Thanks Harry I can't remove the grounds..I scattered them across the top, and then mixed it in looking at the worms, and of course coffee grounds are almost indistinguishable from the castings, ....Well after I added the coir...boy was I glad I had that block on hand!!! they seem to be moving around better, but still staying deep down , not on top at all. I will add some paper too, but for now the bin is totally full to the brim. I think I have survived, but will NOT be adding any coffee grounds again

We have the Jotul F400 and love it. I did not look at the soapstones because we wanted a traditional cast iron stove with an old-fashioned look - and picked Jotul because was the best looking one IMO. I prefer the radiant heating over the convection, mainly because I like being able to stand right next to the thing and thaw after being outside in the freezing cold. I also like that the Jotul doesn't have a catalytic converter - it burns well and is easy to use and maintain. Our house is 3000 sq ft, and when we get it cooking, the F400 heats the entire house -- we have a very open floorplan that allows the heat to travel (we had planned to use it to heat only the family room and kitchen, which is why we went with such a small stove - we weren't aware of how dramatically the heat would travel around the house), plus our winters aren't usually super-cold (we're in PA - usually in the 20s-30s during the day and teens at night). Today is colder than normal and very windy and I'm a little chillier than I prefer, but still no need to turn the furnace on. I will say that we tend to burn the stove pretty wide-open and maybe that's why we can heat so much more space than Jotul says the F400 is good for. Unlike the older cast iron stove I had in college, it seems impossible to overheat this stove, even when you stuff it to the gills and leave the damper wide open. And I guess because our house plan is so open, it seems that we really have to burn hot to feel warm in the room where the stove is - the heat dissipates through the house so quickly. So we burn usually at about 550 degrees (Jotul recommends 400-600) - we get great heating but we do blow through the wood - if I'm home, I'm usually reloading it every 2-3 hours to keep the house toasty. I would think that for your house, you could probably damp it back like it should be and get much longer burn times. We load it up for the last time at night around 11:30 and damp it way back and at 7am, there are still enough coals to relight quickly, although the house has gotten pretty cold by then. Depending on how whiney the kids are, I'll turn the furnace on to take the chill off in the morning but the stove has pretty much taken over by 8:30 or so and the furnace doesn't run for the rest of the day. We have it installed inside our masonry fireplace (it's freestanding but inside the firebox) and since the masonry heats up, we get a bit of the soapstone's extended heating in that the masonry continues to radiate heat after the stove has cooled down. Good luck!

To those of you who have been using these "home made" detergents, are you experiencing any odor, mold or mildew issues? The reason I ask is because castile soap builds up into a gooopy, gel-like gunk if not properly rinsed. This could potentially cause problems in washers. Every home-made product I've tried - from detergent to fabric softener - has proven unsatisfactory. Either the products don't clean well, they risk building up in my machine or on my clothes or they just don't work. Price is not the only consideration, which is what appears to be driving this homemade laundry movement.

mooring_girl - Thanks for the warning! I know that I will need a separate chiller; I was planning on the ProSelect unless there's a strong reason to spend the extra for an EverCold. alku05 - Thanks, I think the 1100 series ISE will give the same look. From the installation instructions, it looks like the ISE 1100 has two separate water supply lines - one is the ambient supply for the hot side, the other is the supply for the cold lever. The install instructions have you putting a Y-connector to hook both those lines to ambient in; I'll see what ISE tech support has to say about hooking them up separately. Or maybe I should just use two separate holes.. I was trying to minimize holes in the deck. So far I have: - Faucet (at least one hole, possibly more) - Sprayer (if I end up with a pull-up type.. hopefully not but we'll see) - airgap - Potfiller for filtered ambient water (planning to use a pitcher/glass filler.. the undersink water filter I'm putting in can deliver approx. 2.5GPM, so it's worth having a full faucet for the filtered water.) - instant hot - now, possibly a separate instant cold (btw, I just now noticed my typo in the title of the original post!)