There were three or four people at Fireside Designs who treated me like a king--they were fabulous--but the owner didn't treat me like that at all. I went there to buy a cap for an existing wood stove and, while I was there looking at another stove on sale, the salesperson told me about a stove that would burn for 12 to 17 hours with a full load. He also told me about a stove swap for a charity where I could get a $1,500 coupon from them toward the purchase of a new stove, so we made the deal. I had $1,500 off, and then I found another coupon on the computer for $200 off--which made it $1,700 off of a $2,700 stove. So that left a balance of $1,000, but then they charged $400 to bring the stove to my house and install it.

Well, the owner wanted a picture of the existing stove so he could show it to the charity, and then he started almost yelling at me that his guys wouldn't be able to get the stove out of the tight spot that it's in. I told him that if your guys can't do it, then me and my wife can because we do it every year to clean it out. At at that point the owner wasn't happy with me--and it was terrible, a nightmare. How it ended was that I disliked the stove and its performance during the three months or so that I kept it. I ended up selling it for $1,250.