You'll find highly detailed answers to all questions about wood stoves and inserts at www.hearth.com.

Do yourself a favor. Consider a free standing wood stove instead.

I recently spent $4000 on a Hampton HI300 wood insert. The amount of heat this thing produces isn't even enough to offset the cost of running the blower. As far as I am concerned, this was a total waste of $4000.

For anyone to suggest that these inserts are good for anything other than looks is a total lie. I will make sure I tell everyone I ever come into contact with the rest of my life that wood stove inserts are a waste of money so they don't get out right robbed like I did.

Inserts are way more efficient than an open fireplace. If you want efficiency go with a yukon wood furnace.

Here is a link that might be useful: Wood furnaces.

I had an insert and I loved it. It heated our house nicely. But if it's not heating, what is the surface temperature? At normal operation, it should be between 500 and 600 degrees. If it isn't, you need to figure out why. If it is, then it's doing what it's supposed to do.

We also had a blower on our Avalon insert, but we rarely used it, and then only during the coldest weather at a very low speed. Because when it was on, the room seemed colder as the blower was just heating the air instead of the objects in the room. It reminded me of the early heat pumps. You would set it at 72 degrees in winter, and the air coming from the registers was 72 degrees. And we were cold all the time.

We built our current home and didn't include a fireplace and went with a freestanding Regency stove and currently it's 5 degrees outside and the stove is keeping the house comfy.