Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

Every page on StoveVerdict is written and signed by one named person. This page explains where the judgments come from, lists what the author is not, and gives an address for corrections.

How this began

It started with a number of cubic meters. A volume printed on a stove, read by almost everybody as a description of their own living room. It is nothing of the kind. That figure is a calculation made against an assumed insulation standard, and the listing almost never names which one — so the same appliance is honestly sold as heating 80 m (262 ft)³ or 200 m (656 ft)³ depending on the building somebody had in mind. Once that gap is visible, the same shape appears right across the shelf. Nominal outputs quoted as though they were a range, when they are one point on a curve the appliance is meant to be held at. Efficiency percentages printed without the standard they were measured under. Draft requirements in pascals, which belong to the chimney and are printed as though the stove supplied them. And most pages answering these questions look identical: a ranked list, a score, a button, and not one figure a reader could hold against the maker's own sheet.

The second problem arrives after the pallet is unwrapped. This equipment is bought on a headline and kept or returned on dimensions. A stove with the right output and a 6 inch outlet over a 5 inch flue. A door cord ordered a size too large for its groove. A pane of glass bought by diagonal when the door takes one outline. A grate whose two dimensions are almost right. An insert that will not pass the doorway it was measured through. None of that is on the front of the crate, and each one decides whether the purchase was worth making.

So the site does the tedious part. It reads what manufacturers and standards bodies publish, confirms each reference market by market, and writes down the line that settles the question — a nominal output next to the fact that it is a set point, an efficiency next to the standard it was measured under, a heatable volume next to the insulation it assumes, a spigot diameter next to the pipes it will and will not meet — and it states plainly when a figure was never published. That last habit matters more than it sounds: a great deal of the disappointment on this shelf comes from a number nobody printed, or one printed without the condition that gives it meaning.

Behind the published pages there is a working file for each family: the one dimension a purchase turns on, every place a manual contradicts its own sales page, which fittings tie an owner to a single maker for everything bought afterwards, what a figure quoted with no condition beside it actually means, and the particular mistake each shelf invites. The site is that file, sorted and written out for readers in the United States.

Everything written up, listed by the build

The list below is not kept by hand. The build regenerates it from the catalog every time, one line per published page, and it lengthens or shortens by itself as a shelf opens or a reference vanishes. What it records is what has been written up — which, stated plainly, is not a record of what is burning in anybody’s house.

Three things it took money to find out

What is set in the largest type is hardly ever what the purchase actually turns on. A stove is sold on kilowatts when the firebox depth decides whether your wood goes in without being cut again. An insert is sold on output when the doorway decides whether it arrives at all. A splitter is sold on metric tons when the log length it accepts is what sends half a delivery back to the saw. A flue kit is sold on a total height when the spigot diameter decides whether any of it connects.

What an appliance costs to keep going outlives what it cost to bring home. A stove whose glass is cut to a shape only its maker reproduces has a service life set by that maker's spares list. A firebox lined with a casting nobody sells separately is a firebox that gets replaced whole. A door takes one cord thickness for its entire life, and that groove sets the cost of every winter after the first.

And what you end up judging it on is almost never printed on the specification sheet: whether the glass stays clear when the stove is run low on a mild evening, whether the door still shuts tight in its fourth year, whether the paint holds where the pipe leaves the top, and whether the part that fails first will still be listed on the day it fails.

What I am not

I am not a stove fitter, a chimney sweep, a combustion engineer or a certification body. I hold no qualification in any of those fields, I have never worked for a manufacturer, an importer or a dealer, and nothing on this site leans on a professional title. A page here describes a product — its dimensions, its declared figures, any standard it cites — and stops there. In particular, every output in BTU, efficiency percentage, square footage, flue and outlet diameter, required draft, flue gas temperature, emission figure, firebox depth, log length, cord thickness, appliance weight and burn time on this site is reported from the manufacturer, with its unit as published and its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker states a figure together with the condition it was taken under, the page credits both to that maker and never separates them, and nothing here is described as cleaner, warmer or safer than anything else on the strength of a specification sheet.

This site is not an installation manual and not chimney advice. For the clearance an appliance requires to combustible material, for the flue cross-section and effective height it assumes, for the combustion air a sealed room needs, for what may never be burned in a firebox, and for the commissioning a local authority demands, it points to the maker's instructions, the plate on the appliance and the standard the listing cites, rather than paraphrasing them. Two statements are repeated rather than assumed. A declared value and the condition it was taken under are two halves of one thing and are never separated, and every page names the value, the unit and the maker that published it. And no stove, no liner, no floor plate and no alarm is described here as making anything safe. What a page carries is the figure a maker published and the condition attached to it; everything past that point is settled by the instructions in the crate, by the plate on the appliance, and by the chimney the stove is joined to.

A signature at the foot of a page proves nothing, and nothing here asks to be believed on one. Every judgment carries its evidence inside the page that makes it, and the long form — the order a family is ranked in — has a page of its own.

The five rules behind every page

No figure gets in without its source next to it — a datasheet, a manual, the plate riveted to the appliance, a named standard, or what owners agree on after a winter of burning.
No gap is ever closed to make a table look finished. Not a price, not a reference, not a dimension. Where a maker published nothing, the row stays empty and the page says in words that it is empty.
Each reference is confirmed on every store before a page is published. Where a model is not sold in that store, the button searches that store instead of opening a listing that has gone.
Where the cheaper option is the right one, the page says so — and where the right answer is a moisture meter, a swept flue or a spring spent splitting rather than any purchase at all, it says that instead.
A family is never ordered around the number in the largest type, and where this season’s model is barely separable from the one before it, the page states that.

What a misread number costs on this shelf

This equipment is sold on numbers that state one thing and are read as another, and the gap usually surfaces once the first cold week arrives. A heatable volume stands where a room is assumed. A nominal output stands where a range is assumed. A required draft stands where the appliance is assumed to supply it. Meanwhile the things everybody treats as afterthoughts — a year of drying, a swept flue, a fresh cord in the door groove, the air the room is allowed to draw — repeatedly decide whether any of it worked.

A great deal of what counts on this shelf is free to learn and reduces to a single sentence: a heatable volume records what a maker was willing to print against a building it chose, and undertakes nothing about the room you are standing in. Most of the rest is the same kind of thing. Splitting a winter ahead rather than a week ahead. Lighting from the top so the load gases through the flame. Replacing a flattened door cord before the glass starts blackening. Running the appliance at its set point instead of throttling it all evening. Sites that exist to shift equipment walk straight past all of that. It is not walked past here.

Sending a correction

Name something that is wrong and it gets fixed, with the date of the fix left on the page where anybody can see it. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · StoveVerdict · Paris, France