wood heat transferred through house

 Hello
I have a wood stove which overheats the living room.  I wish to move some of
this heat somehow to another part of the house which is built on a slab.  It
is about 50 or 60 feet away from the stove to the newer part.  I was
wondering about making some sort of heat exchanger and piping hot water to a
rad in the new part of to go with some sort of flexible ductwork in the
attic of the house.  I live in Manitoba so it gets fairly cold.  Any ideas
or reccomendations would be appreciated.

Thanks
Mike

  Mike Annetts wrote:

Funny you should ask! I've just spent some considerable time on the
phone talking to suppliers, etc about doing the same sort of thing. I
have a boiler in my wood cookstove (Rayburn Royal) that pipes to a coil
in the water heater, which lives 2 feet away on the other side of a
brick wall. During winter, the stove is on 24x7, and the hot water
system boils on days when we don't use much hot water. The house has a
steeply pitched roof, and all the heat from the stove goes up there -
not very useful to us.

The hot-water plumbing from the stove can be intercepted with a small
circulation pump which will send the hot water to a radiator first, then
back to the hot water system inlet, and a control thermostat shuts off
the pump when the "main" hot water system drops below a selected
temperature. This would recover some of the heat that would otherwise be
wasted boiling the hot water system, and use it heating the bathroom -
the coldest part of our house :-(

Unfortunately, the cost of AUD$1000 installed puts it 'way down the
wish-list.

The suppliers recommended that I install a reversable ceiling fan at the
highest part of the pitched ceiling to circulate the warm air back
downwards. Total cost AUD$250.00 installed.

It won't stop the HW system boiling, but it should keep us warmer.
--


Bernie Dwyer
Dump the z to reply to me
*****************************

 Not sure if you have an existing furnace in your house (you didn't
mention) but what I did was put a cold air return in the ceiling of the
room with the wood stove.  Then block the other cold air returns in the
house.  Put a fan switch on the furnace and just run the fan.  The warm
air rises to the ceiling, into the cold air return and then the furnace
fan distributes it to the rest of the house.  Much cheaper.

Good luck.


Roland

 
I like that idea -- it would work regardless of whether one were using a
stove to heat or not.  One thing though, how does the hot air get to the
furnace?  Wouldn't the furnace just pull from right outside the unit's
placement or does it have enough juice to get the heat up and back down?
(I'm assuming your furnace is in the basement for example, or at the least
lower than the air return's position.)

 

That's correct, my situation is a wood pellet stove in my rec room in the
basement.  I have a propane furnance with all the heat ducts, also located
in the basement but near the center of the house.  My furnace only gets air
from the cold air return that runs down the center line of the house and
has vents to pull air from the floor of the upstairs and ceiling of the
downstairs rooms.  I made the intake of the cold air return in the rec room
larger then the rest of the intakes and then partially closed off the
airflow from the other rooms.  This still allows some cold air from
upstairs to mix with the warmer air from the rec room before being blown
out to the rest of the house.

Normally here in in mid-winter, my downstairs temp is about 76F with the
stove going and, with the blower on, the upstairs is about 72F.  This
method was worked well for me for the past 3 years.  My house is approx
2400sqft split level and I haven't run the propane for 3 years.  The stove
easily heats the entire house.

Not sure how you would do this with a house on a slab.  Do you have a
furnace and what type is it.


Roland