Napoleon 2300 Economizer Large Wood Burning Stove - Black

Owned for 18 months

Purchased this stove to heat my 1800 sqft home with 1800 sqft of full walk out basement. Essentially 3600 sqft of home. Have it in the basement, near the centre of the house with over 20ft of insulated pipe running through the house. Stove worked great first winter, I burn as much as possible, pretty much keep a continuous fire going from october-April with Propane Forced air furnace as backup. As I said first winter it worked very well, kept the house at 70 or warmer quite easily. We would load hardwood every 3-6 hours except at night where I would leave the damper very low and let it burn for 8-9 hours. Always coals left over, stir them up and load more wood the next morning. This season I have experienced issues, on the inside of the stove there is a rectangular bar running front to back that houses the secondary burn chamber. This very beefy piece of steel has actually bent down, I imagine due to the heat and is now blocking the holes of the secondary burn tube located inside the big steel runner. May sound hard to understand but if you look inside the stove you will see what I'm talking about. Most secondary burn designs are stainless tubes that are fully exposed, this stove uses a burn tube that is shielded by a big steel runner and has large slots drilled into it, when the steel sags it blocks the secondary chamber and the efficiency drops right off as does the heat. The ash drawer is a joke, it has a huge hole on the back where the fresh air intake goes. I don't use that input so every time you put ash into the ash drawer it fills the area around the stove with tonnes of ash.... Kinda seems like an after thought. I choose to flip the brick for the ash drawer opening over and just don't use the drawer ever. I still like the stove i just think this is a bad design, and from what I hear it's next to impossible to get Wolf Steel (Makers of Timberwolf and Napoleon) to help out. They want you to go through your authorized dealer, so they don't have to deal with it directly. For the price it's a hard stove to beat, it's basic but as long as you don't have the issue I did should be a great stove. May just want to ask if there has been a fix for this problem i experienced or maybe I just got a bad unit. If I had it to do over again I would spend the extra money and go Pacific Energy or one of the higher end makers and buy the best, however as I said for the price it's pretty good.