This is my first year burning, and all has been great thus far. I'm wondering how I can get better control though.
Situation is:
-stove in basement
-run forced air furnace fan to distribute heat throughout house (basement + 2 stories)
When I run the stove on setting 2 (since setting 1 appears to be a standby, doesn't even run the blower), it does a pretty good job at keeping the house at temp overnight. Might lose 1 or 2 degrees over the course of the night when it gets cold out. I crank it up to 3 when I want the house temperature to rise, then I turn it back to 2 when it gets where I want it to be.
Problem is, when I go to work I either have to leave it on or turn it off. If I leave it on, it gets pretty warm in the house and I feel like I'm wasting fuel doing that. If I turn it off though, it gets down into the high 50's (when its in the 30's during the day). When I get home, I crank the stove up to high and it takes about 2 hours for the house to warm back up again, at which point I can turn it back down to 2 for maintenance.
I could put it on a thermostat and use the thermostat essentially as a timer to fire the stove up about 2 hours before I get home. However, I need the furnace fan running to distribute the heat. If I leave the furnace fan on while I'm gone, it runs cold air from the basement (once it cools off, which is pretty quickly) through the house and just lowers the temperature much faster than what it would through standby heat loss, not to mention wasting electricity.
I was thinking if I put them both on Wi-Fi enabled thermostats (the main furnace already is), I could manually kick off both the stove and the fan around 2pm to get it warm for when I get home. That does require my intervention though, so it's not exactly ideal. On my main thermostat I can't program a schedule for the fan.
The main thermostat does support a JSON based API, so I could have my web server kick the fan on and off based on a schedule that I program by hand. I've already wrote some Ruby scripts to store the indoor and outdoor temps in a database in case I want to ..... do who knows what with that info.
So a very long winded explanation, but the main question stands. Is it better to just leave it running, or to try and schedule burn times?
Situation is:
-stove in basement
-run forced air furnace fan to distribute heat throughout house (basement + 2 stories)
When I run the stove on setting 2 (since setting 1 appears to be a standby, doesn't even run the blower), it does a pretty good job at keeping the house at temp overnight. Might lose 1 or 2 degrees over the course of the night when it gets cold out. I crank it up to 3 when I want the house temperature to rise, then I turn it back to 2 when it gets where I want it to be.
Problem is, when I go to work I either have to leave it on or turn it off. If I leave it on, it gets pretty warm in the house and I feel like I'm wasting fuel doing that. If I turn it off though, it gets down into the high 50's (when its in the 30's during the day). When I get home, I crank the stove up to high and it takes about 2 hours for the house to warm back up again, at which point I can turn it back down to 2 for maintenance.
I could put it on a thermostat and use the thermostat essentially as a timer to fire the stove up about 2 hours before I get home. However, I need the furnace fan running to distribute the heat. If I leave the furnace fan on while I'm gone, it runs cold air from the basement (once it cools off, which is pretty quickly) through the house and just lowers the temperature much faster than what it would through standby heat loss, not to mention wasting electricity.
I was thinking if I put them both on Wi-Fi enabled thermostats (the main furnace already is), I could manually kick off both the stove and the fan around 2pm to get it warm for when I get home. That does require my intervention though, so it's not exactly ideal. On my main thermostat I can't program a schedule for the fan.
The main thermostat does support a JSON based API, so I could have my web server kick the fan on and off based on a schedule that I program by hand. I've already wrote some Ruby scripts to store the indoor and outdoor temps in a database in case I want to ..... do who knows what with that info.
So a very long winded explanation, but the main question stands. Is it better to just leave it running, or to try and schedule burn times?
