Part 5 of my wood/multi-fuel stove project

Well its been a couple of weeks since my last post on the wood multi-fuel stove project. This in truth is done partly to my laziness and partly due to there not being too much new information to talk about. I have since had a second contractor around to survey and they seemed very friendly and perhaps a little less professional than the first one. But I am still awaiting the price back. They did however raise a very important question with me. That is, what output size of stove do I want and I don’t actually know.

So what size stove should I go for?

Using the various online guides, whereby you put the basic room size measurements in and it spits out a kilowatts. Which I was fairly happy to go along with, until this second contractor asked my why I thought I only needed about 3KW. I told them that I’d used a couple of these guides and even allowing for a little expansion in terms of knocking two rooms together, I could see any reason to get anything bigger. His response was perhaps not that surprising given that they are trying to “upsell” the size of the order. (or perhaps I am being a little unfair??) He said that why not go up to 5KW and not put as many logs on a time, if I wanted less heat. They also said that, once a 3KW stove is installed, then it is very difficult to go back and put in a larger one and I’d never do it anyway. It is true that this winter, I say temperatures as low as minus 16 oC and no doubt it would have been extremely useful to have had a good fire on the go!

So which is better a smaller stove run at capacity or a larger stove which can so “controlled” by running under capacity? One thought I had on this, is to make sure the stove looks right for the room and if a larger 5KW one works, then so be it. Has anyone got any experiences of this to help?