>>Ok, so the brick and mortar mass stores the heat for up to two days. Does that mean you really only need to fire up the stove with one good fire per day to get/keep the house warm?
Yep, that is one of the biggest attractions of masonry heaters, especially the fact that you don't need to get up in the middle of the night to feed the fire. Your "one fire a day" obviously has to be fairly big, maybe 50 pounds of wood, but you still end up burning less wood than a typical woodstove would consume given the same heating task.
When it's bitterly cold I expect it may take two fires a day, one in the morning and one in the evening, although the house is pretty well insulated so one might be enough.
>>If you DO want a fire for aesthetic reasons, is there a way to "bypass" transferring so much of the heat to the masonry via a fan or different duct?
The custom-built heaters often include dampers to bypass the masonry mass, or to let you run a small fire in a cooking oven/stove without firing the heater, but this one uses a prefabricated modular heater core and is pretty basic, so no bypass. We thought about it, but since I have the chimney pretty far away from the heater core there was no obvious way to put in a bypass.
The really fancy custom-built heaters have benches (heated with smoke channels) poking off into other rooms, coils of pipe for hot water, ovens and smokers built in so controlling all the dampers is a bit like operating an old steam engine.
>>Or, would you have to walk around in your boxers for three days because the place is too hot?
Of course not, I have air conditioning
Seriously, masonry heaters require a bit of planning ahead, and if the weather suddenly turns warm after you fire the heater you might need to open a window or something. The nice thing is that since so much of the heat is radiant (ie the air temperature might be lower than normal but you still feel toasty warm) this isn't as much of a problem as you might expect.
I wanted to build at least one conventional fireplace into the house so I could keep a small fire going for aesthetics, but the house was already way past my original budget and there was just no way I could add anything else.
My original plan was to start with just a big daylight basement, subfloor and tarps over the subfloor, finish one corner with a small gas heater and a big-ass woodstove, and live in there until I had more money saved up and knew what I wanted the rest of the house to look like. Unfortunately existing zoning laws prevented me from living in a partially-built house (that used to be a fine old tradition in Toronto) and newly passed laws meant I needed to build *now* or lose the ability to get a building permit.
