Behold!

Everyone, meet our new wood stove, Otto. We're very pleased and proud with this addition to the family. After a long period of research we decided on Jøtul, a Norwegian company. It's very attractive with its matte black finish and glass front door. The stove came with a spark screen so we can keep the front door open and enjoy the crackly goodness of a roaring fire.

It's also very kind to the environment. On the roof of the stove's fire box there's a series of tubes (I'm totally serious, there really are tubes!). Air flows in and out of these tubes providing the oxygen to mix with the smoke creating a secondary combustion. This secondary combustion creates longer, cleaner burns so we're not polluting as much and we get longer burn times out of our logs.

We're still trying to figure out how to get the best out of the stove. We'll run it during the day and before we go to bed we'll fill it with logs and lower the air flow into the firebox for it to burn slowly, hopefully through the night.

Here's what the stove looks like without a fire burning (doesn't it look nice!):

We also needed to bring in a bunch of wood that we hope will last through the winter, though it seems at some point we'll need to re-up the stash. Here's our lovely stack in the catch all room. There's just over 2 cords of wood here (a cord is defined as enough wood that fits a 4ft x 4ft x 8ft space).