I have a Pacific Energy Spectrom we do go to work 5 days a week and are gone 10 hours during the day. I fill the stove before we leave in the morning and damper it down, there are still coals when I get home and I fill it again and let it rip for a while. The house is usually down to about 60° when I get home, I'm talking mid winter. I'm sure my stove does not hold nearly the amount the King does, but am I really using that much more wood? My stove does not hold much but I can have my house back up in the 70's within a hour. If I win the lottery I might consider spending $2,000+ on a king but I think I would go to a wood furnace for that much money. The stove came with the house when we bought it last year and does the job. I'm not doubting the BK is a good stove but just because it holds 3 times as much wood as mine doesn't automatically mean it burns that much less wood.
Coldfront looks like a nice stove and I had looked at that manufacturer but their other line of products, the Alderlea T6. I liked the looks and some options it had on it like the neat built in cooking area.
Your stove is a good stove, no doubt, and it came with the house you bought, so you didn't have the option of choosing. I would run it and be happy same as you are instead of changing out stoves. Well maybe I would, LOL. What this thread was about was some stove's on the market say they will burn 10-14 hours on a full load, only to have the person buy the stove, and find 6 hours is the best it will do on low or less. This from a stove costing around 1000 bucks or more. I have found Blaze King to be honest and true in their manufacturer claims as compared to real life output and usage of their stove. As you look at many manufactures claims of btu's they will say its 100,000btu stove and yet fail to mention that's only when you are constantly feeding the stove tiny pieces of oak, like an old train engineer used to shovel coal to the steam engine. Not real world output with lower btu wood many have to burn and not babysitting the stove all day. In EPA testing most all stoves only produce about 50,000btu's max. Yes a blaze king is expensive, but not too bad when most can use it exclusively for heating thus cutting out the propane, natural gas, fuel oil or electric guys. At over 2000 bucks its twice as much money as some stoves, although think of the savings over a 20-50 year or longer run time especially for someone who cannot, or chooses not to cut their own wood. Here wood is $140 per cord, now if you can cut your wood usage in half, imagine the savings compounding over time. It will take me two years, this being the second, to fully be repaid for the cost of stove and installation from the savings of propane not being used. Actually this year the propane tank is going goodbye! There is a down side to a cat and that is does eventually need the occasional cleaning, plus every six to ten years replaced at a little over a hundred bucks. I also thought about a wood furnace but the fact that you need electricity to use it, or some sort of long term backup, like solar power, or huge fuel storage and a generator, makes it a bad choice for a worst case heat source. I do not trust the power grid very far these days seems its over worked and all it takes is a rolling blackout or random storm to render you without electric for days maybe months as many people have found out across the country.
Perhaps this will help explain better than I am able to.
[video=youtube;jBSNWKI-d-A]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBSNWKI-d-A&feature=player_embedded#![/video]
Another good video I found showing the cat glowing and burning the fumes given off from the wood on secondary burn, notice the fire starts up high then rolls downward. The noisy background is kind of annoying and I muted it
[video=youtube;oodVrxoUZKY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oodVrxoUZKY&NR=1[/video]
