Convection Improvements: Stove Blower vs Tower Fan? What would you do?

[NothingLikeWood]

Although we have been pleased with our basement family room install (Napoleon 1400), we have a hard time getting heat to go upstairs. The stove is installed in the basement directly across from the stairwell but it is 20 ft away. Once the stove gets rocking, I can feel the convection on the stairwell with heat is stratified upstairs - near the ceiling (below the atic) it can get reach the comfort level but the floors are drafty (due to the convection) and cooler. The stove has an OAK and we use that (air tests showed we're airtight and leaning towards negative pressure when running the dryer or vacuum - we crack a window on startup).

We purchased an ecofan last winter and that seemed to help convection along with a small fan at the base of the door to the room with the stove. With the help of tax credits, we upped the insulation in the attic this summer from R30 to R65 - that should help but now I am wondering about blowers and/or bigger fans. To get that convection really going, which will be a better bang for my buck: a stove blower ($300+) or a powerful tower fan ($50 or so)? I would like to find a way to keep downstairs at a more livable temperature instead of the required 90s so we can get to 70-75 upstairs.

Thanks for your input!

 

[vvvv]

try boxfan on floor @ bottom of stairs blowing @ stove & harder blow the better if necessary.

 

[Slow1]

My question is how can you get the cold (relatively speaking) air down into that basement to be heated? It sounds like you are relying on the stairwell as your conduit to get the hot air up and cold air down which may be fine, but perhaps you can help the cold get moving a bit faster by putting a fan near the top of the stairs to push it down a little faster? Too bad you don't have two sets of stairs going down there - then you could have an up and down for the air (think of dumping gas out of a can - if you don't open the vent it is very hard to get the gas out - glug glug, but once you open the vent if flows really fast eh?)

I don't know about code concerns etc, but perhaps a vent somewhere away from the stairs installed in the ceiling of the basement/floor from above with a fan forcing cold air down would help. If you have 90* air in the basement and much colder air upstairs you clearly have enough heat to move around. Getting it off the stove doesn't appear to be the problem - getting it out of the basement is.

 

[vvvv]

if u tape a 8"x1" piece of toilet paper at the top of the doorway upstairs u can see the differences of actual airflow from cellar with different configurations

 

[Cowboy Billy]

My stove is in the basement too. It seemed at my place the cold air was fighting the warm air coming up the stairs. And I remembered that grandpa had 12" or 16" square cast iron vents that went through the floor between the joists. So I put a vent in the back bedroom closet. It helped some but when I put a fan blowing down through the hole into the basement the warm air blew up the stairs and filled the rest of the house.

Billy

 

[Todd]

Fans and floor vents will help but you will never even out the heat throughout the whole house. What about installing another stove on the main floor?

 

[btuser]

Vents in the floor are about the only way its going to work for you unless you have central air and can run the unit backwards. I don't think its worth it to cut holes unless your house is a fire-trap to begin with. Believe it or not drywall does a damn good job of slowing down a fire, about 10x better than plywood. I've seen some people put a detector supsended beneath the grate, thinking it would alarm them. Of course with such a massive air flow through the detector (which wasn't designed for it) its a matter of a few weeks before the chamber is fouled.

There's a reason why you don't see a lot of homes with the original air grates in the floors. They're the homes that have burned to the ground.

 

[pmac]

if u tape a 8"x1" piece of toilet paper at the top of the doorway upstairs u can see the differences of actual airflow from cellar with different configurations

I tried this last year when experimenting with different configurations to address the same issue that NothingLikeWood is asking about. We have a similar setup; family room in basement with stove, struggling to get the most heat back upstairs.

I tried three different things - blowing a fan on the stove, blowing a fan down the stairs, blowing a fan away from the stairs at the top. Blowing a fan down the stairs (at floor level) seemed to have the most effect, judging by the warm air moving the piece of toilet paper at the top of the door jamb.

However, we've had the stove for eight years, and so far the biggest help has been something done about five years ago. The air handler for our forced air HVAC system is in the basement; we cut a hole in the return duct in the basement, put a louver on it which stays closed in summer, open in winter. In the winter, basement air is pulled into the return duct and recirculated upstairs. Lowered the basement temperature by about 8 degrees (it was almost unpleasant sometimes down there) when the stove was going.

Of course, that's not an option if you don't have ductwork in your home...