we're attempting to build our own compound completely off the grid without being dependent on anyone else for anything at all so if you have some suggestions on how to do that or resources I would love love love to hear from you that's all we got for you on this video I'm learning like you are and I hope you guys enjoyed this process today God bless go get em you guys