In the middle of one of our periodic cold snaps in the unpredictable Texas winter I was reminded of what a good idea it was to purchase a Vogelzang Boxwood Stove a few years ago. The stove is a well-made, compact and handy little unit which fits a need which I suspect we share with many other households perfectly. It may seem anachronistic, but it fills a need which is as real now as it was hundreds of years ago.
Like a lot of houses ours has problems with distributing the central heat evenly. While the master bedroom and the second story get good head distribution, nothing seems to keep the main living area warm because of its many windows, glass doors, and high ceilings. And if you turn the heat up high enough to compensate, the upstairs and the master bedroom become unbearably hot. The only answer is to set the thermostat for the rest of the house and find some other way to heat the living room to make it bearable on the 30 or so really cold days we have each winter.
When we bought our house it came with a fireplace with a built-in gas heater as the answer to this dilemma, but the blower makes so much noise you can't hold a conversation anywhere near it, and the heat output was never impressive. So a few years ago I bought a Vogelzang Boxwood Stove and installed it on the tile pad in front of the fireplace, running a vent pipe from the top of the stove into the chimney. The stove was inexpensive, well made, and does a remarkably good job of heating the living room when we need it.
The boxwood stove is an interesting device. It's a small woodburning stove designed more for function than for aesthetics. The interior is only about 22 inches deep and about 9 inches wide. It has no glass window or open grate so you can watch the fire. It's a little, rounded hunk of cast iron designed to generate the most possible heat from the smallest amount of fuel. Instead of a window it has a solid door in the front with a pull-out base plate for cleaning out ash and drawing in air. On the top there are two warmer plates which work nicely for keeping warm drinks warm. It's called a boxwood stove because it was made for use in warehouses and workshops to run off the scrap wood from shipping crates and boxes and pallets which would otherwise just be thrown away. The utilitarian design makes it much more efficient as a heat source than fancier stoves with windows and a fireplace-like design.
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