I paid $2,400 for a seven hundred pound soapstone free standing fire view .. fire place. When it arrived I put my 24 foot hay hauling trailer on my truck and went to the freight dock and picked it up. Using the front end loader on my New Holland I set it down on the front porch and un-crated it. With four strong men we moved it through the door into the living room at the peak of the cathedral ceiling in the middle of the room .. best draft .. worst draft next to the 8' walls somewhere or in the corner.

Everything worked well for three years, and then I put a temperature gage on the stack .. metal chimney. The stove read 450 and the stack read 450 and I thought "what a waste." I light the fire and most of the heat after the soapstone is charged up .. goes up the stack.

My wife being a kind soul let me tinker. I placed a two foot horizontal joint of pipe in the back (this puts out a lot of heat) and ran it into a diverter box which would let me either cut the heat off from entering a barrel full of 1,000 pounds of field rocks .. or let it run through a 90 and up the stack .. either way I could choke the draft down with the gates.

We are now enjoying a fire place that uses half the wood, and we can control the burn far better on a day with 15 to 45 mile per hour winds than we ever could with just a damper .. we dry dish towels, pants and boots around it and I can jump rolls and four covered loaves of dough in my clay bread pans up in no time at all.

Our double bedroom doors open close to the fire place .. we are warm and comfy at night and now .. when the fire box is running at 450 .. the stack measures 85 .. do the math, a huge savings .. twice the heat storage and twice the radiating surfaces. When the fire goes out twice the heat from the stones .. 700 vs. 1,700 pounds.

My Sun Valley friends are from France and sell French antique stuff including their hand carved four hundred year old limestone fire places that couldn't warm a cat.

They came in the fall and spring dropping their two horses off for me to feed all winter because our winters are thirty degrees warmer at night than their temps at higher altitudes. For three years they smiled at my contraption. I noticed but didn't say any thing.

Then one winter they dropped by while it was very cold out and could not believe how warm our house was compared to theirs. There is expensive and cute .. and there is warm .. C'est la vie.

The reason for the 24" horizontal pipe .. (1.) it was the shortest section I could purchase; (2.) UL recommends keeping all dampers and the slider cut offs in the diverter box a minimum of 18" away from the back of the fire place exit .. as the temps are too hot and could warp and or get too hot.

What surprised me was the huge amount of heat that comes off it immediately and sucks the cold air off the floor and warms it. I liked that. The bad - small children must be kept away from it and the fire box.