Shared wall/brick hearth for added heat storage/release

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Nort'Woods

New Member
Jan 10, 2019
10
Wisconsin
Hello,
New to the forum and looking for some advice. I have a Drolet Savannah (found on CL for $250) that I plan on installing in our 1100sq. ft. single story home (slab construction).
The plan is to centrally locate it on a wall that will partition a bedroom area. My hope was to use brick or stone behind the stove for the hearth and allow that to gain some heat to help heat the bedroom on the other side via thermal storage. In other words, only the brick/stone hearth would be separating the bedroom from the stove. There will be no other sidewalls to worry about just the one directly behind the stove.
1. Is brick a good choice for this?
2. If so, how thick is best for the brick wall? Is a single row thick ok?
3. Since I want the brick to warm up, I want to place the stove closer to the wall--I've been told this is fine because its non-combustible. Is this correct?

Thanks!
 
Hello,
New to the forum and looking for some advice. I have a Drolet Savannah (found on CL for $250) that I plan on installing in our 1100sq. ft. single story home (slab construction).
The plan is to centrally locate it on a wall that will partition a bedroom area. My hope was to use brick or stone behind the stove for the hearth and allow that to gain some heat to help heat the bedroom on the other side via thermal storage. In other words, only the brick/stone hearth would be separating the bedroom from the stove. There will be no other sidewalls to worry about just the one directly behind the stove.
1. Is brick a good choice for this?
2. If so, how thick is best for the brick wall? Is a single row thick ok?
3. Since I want the brick to warm up, I want to place the stove closer to the wall--I've been told this is fine because its non-combustible. Is this correct?

Thanks!
There is no problem doing this but I really doubt you will get much of any benefit from it.
 
There is no problem doing this but I really doubt you will get much of any benefit from it.

Thanks bholler. Ha, I started to realize that too right after I posted. The brick just really isn't going to heat up that much. Either way, the brick will look nice and allow me to put the stove closer to the wall--plus it'll be tucked back from the walkway better. Still, I wish there was a way to share heat from the back of the stove to the bedroom...although it may not even be an issue given the size of our house.
 
There is no problem doing this but I really doubt you will get much of any benefit from it.

Absolutely. Will look nice, but very little heat to the bedroom, probably not enough to even tell the difference.

In theory, the brick will absorb heat and some will migrate to the other side of the wall. Then again, I did something a bit similar in my greenhouse when I built a stone wall around three sides of a wood stove. This was, I figured, going to absorb heat during the day and then radiate it back out into the room after I went to bed and the stove went cold. I took measurements before and after my wall-building and could determine no benefit.
 
Specific heat of stone = .20 BTU/(degF lb)
A ton of rock, 2000lb, raised 30deg, over 10hrs, would release 1200 btu/hr. Thats not much. Boiler guys sometimes use water to store heat (1000 gallons or more), or passive solar guys sometimes use rock (an entire basement full or an entire wall). Just shooting from the hip here, but I think it gives kind of an idea that you would need either a massive amount of rock, or a very large temperature rise, or both to make a difference.