Do you think its worth it? We bought a stove a couple years ago with capacity for a catalytic burner, but it didn't actually come with one. Wondering if I should get one.
Never used one but our wood stove works great and is a non-catalytic. We have a Millennium 4300. I really like how it runs with its baffle and multiple burn zones. Burns so hot that my ash pile is minimal and chimney stays very clean. Only smokes on start up and thats expected. Empty the stove box of ash once a month and we use the stove 24/7 during winter.
We go through about 3-4 cords a year, stored in a 10x10x5' wood shed I built. I have 3 cords of oak that is split into nice pieces for long burn times, and 1 cord of cedar that is split fairly small for starting fires. Cedar gets it going, oak keeps us warm. Our house is small, 1500sqft, for the stove size, which handles 3000sqft. It's an older drafty house with poor insulation built in the 70's. Stove heats us out of the house and the fires stay small, a morning/evening fire, usually letting it go out, unless we dip into the 20's. If I fill it full of oak with a nice bed of coals and turn it down, I can run for 12 hours straight, ending with hot coals which just need a fresh load of oak for the next 12 hours.
I use an old tire I found on the roadside thats attached to a round of cedar as my splitting log for kindling. You can fill a trash can full of cedar kindling pieces in around 10 min.

We use a heat powered fan and humidifier now too. This was our first burn.

The tire kindling splitter.

Before I put the roof on. Wood shed is sealed with a 50/50 mix of diesel fuel and used motor oil. The new coat this year stained it pretty dark and it looks amazing. I put the splitting end of the splitter right next to the entrance of the shed so my splits pile up next to where I stack it. Pretty efficient operation. Took 8 hours to split and stack all my wood. Probably another 8-12 hours of cutting and moving rounds to the pile. Oak was seasoned for 2 years, cedar was only seasoned for the summer. Cedar dries super fast out here in the summer with 80-90* weather, full sun exposure, and low humidity. Both sit around 20% moisture which is supposedly perfect.