Advice for pellet furnace install

[lsirois]

I purchased a used St Croix SCF-050 with the hope of heating up the basement a bit and providing some heat to the upper floors. This furnace will not be able to heat the house, but I do have a wood stove insert on the 1st floor that supplies a lot of the heat.

I was thinking of just installing this furnace as a standalone with a few registers leading to the first floor, but after reading some of your suggestions, I realized that it might be an interesting project to install this furnace in parallel with the existing LP furnace. I read a bunch of posts and was all motivated until I took a good look at my plenum. See the plenum photo. There is a nice area right where the furnace ends and the plenum starts that unfortunately has my AC coils and the coils go right up into the center of where all those ducts connect. In other words, I wouldn't know where a could put a backdraft damper in such a setup. Any suggestions about this?

With this in mind, my second issue is where to install the pellet furnace. I can install it to the left of the furnace or the right...that's it, but neither would be close to the furnace. The back wall (wall behind where I stood to take the photo) has a large deck running its entire length. The front wall (on the other side of the furnace) is just a partition leading to the finished basement and the front of the house. 25' to the right, I have en empty chimney flue. 35' to the left, I have a concrete foundation. I have quotes to vent into the chimney (with an insulated liner) or through the foundation. Prices are about the same. I prefer going up the chimney because the other wall would require a hole through the concrete foundation slightly below grade to clear some electrical and LP lines and I am not too crazy about that. Any recommendations/opinons/comments about the chimney install versus the concrete foundation install?

Again, keep all of the above in mind... On the left side (through foundation install), the furnace would be close to 1st floor and 2nd floor supply and cold returns ducts (see photos). On the right side (flue install), the furnace would be near a 2nd floor supply only. The 1st floor and cold return find themselves on the finished side of the basement. So, if I cannot install a damper at the plenum, would access to the various ducts mentioned above affect your choice of installation location?

Finally, if I go back to my idea of having this as a standalone furnace with a few ducts going to the 1st floor, it would have to be vented through the concrete foundation. The chimney side has a woodstove on the 1st floor making that side of that level already warm..plus running ducts all the way to the other end (~50') sounds inefficient. Plus, I am not quite sure what to think about drilling a large hole through my foundation. Thoughts?

So basically, I am trying to figure out how to tie into the existing ductwork and where to install the pellet furnace.

Sorry about the "mess" in the basement. My LP water tank sprung a leak...followed by a stream....a couple of months ago that got replaced by a tankless system...hence the newly liberated flue...and the basement junk just tossed around.

 

[lsirois]

I am surprised...no comments/opinions? I did get an idea regarding hooking up to the plenum though. Since a damper in the plenum doesn't seem possible (to me anyways) without having some major work done, I though that it might be possible to run a duct to the plenum and split it into however many supply branches I wish to feed into and put a damper on the branches that I am feeding into between (where I tied into with the pellet furnace duct and the side of the duct that leans to the plenum).

Besides...I have 4 supply ducts leaving the plenum and leading to the 1st and 2nd floor of a 3000 sqft house. I doubt the SCF-050 can push air through that entire system of ducts with its 800cfm blower. One supply branch leads to the side with the wood stove...I probably wouldn't feed into that branch....maybe it's not even worth feeding into the 2nd floor ducts either. A lot of the heat from the wood stove finds its way upstairs. Thermostat rarely calls for heat on the 2nd floor except early in the morning before the morning fire. The house temps won't be homogeneously warm, but we already experience that now with the wood stove.