Another Newbie; lots of questions

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wccountryboy

New Member
Nov 9, 2008
29
NC
Great site, I've found tons of useful information. But I still have a few questions I haven't found solid answers for yet
First, a little background:
- I just installed a 30-NC in my front room (which is about 40'x25'). The stove is against the long interior wall, about 15' in from the short wall. The chimney consists of 6' of single wall pipe inside the house, and 15' of class A chimney through the attic and out the roof. A few feet to the right of the stove (about in the center of the long wall) is the doorway going down the hall to the bedrooms, study, and parlor.
- I have 2 celling fans in the room, more or less evenly spaced. I also have a through the wall fan above the door to try and move the heat. I also have through the wall fans above each of the bedroom doors, about 20' down the hallway.

The questions I have are the following:

1. Airflow- I can't seem to get any heat down the hallway to the bedrooms. I can easily get the front room to almost 80*, but am hard pressed to get the hallway and bedrooms above 65*. I've tried runnning the celling fans in both directions, using the wall fans on both high and low speeds (70 and 200 CFM/ minute, if I remember), using a box fan to move cold air along the floor, and various combinations of all of these. Stepping into the hallway is like walking into a cooler.
Would installing a blower on the stove help?
Any ideas on how to get the hallway and bedrooms up to mabey 70*?

2. Flue damper- I don't have one. How much and what kind of benifit will I see by adding one?

3. Burn time/heat output. If I load the stove at about 10:30 at night, let it run up to 550* or so, leave the air intake oper about 1/4", and call it a night, I wake up at 6:30 to a 200* stove and a chilly house. Lots of good coals to start a new fire with, but is there a way to keep the stove a little hotter, longer? Idealy, I'd like to wake up to mabey a 400* stove and 65* house. Am I being unrealistic?

I'm sure I'll have more stupid questions soon, but if I can solve these issues, life will be grand! Thanks for putting together a great forum!
 
You say you have pushed cold air. Are you putting a small fan on floor furtherest from stove as possible down hall blowing toward stove room? Whats happening in your main room with the stove. Is it easy to get hot? There are better experts on the 30 NC here and one will come along.
 
I've tried to push cold air with a box fan on the floor, beyond the bedrooms; about 25' from the doorway into the stove room. I think the shape of the hallway is part of the problem... its wide -5'- by the doorway, with a bathroom and stairwell (which is enclosed, and has a closed door, so the heats not going upstairs) on the right. It then narrows down to about 3'for about 5 liner feet, then wides out again. The stove room is easy to heat, its very easy to get it 77*-80*. But when I step into the hallway, its at least 10* cooler, usualy more. The best temp I've been able to get in the hall is about 65*. And there's no transition, for lack of a better word. The stove room may be in the upper 70s, a foot inside the hallway is in the low 60s.
 
Fans, at least the common non-ducted fans we're usually talking about, don't really "push" air nearly as effectively as they "pull" air. You might try placing a fan on the floor right where the hallway enters the room with the stove in it, blowing air toward the stove. You should, with some combination of fans, be able to establish a flow of cool floor-level air out of those back rooms toward the stove room, which will then be replaced by a flow of warm ceiling-level air flowing back into those rooms. Takes some experimentation, but I don't think you'll ever have much luck placing the box fan clear back at the remote end of the hallway and expecting it to produce the results you're looking for. The airflow from the outlet of the fan just diffuses so quickly that it's not going to get you to where you want to go. Place the fans so that the diffusion of the air coming out of the fan works for you, not against you. Keep fiddlin' around, you'll figure something out. Rick
 
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