VCBurner said:
A blower allows you to move the heat to further spots in your house by creating greater air flow. Agreed!
A lot of this game we play with stoves also has to do with the circulation of air. For example: My next door neighboor just bought a pellet stove and was told that it would work better with an outside air intake. I told him that it probably would work just as good if not better without one. His stove is in the livingroom of an open floor modern colonial. Without outside air his stove acts as an air circulator by bringing in cool air into the room from other areas in the house. The blower spreads the hot air and the cool air is sucked in by the intake. The air sucked in by the intake is replaced with warm air created by the stove.
I highly recommend blowers!
Edit 1: Another thought greater air flow in the house can also cause the wood to burn faster in your stove. This can boost firebox temperature, thus hotter gasses and better secondary burns too! Unless you have an outside air intake that is not affected by the indoor air circulation.
Hi Chris,
If you're willing to do some research and contemplation, I think you'll find that the facts of the matter are somewhat different from your present beliefs. I say that not to be argumentative, but to offer you a chance to see things differently.
Regarding outside air kits, your neighbor was told correctly. A stove intake sucks in the air closest to it, which is--barring an outside air intake--probably the air the stove has just heated and the warmest air in the house. It then sends this nice warm air out of your home, straight up the chimney, and out into the cold, cruel world.
Since that lost air has gone outside of your house, it has to be replaced by air from outside of your house. That ice cold air comes in through whatever cracks, holes and vents it can find. The net effect is warm air gets sucked towards your stove and up the chimney, and replaced by cold outside air, making the areas away from your stove colder. An outside air intake stops this warm inside air from being lost up your chimney and allows circulation to occur within your house, rather than sucking cold air in from the outside.
If that isn't clear, you can search the threads and faqs if you want, it's in there.
Regarding convection cooling, it cools the stove, not heats it. If the stove has a thermostat, or an observant operator, increasing the combustion air can make the stove burn faster and perhaps regain its original temperature, but that is an external correction and the basic effect of sucking heat out a stove with a fan is to cool the stove and cause it to burn less efficiently, not more. And since the stove has a limited ability to generate BTUs, any stove could be extinguished by the cooling of a sufficiently strong and cold wind.
That's not to say a blower is a bad thing, it's a great thing, because we want to get that heat out of the stove. The point is that sucking that heat out stresses the stove, like climbing a hill stresses your truck. There's no free lunch.
Hard to believe? An experiment might help.
Although it would be a pain to take a big stove outside and try cooling it, fortunately we have a smaller and more portable stove to play with--our bodies. In fact our bodies are miracles of technology, with built-in catalytic combusters allowing them to burn fuel at low temperature, and a built in thermostat to control burn rate and air supply. But, just like a stove, the human body has a limited maximum burn rate, and is stressed by too much cooling. So let's use our personal stove in the experiment.
On a 10* day, with winds of 30mph, take your personal stove outdoors with no insulation to allow maximum convective cooling. This is also known as buck naked. I predict that the first thing that happens is your thermostat turns your burn rate up to maximum (AKA shivering), and your air intake opens wide, sucking in as much oxygen as possible--likely accompanied by loud screams, obscenities, and major shrinkage. I also predict that your firebox temperature and efficiency will not go up, but down, your secondaries will go out, followed--if you stay out long enough--by your primaries, and a scene immortalized at the end of The Shining.
I assert that a wood stove's response is similar, though admittedly less entertaining.
I hope you find my rambling fun and thought provoking, for I mean no offense. Often the truth is counter-intuitive, which is one of the reasons this forum is so useful. If not, apologies, and as you were.
And at best the answer would only be a very rough approximation due to all the simplifying assumptions you would have to make to figure it without a computer. That might make an interesting final exam question for some engineering students....
