ok.................i'll chime in on this one since in the last two months i've been thru pretty much all your concerns + wet wood.i have a drafty 4 bedroom ranch with an insulated basement.
i built an exterior masonry chimney to replace an old one that had been torn down.end result is a chimney that works ok when its cold outside and the stove is cranking.my draft is lousy with warm temps and stove damped down.
put a monster airtight with a blower and 2 air outlets in the front in the basement.end result was a basement that was 90+ degrees and a main floor that rarely reached 67 no matter how many fans i ran or floor vents i put in or cold air returns i added.3/4 of the way up the basement stairs you hit a wall of cold air and all the registers were cold.plus i was going thru an extreme amount of wood.so far was a very unhappy camper.
pulled the monster smoke dragon and installed a quadrafire 4300 step top.what a sweet stove.capable of heating 2200 sq. feet.uh yeah........not from the basement.now my basement temps were down in the 80's and the main floor was under 65 unless you burned it wide open non stop.very very unhappy guy.was this close
to ordering oil.
put the ol smoke dragon back in and built an airbox the enclosed the air outlets and sits on the top of the stove.bought 200 bux worth of 6" duct work and hooked up 4 6x10 floor registers.turned on the blower and went upstairs.1st 2 registers were blowing warm air weakly and from there it just died in the pipe.talk about frustration.
bought a small furnace blower at local builders exchange for 30 bux.added a 6x10 register box with a 6" round inlet to the output of the blower,added a 6" to 4" reducer and ran it into the existing blower opening.built an inlet box to accept a standard furnace filter to clean the air up a bit and let her rip.now we gots heat
it runs pretty much constantly on low,the basement stays around 75-80 and the main floor between 72-76.if it gets too warm we just shut off the blower.now that i've got this set up working i'm going to look into how to get the blower to run off a control unit of some sort with a thermostat.
with the monster loaded and dampened down i can get a 10 hour burn and come home to a decent bed of coals and still warm ducts and a house thats still 70 plus.i know running it this way my stove and pipe temps are too low,and it does build creosote at a faster rate than normal,but i clean the pipes every 2 weeks and the flue once a month.
my opinion is that chimneys belong inside,stoves belong on the main floor,and that heating from the basement does nothing but overfire the hell outta your stove unless you force the air to the main floor.
we'll get by with this set up for the rest of this year,but next year we will be making a change.
either the quad will find a new home on the main floor,or we'll sell it and buy either an indoor wood furnace or an outdoor boiler since the house has forced hot water installed already.
this is by no means me telling others to do as i have,just stating what we've had to do to get by with the heating mistakes we've made for the 1st year..........jeremy