BK: How to OAK

[Tron]

Not having an OAK isn't the problem you make it seem. I can't have one since my stove doesn't sit on an outside wall (and no crawl space underneath), and the only time I've got issues was when I ran the kitchen vent and forgot to open a window.
Unless your home is super tight, the air drawn inside by the stove is a lot less of what even a light breeze would bring in. We've had an energy evaluation done a while ago and I was suprised of all the places air gets drawn into the house.

True, we never have issues with low humidity inside, it never really goes below 50% or so, summer and winter.

 

[brenndatomu]

Really? That would be ideal, if it could work. I had read that the combination of red shale (lots of clay) and granite would make this very difficult or impossible, but have to admit I'm not an expert.

I've only core drilled three times that I can recall, and two of those were block and concrete, only once thru stone similar to this. In that case, I used water, but it was a newer wall and not at the bottom of 4 stories of stone above.

Do you use a different bit for dry coring stone? I was looking at classic segmented diamond bits, for a good mix of clearing slurry from the clay-heavy red shale, and diamond for getting thru the granite. No hammer action, just turning it on my low-speed gear drill, and with minium water flow.

Only concern for me would be cooking the bit part way thru the job, and leaving things in a half-drilled state. My gut tells me I want to get the hole done and get the stainless tube in there before letting it sit days half-drilled. I've never had issues with stone shifting before, but leaving it days while waiting to order up a new bit, thru possible freeze/thaw cycles, gives me the willies.

I missed the granite part, sorry...I would want that water cooled too.
To minimize the mess, rent a Hilti water recycler...it collects the water, filters, and reuses it. I've never personally used one, but I hear good things.
Here's a link to a local rental place that has them...surely you can find them over your way too.

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[bigealta]

Wouldn't it be way easier to just rig a toilet fill valve to your humidifier water tank and skip the oak?

 

[Ashful]

Not having an OAK isn't the problem you make it seem.

I'll admit my knee-jerk reaction was to argue with you on this point, but after some background reading, I see you make some good points.

My house is large (6600 sq.ft.), but of mostly stone construction, so the walls themselves don't pass much. However, 26 of our 54 windows are older than the Declaration of Independence, and we have 10 exterior doors dating 1730's to 1990's. It seems a single drafty window or door can admit almost as much air as a wood stove forcibly draws into the house, and when considering the sum total of our window and door count, the wood stoves appear to be a drop in the bucket... at least on a windy day.

What my gut and own experience of living in this house and putting 150+ full cords of wood thru no less than 5 wood stoves, is that we definitely notice distant rooms feeling colder as soon as we fire the stoves, but perhaps this is our simple human minds picking up on the larger delta between the rooms near the stove and more distant rooms.

If you give me a good excuse to forgo the OAK's, I'll gladly stop right here! I don't love the idea of leaving two large holes in these antique stone walls, nor the work required to get it done.

Unless your home is super tight, the air drawn inside by the stove is a lot less of what even a light breeze would bring in.

Note, it's not "the" stove. We have three, at least two of which are always running 24/7. We also have an oil burner drawing on house air, albeit much less hungry than the stoves, burning 1000-1200 gallons of oil per year.

True, we never have issues with low humidity inside, it never really goes below 50% or so, summer and winter.

Ours runs 17% - 19%. Even with 3 large humidifiers running, I struggle to keep it at 50%.

 

[Ashful]

Wouldn't it be way easier to just rig a toilet fill valve to your humidifier water tank and skip the oak?

Because it's an old house divided into many sections, I have to keep a few of them running. And filling two of them every night, a third in a smaller space once or twice per week, is a little tedious. But honestly, simply filling them is not that big a deal.

The bigger issue I have with the humidifiers is maintenance. They should be torn down and cleaned weekly, and the wicks go hard with mineral deposits, even with our softened water. So when I get tired of cleaning and maintaining them mid-season, the wicks go hard, and they stop consuming water.

Misting "wickless" types would solve some of those issues, but the wick is nice at capturing dust, pet dander, even errant stove ash. They keep the house much cleaner than a wickless type which sprays out mineral deposits from the water source.

That said... feeding and cleaning humidifiers is still less work than installing two oaks thru these walls. And if Tron is right and the OAK is really like pissing in the ocean, then I'd be glad to save that time and effort.

 

[brenndatomu]

It might be worth a trial...rig up a temporary "OAK" through a window near the stove, see if you feel like it helps any.
I dunno what kind of windows you have, but if they are double hung, you could use one of those vent kits they make to exhaust a portable AC unit out through a window...then run some dryer duct over near the stove...

 

[Ashful]

I could probably rig something up. Both stoves are set back into walk-in fireplaces (see my avatar), so there'd be some duct length involved in getting from a window around the side of the fireplace and to the connection point at the back of the stove. But I could make most of the pipe 4" flex duct, just transitioning down to 3" at the stove, to reduce any issue with restriction due to a long 3" pipe.

I don't think I'd get a good sense of room feel under different weather conditions with just a day or two of this test setup, tho. Likely something I'd want to run a few weeks, before forming any confident opinion on it.

 

[Dieselhead]

I'll admit my knee-jerk reaction was to argue with you on this point, but after some background reading, I see you make some good points.

My house is large (6600 sq.ft.), but of mostly stone construction, so the walls themselves don't pass much. However, 26 of our 54 windows are older than the Declaration of Independence, and we have 10 exterior doors dating 1730's to 1990's. It seems a single drafty window or door can admit almost as much air as a wood stove forcibly draws into the house, and when considering the sum total of our window and door count, the wood stoves appear to be a drop in the bucket... at least on a windy day.

What my gut and own experience of living in this house and putting 150+ full cords of wood thru no less than 5 wood stoves, is that we definitely notice distant rooms feeling colder as soon as we fire the stoves, but perhaps this is our simple human minds picking up on the larger delta between the rooms near the stove and more distant rooms.

If you give me a good excuse to forgo the OAK's, I'll gladly stop right here! I don't love the idea of leaving two large holes in these antique stone walls, nor the work required to get it done.


Note, it's not "the" stove. We have three, at least two of which are always running 24/7. We also have an oil burner drawing on house air, albeit much less hungry than the stoves, burning 1000-1200 gallons of oil per year.


Ours runs 17% - 19%. Even with 3 large humidifiers running, I struggle to keep it at 50%.

Idk if you saw my post #25 but I backup tron, I still humidify with an oak.

 

[Tron]

And if Tron is right and the OAK is really like pissing in the ocean, then I'd be glad to save that time and effort.

Now knowing the size and age of your house, and especially the age and number of windows, I stand with my opinion.
To take a more scientific approach, you could get an energy survey done for your house, energy companies oftentimes offer that for free. What they'll do in the course of that is tape off one of your doors and run a blower exhausting air out of the house. The pressure delta between inside and outside tells them how leaky the house is, and also lets them hunt for the major inleakages. I was surprised at the amount of air entering my home through the internal door latches, no less. Those go though the doorframe and connect directly to the attic above...
Another thing to do is to place thermometers in the distant rooms and see if the temperature there really drops or if it just feels like it due to the stoves running in the other rooms. I'd bet that's the case.

I mean, sure, every cubic foot of air through the OAK is one that isn't being drawn into the house, but I doubt it'll make much difference.

 

[Ashful]

No need for a blower door test, when I can literally look outside thru the gaps around some of my 290 year old doors. I sometimes get snow indoors thru those gaps, literally.

Keeping a very old house original and authentic has its costs, and I’m willing to bear them, but am just trying to make the place as comfortable as possible in the meantime.

I do have shutters over my skeleton key holes, if it matters.

How many of you have to literally argue with airport or stadium security over your house key, every time they try to claim it’s a weapon?

 

[Ashful]

Oh, and the universal exhaust tubing kit just arrived from Amazon. Not a tiny box! That’s gonna be a fun return.

 

[moresnow]

I do have shutters over my skeleton key holes, if it matters.

This^ is my outside air supply
Until it gets so cold that I cover it up with tape!
Amazing how much air passes through here.

 

[Tron]

when I can literally look outside thru the gaps around some of my 290 year old doors.

Well, I guess there's your answer ;-)
I guess you won't find those doors at Home Depot, but after almost 300 years, I'd probably look around to find someone who can make a replacement that fits the aesthetics and style of the house. Same goes for the windows. Especially if they're still single-pane glass, you're losing tons of energy through those.

 

[Ashful]

Well, I guess there's your answer ;-)
I guess you won't find those doors at Home Depot, but after almost 300 years, I'd probably look around to find someone who can make a replacement that fits the aesthetics and style of the house. Same goes for the windows. Especially if they're still single-pane glass, you're losing tons of energy through those.

Two of the doors are indeed pretty leaky, but the windows are actually reasonably good.

I FLIR'd the whole house about 15 years ago, I'm sure the images are in the archives of this forum from that time, and found the radiation losses from the 1775 are much lower than that from the 1995 windows. The reason is storm windows with 3 - 4 inch air gaps, versus dual panes with 0.2 inch air gaps. But the old windows are admittedly a little more drafty than the new.

The good news about the two very leaky doors is that one is immediately adjacent to the stove I run WOT, and the other is the basement entrance directly below that stove. They're both also on the southern and leeward wall of the house, and deeply recessed. So they're not emitting a ton of air in the first place, and what they do is immediately going toward the stove, rather than being drawn thru the whole house.

 

[Tron]

So they're not emitting a ton of air in the first place, and what they do is immediately going toward the stove, rather than being drawn thru the whole house.

Seems like you already have an OAK of sorts

 

[stoveliker]

Two of the doors are indeed pretty leaky, but the windows are actually reasonably good.

I FLIR'd the whole house about 15 years ago, I'm sure the images are in the archives of this forum from that time, and found the radiation losses from the 1775 are much lower than that from the 1995 windows. The reason is storm windows with 3 - 4 inch air gaps, versus dual panes with 0.2 inch air gaps. But the old windows are admittedly a little more drafty than the new.

The good news about the two very leaky doors is that one is immediately adjacent to the stove I run WOT, and the other is the basement entrance directly below that stove. They're both also on the southern and leeward wall of the house, and deeply recessed. So they're not emitting a ton of air in the first place, and what they do is immediately going toward the stove, rather than being drawn thru the whole house.

Why not make an oak to the WOT Ashford by going into the basement then?
No core drilling in sketchy (once cored) walls needed and less air r drawn from the room in which the stove is (so less draft coming in that door)?

 

[Ashful]

Why not make an oak to the WOT Ashford by going into the basement then?
No core drilling in sketchy (once cored) walls needed and less air r drawn from the room in which the stove is (so less draft coming in that door)?

There is actually a flue connecting the top of the firebox in which one of the stoves resides, down into the basement. It's been blocked off with a stone mortared over the hole in the basement, impossible to detect today, but I'd bet I could locate it from old photos and un-cover it.

But, the route is somewhat circuitous, as the OAK duct would need to run from stove, up about 8 feet to where the basement flue joins with the flue holding the liner for this stove. Plus, there's not enough air intrusion into the basement alone to support the draw of the stove, so it'd still ultimately be drawing air down thru the rest of the house to support the stove, just via the basement.

Going straight down from either stove would mean coring thru many feet of solid stonework, as each stove has solid stone hearth below. Out thru the back wall is definitely the shortest path.

But I think I've made my mind up to just abandon the OAK altogether. The idea to improve efficiency was good and real, but seems to amount to a teaspoon in a bathtub, when compared to wind-driven air infiltration. The amount of air the stoves draw is just too small to make any noticeable net difference in this house. I realize that, now.

 

[Tron]

The amount of air the stoves draw is just too small to make any noticeable net difference in this house. I realize that, now.

The problem is that you only have one of two numbers needed to make a good evaluation. You really don't know how much air is leaking in without the stoves. But let's make a quick assessment.
Apparently, a regular-sized wood-fired stove (princess-class) draws about 10 (on low) to 25 (on WOT) CFM.
But I would bet that significantly more than that enters your house. With 6600 sq. ft., and an average of (estimated) 7' room height, that gives you 46200 cubic feet of volume. Ok, deduct a bit for walls and such and we're talking 40000 cubic feet.
With two stoves running WOT, that's 50 CFM. Or in other words, the air in your home is replaced once by the stoves every 13.3 hours.

Probably running your kitchen vent hood for an hour making dinner already reaches that figure.

 

[Highbeam]

The problem is that you only have one of two numbers needed to make a good evaluation. You really don't know how much air is leaking in without the stoves. But let's make a quick assessment.
Apparently, a regular-sized wood-fired stove (princess-class) draws about 10 (on low) to 25 (on WOT) CFM.
But I would bet that significantly more than that enters your house. With 6600 sq. ft., and an average of (estimated) 7' room height, that gives you 46200 cubic feet of volume. Ok, deduct a bit for walls and such and we're talking 40000 cubic feet.
With two stoves running WOT, that's 50 CFM. Or in other words, the air in your home is replaced once by the stoves every 13.3 hours.

Probably running your kitchen vent hood for an hour making dinner already reaches that figure.

Actually faster than I thought. The stoves suck out the entire volume of conditioned house air in ashful's mansion almost twice a day. A regular big box store bathroom (fart) fan sucks at 50 cfm.

Given the difficulty in connecting his stoves and the known huge air leaks I think I can get behind skipping it.

 

[Ashful]

The problem is that you only have one of two numbers needed to make a good evaluation. You really don't know how much air is leaking in without the stoves.

We know the stoves pull something in the range of 10 - 30 CFM, times two stoves = 20 - 60 CFM.

We also know I have rougly 50 windows within the living space (excluding garage, etc.), and half of these windows are more than 250 years old... obviously not the tightest-sealing things you've ever seen. Our average heating season wind speed is 7.5 - 9.5 mph, let's call it 8.5 mph, and an older window can be expected to leak 8 - 20 CFM at this wind speed.

Even taking the lowest possible number, we'd be looking at 8 x 50 = 400 CFM thru the windows, in reality probably 1.5x to 2x that number, and that's before we even start counting doors. Given I always run one stove very low, only ever push one of them hard, we're probably talking average < 40 CFM draw from the stoves during any burn cycle.

I'd say a 10:1 margin is comfortable enough to not need a blower door test, just to prove a point!

 

[brenndatomu]

Man, I hafta wonder though, if the house is really that leaky, how can it be kept more than about 10-20* above ambient when real winter hits? I know there's plenty of btus being thrown at it, but still!

 

[Tron]

I'd say a 10:1 margin is comfortable enough to not need a blower door test, just to prove a point!

Absolutely. Hence your teaspoon/bathtub analogy.

 

[Ashful]

Man, I hafta wonder though, if the house is really that leaky, how can it be kept more than about 10-20* above ambient when real winter hits? I know there's plenty of btus being thrown at it, but still!

My office, containing the stove that's run hard, is usually kept about 78F - 81F. That keeps our living room across the hall around 73F, and bedrooms upstairs around 71F during the day or 67 - 69F at night... excepting the one son who's bedroom is right above my office.

The second stove is a lage great room, and that's usually kept at 73F, much easier because that's a newer addition.

I really don't think the house is "that leaky", in that our walls are solid stone (zero leak) and our windows are in excellent repair for proper historic windows. It's really more a case of "that big", for an older home, how many houses of this combined age and size have you seen? The guy who built this place obviously spent a fortune in windows, given the cost of importing and transporting glass at the time, I don't know where he had the sash and frames actually built.

But yeah, we do eat thru some BTU's with our array of heating sources:

1000 - 1400 gallons of heating oil
+ 6 - 12 cords of red oak
+ 2 minisplit systems with 3 indoor units
+ 1 propane direct-vent wall furnace
+ 1 propane stove
+ 4 resistive heaters (electric baseboard or bathroom vent heaters)

The wood and oil usage have wide ranges, as conditional factors push me to often trade one for the other. Last year I shut off the stoves around 6 - 7 cords, but burned a lot more oil, other years I've reversed that. Probably more than 90% of total BTU consumption is the oil and wood, since the other heaters are either limited use or heating spaces kept well below 70F.

 

[Tron]

1000 - 1400 gallons of heating oil
+ 6 - 12 cords of red oak

That certainly is a lot. I burn less than 2 cords or about 6 totes of pine most winters, even though the stove runs 24/7 in winter. Of course, different climate, so it mostly runs throttled down. I don't think I've ever had to run it WOT, not even when we had 20's outside.

 

[Ashful]

Yeah, there's definitely some difference in our climates. I'm between Philly and Allentown, with climate more closely following Allentown. Here's what Google AI threw up when I asked it to compare the two. The highlighting is Google's not mine... I guess people are getting too busy to even read full paragraph form, anymore.

I'm actually surprised are average temperatures are as high as listed, we regularly have sub-zero stretches of a few nights in a row, but I guess a few warmer days can pull up the the monthly average.

The winter climates of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Jackson, Mississippi, are starkly different. Allentown experiences a harsh, true northern winter with freezing temperatures and significant snowfall, while Jackson features a mild, southern humid subtropical climate where sub-freezing days are rare and rain replaces snow.
The table below breaks down the typical winter climate averages (December through February) for both cities based on historical climate data: [1, 2]

Metric	Allentown, PA	Jackson, MS
December Average High / Low	42°F / 28°F	59°F / 38°F
January Average High / Low	36°F / 20°F	58°F / 37°F
February Average High / Low	40°F / 22°F	62°F / 40°F
Total Winter Snowfall (Season)	~29 to 33 inches	~1 inch or less
Monthly Winter Precipitation	~3.0 inches per month	~4.3 to 5.4 inches per month

Temperature Differences

• • Allentown, PA: Winters are consistently cold and bracing. Daily highs hover near or just above freezing, and nights regularly plummet well below freezing. Prolonged cold waves are common.
  • Jackson, MS: Winters are chilly but generally mild. Daytime highs routinely break into the upper 50s and low 60s. While Jackson does get about 40 freezing nights a year, the ground rarely freezes, and cold snaps are short-lived. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]