Seems to me the newer stoves all mostly work much better and use less wood, at a variable, but also require a lot more expensive repair parts all the time. Plus, initial cost. they ain't cheap, at least not for me they ain't. (yes, I know I am at the bottom of the scale here on this site for income...) That's what is keeping me away from a newer heater, geez loweez even the used ones cost a lot. New is out of the question right now. I've looked at all the various cheap entry level new stoves and heaters I could find, meh, can't see them working any better than what I have now. I could add ambience with a glass front as the only upgrade part at cheap levels. meh..
Then the repairs, the stuff that wears out and has to be replaced with these new high tech stoves,, those tubes and burners and fireblankets and blowers and so on. Plus mostly having to have the electricity going for a lot of them to work properly. That's a big negative to me, big ice storm hits, cold windy nasty..dang power is gonna go out, you just know it will, right exactly when you really want the old dragon throwing some heat. Heck, supposedly some of the boilers can fail pretty good if they don't have electricity working to run them.
ya, I know having a genny is a good idea and I have one, you just don't know i it will really work or not, might start then crap out, then uel storage. got enough for a day or two, how about a month? Questions like that. I want my all back reality here to not be entirely dependent on electricity up, OR easy cheap close by more fuel supplies..because that might just not exist, as we have just seen. My wood heater.no electricity needed, my backup propane heater, no electricity needed, just a wall unit with a piezo click start or use a match.
My old heater cost 25 bucks used. antique, no idea when it was made. Cast iron with sheet metal sides. Well, it's an oval shape. Only one side to an oval.... Have to go around ten times price of that to even think about a newer stove,(and those cheap ones just ain't that great) and they go up from there into way over a thousand bucks-two grand, whatever, or those outside boilers, which cost like a late model decent used truck... and I sucketh at welding so can't make my own.
Every few years I get a few black stove pipe sections to use as liner and reline it on the inside (the exisiting sheet metal) with some pop rivets and sheet metal screws.(most likely there was exact factory new sheet metal for it, way out of production, so came up with that idea) Not too expensive or hard to do. Besides that, looks like it would work pret near forever. I know I burn a lot of wood, but I think that is way more to do with the leaky no insulation cabin then the design of the stove. If the cabin was actually built well and insulated well and good windows, etc,, meh, proly a heater 1/3rd the size and only 1/3rd or less for the wood would work fine. Or, could work for a 3-4 times larger house if it was more modern and tighter, etc.
ME, if I had the extra loot, and owned here, I'd put the loot into an actual 21st century (this is important, 21st century, not last century level, or century before that) insulation update, and skip the new expensive heater. You'll cut the wood supply down much farther (and forever, a point) than you would with an updated top of the line heater, in almost any case. Now that's just my opinion, but based on working in the field and looking at and living in a variety of homes and seeing what people consider to be "good" insulation levels as opposed to what real engineering studies have shown is actually "good".
Analogy time! This is what I have seen, I'll be as close and accurate as I can get with this
For example purposes, we are talking very cold winter day, "you" are the house..ask yourself what you want to be wearing for the outside temps...
my cabin = wearing a T shirt..absymal two centuries ago levels of air infiltration and insulation construction, basically nothing, just planks and some cheap panelling on the inside to cut the draft down a little
most residential units, the vast hugemongous majority, even relatively new construction, at best = long sleeve sweat shirt
what most consider to be very good insulation and very best quality windows and doors etc = nice jacket (getting better finally now, maybe one home in a hundred like this, something like that)
There are maybe, some sort of SWAG at this from what I have read, a few hundred to maybe small single digit thousands (no one knows other than not very many) "winter parka" level residences around in the US-you get to that level, very little if any additional winter heating is actually needed (also for cooling purposes)
I know it ain't sexy, but it has been my experience most folks only think in terms of throwing more energy at a situation, or somehow altering what energy source they use, or energy consuming device, rather than conserving what they have better. Talking about the longer term economics of it and so on. It's an all of the above solution, not just one or the other.
""Conservation" the entire topic of it, has turned into "boring", "can't work" "stupid green hippie nonsense" "must be subsidsed by the tax payer/government" etc. Well, that's just not true, none of it, but there ya go, anyone can take it for what it is worth. I hope my analogy makes some sense, because that is really what it is. Burn more and more with what you have, get some modest gains with throwing more tech at it and expense (upgraded good quality burner), or burn much less with just a lot more solid "old tech" entering into the solution (same burner, go to a jacket or parka), or both, more of the old combined with just a little bit more o the new tech. I like that last option the most of the three choices. And there's really only those three choices.
Anyway, using a more modern heating device, sure, that's the easiest/quickest and cheapest way to get more BTUS in your home with less burning/cutting. Depends on your house's insulation level, what a cost or hassle it is to get your wood, and what an upgraded unit costs over pay back there. No problem there, this is completely viable to upgrade the unit to a better one,, but it is good to look at both sides of it, getting the BTUs there cheaper, and also *hanging on to those BTUs* so you ain't trying to heat the outside world. Go at least from a sweatshirt level to a jacket level.