anyone have a cleanfire or classic edge stove and are you happy with it as far as efficiency and no problems with it. they claim there 90% efficient compared to the 434 I have that's around 50%. mine is 20 years old and looking to upgrade .

My sister and brother in law just got a new one and he says about a 1/3 of the wood as the old one.

thought there would be more people that would have these.

I think you should quit heating the outdoors with your stove as it is in the mid 80's right now and things are getting sweaty

Do you need properly dry and cured wood though? It's nice if you can throw any green wood in and produce heat vs having to split and dry.

yes it should be properly dried but will burn wetter wood with a bigger bed of coals then drier wood would need.

My friend has one and his wood is kindling size and has to be 15-20% moisture content. I have a Heatmor, burn 12 cords, he burns 4 cords.

I am guessing you will burn a lot less wood. It will need to be dry though.
I would need to change my wood storage habbits with one of them.

Almost 3 years dry.

your not going to get anywhere close to 90% efficiency burning anything but dry wood. The drier the more efficient.

I'd be curious on how they get 90% effiencey with a outdoor wood burner.

I doubt they are counting btu's in the wood vs btu's delv'd to the house.

There are losses to the atmosphere when the stove is outside, there are losses in the ground transporting the heat to the house and there is the loss in efficiency to electricity needed to run the pumps.

An indoor stove has none of these losses.

The EPA test is based on the BTUs from the firwood no other energy losses. I lose 5 degrees F from stove to house in the piping.

the best place to set a wood burner is in the basement. heat moves up on its own, no pumps, fans or mechanical means of distributing heat is required.

The most efficient way to burn wood is as fast and as hot as possible to ensure complete combustion, choking a stove down to make it run longer is inefficient. Another benefit to efficient burning is no need to clean chimneys.

Needing electricity to burn wood is inferior than not needing electricity, what to do in a power outage, Freeze?

Better to store your winters wood in the basement where the heat from the burner dries the wood even further than can be achieved than storing anywhere outside. Again, the drier the wood the more heat one will get from the same stick of firewood.

Being able to store the heat is best, water or masonry as thermal masses. Slow even release of heat is better than fast uneven release of heat.

the best wood to burn is the driest wood, damp or green wood spends alot of its heat just drying the wood so it can burn, very inefficient.

As far as messes, having an organized setup to store wood, and using very little wood while burning efficiently produces less mess. If the mess is in a basement than its easy to clean once a year in a couple of hours time.

When thinking of burning wood for heat if one uses all these to advantage then one doesn't need as much wood (less work, less cost)
I realize that adding wood heat to existing house may pose limitations.
But if one is designing a home and looking for the best way to heat home with wood as heat source an outdoor wood boiler is a very poor choice.

Everyone that I know that uses one goes thru ALOT more wood than I do, usually about 2-3x as a minimum. Spends more time in he process.