No power! wood furnace?

[Bwhunter85]

In Michigan without power. What could go wrong if I started a fire in add on wood furnace without electricity to power blowers? Just looking for the radiant heat to come up through duct work. The unit gets hot without blowers on. Hotblast unit . Thanks and merry Christmas!

 

[fespo]

Maybe a very small fire, nothing to over heat the unit. I don't know for sure.

 

[Conkl]

In Michigan without power. What could go wrong if I started a fire in add on wood furnace without electricity to power blowers? Just looking for the radiant heat to come up through duct work. The unit gets hot without blowers on. Hotblast unit . Thanks and merry Christmas!

I have a old Clayton add on furnace and what i have done in the past is remove blower from rear of unit and that allows the cold air to enter using natural convection. You still have to watch the temps. But it does allow for more airflow up through the ductwork.

 

[UncleJoe]

Back at the old farmhouse we had a hotblast 1400 as a stand alone. The power went out more often than I care to remember. I would keep a low fire going and let convection do it's thing but it just wasn't enough to keep that drafty old place warm. It hardly seem worth the gas to run the generator for just a blower so I ended up going out and buying 2 deep cycle batteries and a 400w power inverter. Hooked up one battery and plugged the blower into the inverter, which said it was drawing 60w. The battery lasted for about 14 hours. The inverter shut itself off when the battery got too low to run the blower. Replaced the drained battery with the fully charged one and put the drained one on the generator while I was running it for the freezers. This way I only ran the generator twice a day for a couple hours at a time. The longest we ever went without power was 4 days and this system worked quite well for us.

 

[maple1]

Got kids? Old exercise bike?