Thomas, you mention you have a wood furnace. Is it connected to a forced air duct system? If so, you might consider a furnace such as the Kuuma Vapor-Fire:
The Best Wood Burning Furnaces In The World - KUUMA
or Max Caddy:
Max Caddy | Wood furnaces | Caddy Furnaces
The MaxCaddy is interesting because it has options for wood-only, wood+electric, wood+oil or wood+oil+electric.
I helped my neighbour research furnaces for his new 3,000 sq. ft. a few years ago. He went with the MaxCadddy wood+electric and is very pleased with it. I heat our house with an old(installed in 1981) RSF wood furnace/electric furnace combination which works well but is not near as efficient as the MaxCaddy.
The MaxCaddy has six blower speeds whereas mine has one. I figure it is at least 25% more efficient than my wood furnace (which is more or less a big burn chamber surrounded by a metal shroud). The wood fire in my neighbour's furnace looks like it is burning gas (like the modern wood stoves). Mine is somewhere between that and an enclosed campfire. Wood burning appliances have come a long way.
That said, we really like our old wood furnace compared to the electric furnace because it provides a much more even heat compared to the on/off cycles of the electric furnace. We heat 95% with wood and normally just use the electric for morning warmups during cool spring or fall mornings. The wood and electric furnaces have separate thermostats which can be operated together. If you set the electric lower than the wood, the wood furnace will do all the heating and when the wood fire dies down the electric will take over. But we mostly leave our electric thermostat "off".
Although not as effective, our furnace will heat the house during power outages. It has removable bottom panels which allow air circulation by convection.
Our wood furnace thermostat controls the fire's intake air and it either full-on or full-off. That can be a problem. If there is a lot of wood and the intake is open for a long time the furnace can get hot. Another switch on the furnace shroud will then turn the intake air off until it cools a bit. Another problem can occur when adding wood if the thermostat is calling for heat but the room temperature is near the thermostat setting. The fire can raise the room temperature and the thermostat will shut off the air before the wood is completely going. The wood smoulders on a bed of coals and the burn chamber fills with smoke. When the room finally cools and calls for more heat it opens the furnace air. That can cause a smoke explosion as the flames start back up and some smoke escapes through the chimney pipe joints and chimnney damper. That does not happen now but it took us a few years to figure out how to run the furnace.
The Kuuma vapor-fire appears to have a good solution for this problem as seen in this video:
Kuuma Vapor-Fire Furnace Operational Video - YouTube Note: edited to correct this link.
I have considered upgrading my furnace to a MaxCaddy but likely will not do it because of the cost and my existing setup works fine.
Next to the better comfort of the wood furnace over our electric furnace I like getting the wood. I am retired and fortunate to have a ready supply of free wood. My favourite job is cutting logs in the bush. If I wasn't cutting firewood I'd still be in the bush much of the time. But it was not that way 15 years ago when I did not have time because I was working.
Good luck in your search for a new heating appliance.
my glass is dirty, but here is the glow of my pellet stove right now. Really pretty when the glass is clean. I normally clean it when i clean stove, but being sick, it didnt get cleaned last time. The nice thing about this harman stove, is it has a large ash pan, new pellets being feed in pushes the ashes over the edge of firebox into pan below. Clean out once a month.
