I personally have installed 3 different stoves. The first was a corn burning stove, right (months) before the corn price shot up from $1.98/bushel to over $8/bushel... Bad timing. It worked great and with the built in hopper I only needed to touch it once a day. But with the price of corn, it was more expensive than burning natural gas.
The next stove was a Morso 7110 made in Belgium. This was a very high quality stove and worked great, the only problem was that the firebox size was too small to support an overnight burn in my climate (SE Michigan and it was a fairly hard winter, unlike the last 3...) So I sold that to a guy who had a smaller home and got a Pacific Energy stove. Now Pacific Energy stoves are made by Canadians who have REAL winters and all they have to burn are those pine toothpicks that they grow there up north. These are very well built stoves, quality materials everywhere. No fragile ceramic insulation that you can break by knocking it with a log (seriously, that is what you find in the new VC stoves and others like Harman). One of the key features of the PE stoves is the huge firebox. I can insert 18" logs end on and still have room. This helps a lot with getting a good load of wood in there for cold days. I got one of the fancy versions with cast iron cladding, the T5. This basically turns the stove into a big convection heater and allows quite close install clearances. Clearances are a big issue on many stoves, including VC, Harman and most of the soapstone stoves which is why I couldn't consider them.
The EPA 2 requirements have only 1 downside on current stoves and that is how the test is done with a minimum chimney height in a warm climate. This is referred to as the "Florida bungalow syndrome". What this translates to is that a system that is designed to work acceptably in the awful test configurations, when transplanted to a Northern climate with a full height chimney and high draft because of the low ambient temperature, will have too high of a burn rate without taking some external measures. Basically, in most cases in Northern climates you have to install a damper, sometimes 2 in the stove pipe above the stove. This counteracts the tendency of the stove to run uncontrolled because of the excessively large inlets, which are unavoidable because of the way the EPA test is specified. With this simple modification, one gets perfectly good long burn times, very clean combustion and in many cases over 80% efficiency. By comparison, the efficiency of a typical pre-epa stove is often half to a third of that and all that unburnt fuel goes into your chimney with some of it accumulating creating a risk of a chimney fire.
I would never want one of those smokey, stinky old stoves any more than I want a car with a carb and points and choke cable and the attendant hassle with getting it started on cold mornings. Nor would I want to put up double the amount of dry wood or more.
