Englander 28-3500 as a radiant heat stove?

[Badfish740]

Been a long time since I've posted because I haven't been burning much wood lately. Back in the fall we moved to a house with hot water baseboard heat. We are renting our old house where our Englander 28-3500 furnace sits idle in the basement. I am not comfortable with allowing the tenants to use it and they are fine with just paying for oil anyway. Eventually I would like to pull it out of there and use it here somewhere, but of course we don't have the infrastructure (ductwork) in the house. I do have a barn I could heat with it, but I had another thought. Our new house is about 2600 square feet with a very open layout on the first floor. There is an old (manufacturer unknown) wood/coal stove in the kitchen/dining room area vented to stainless steel Class A chimney in good condition. It's an ugly old stove with no window and it looks to be in rough shape inside so I'm inclined to get rid of it no matter what.

The Englander, of course has a decent 8x8 window and will throw a ton of heat. I'm considering removing the blower altogether and just allowing it to radiate heat through the plenum out the top (maybe fashion a decorative "chimney cap" out of heating duct to give it a finished look) since the layout is completely open downstairs. The area where the stove is situated is also not far from the staircase to the second floor so I may even get some convection up to there as well. Regardless, the first and second floors are on separate zones so at the very least I could probably keep the first floor zone from kicking on most of the time with the Englander running.

My basis for all of this is that Englander does state in their manual that in the event of a power outage the furnace may be safely vented to open air, so I would think that if it were just not connected to duct work to begin with that it would be safe assuming that all other clearances, etc...were followed. I will call Englander tomorrow to get their opinion, but figured I'd run it by everyone here as well. The alternative would be that I could install it in the basement (would require extending the chimney, but not the end of the world) with the blower intact and simply leave the plenum vented to open air in the hopes that the heat would radiate to the first floor. Down the road I could install some floor vents as well.

 

[Highbeam]

Ducting is optional. Is the blower so noisy that you can’t stand it?

 

[Badfish740]

Ducting is optional. Is the blower so noisy that you can’t stand it?

Yes-it's an 850 CFM blower-so it would be fairly noisy to have it in a living area. Plus it would create quite a breeze

 

[maple1]

What about swapping the blower for a (much) smaller & quieter one? With no ductwork to push the air through, it shouldn't take much fan to get air moving good around your room.

I'm not sure I'd want to run without one for extended periods. The power outage period in the manual usually wouldn't be a long time - and if the ductwork is set up for it would actually help to get air moving through via sort of stack effect. Without that stack, the air might sort of almost stall and it might get hotter inside than one would like. Curious what they would tell you.

 

[mustash29]

It will work very good for you with that open layout & large sq footage.

I bought one after reading many of your posts, LOL. I ran it for a few years but it cooked us out of our 1800 sqft tri level so I went back to the old stove with secondary burn. I had to choke the Englander down too much and was having gobs of flakey creosote issues, mostly at the top of my 24' SS class A flue. The top 6" of the pipe would choke off as the gasses hit the cool outside air.

I have oil HW baseboard, no ductwork. I never used the factory blower, too loud & blew like a hurricane. I let the Englander "dump" heat into the lower rec room. A blower takes that heat (80-90 in the room) and blows through about 6' of ducting into the master bath on the upstairs. The bath air moves through the bedroom, down the hall past the 2 front bedrooms, past the kitchen, down a half a flight into the LR, through the foyer & down another half flight into the rec room. The mid and upper levels of my place have a pretty open floor plan. We were able to maintain mid 70's in the bedroom, upper 70's in the kitchen & LR even in single digits outside. If I opened the door to the 2 car garage that would get hot too.

About 4" behind the air inlet on the furnace I had two 4" heavy duty muffin fans (much better than typical pc fans) sitting on a brick. Depending on how much heat I wanted I ran no fans, the crappy one, the better one, or both.

This setup worked very well for us. I was seriously contemplating adding some form of secondary air tubes to it. Feeding it very well seasoned oak reduced the creosote problem somewhat, but the tremendous heat made us lethargic & lazy. Leaving the kitchen slider door open for extended periods was normal.

 

[Shearerhollow]

It will work very good for you with that open layout & large sq footage.

I bought one after reading many of your posts, LOL. I ran it for a few years but it cooked us out of our 1800 sqft tri level so I went back to the old stove with secondary burn. I had to choke the Englander down too much and was having gobs of flakey creosote issues, mostly at the top of my 24' SS class A flue. The top 6" of the pipe would choke off as the gasses hit the cool outside air.

I have oil HW baseboard, no ductwork. I never used the factory blower, too loud & blew like a hurricane. I let the Englander "dump" heat into the lower rec room. A blower takes that heat (80-90 in the room) and blows through about 6' of ducting into the master bath on the upstairs. The bath air moves through the bedroom, down the hall past the 2 front bedrooms, past the kitchen, down a half a flight into the LR, through the foyer & down another half flight into the rec room. The mid and upper levels of my place have a pretty open floor plan. We were able to maintain mid 70's in the bedroom, upper 70's in the kitchen & LR even in single digits outside. If I opened the door to the 2 car garage that would get hot too.

About 4" behind the air inlet on the furnace I had two 4" heavy duty muffin fans (much better than typical pc fans) sitting on a brick. Depending on how much heat I wanted I ran no fans, the crappy one, the better one, or both.

This setup worked very well for us. I was seriously contemplating adding some form of secondary air tubes to it. Feeding it very well seasoned oak reduced the creosote problem somewhat, but the tremendous heat made us lethargic & lazy. Leaving the kitchen slider door open for extended periods was normal.

Did you leave the blower motor attached and just unplugged while operating it this way?

 

[mustash29]

About 4" behind the air inlet on the furnace I had two 4" heavy duty muffin fans (much better than typical pc fans) sitting on a brick. Depending on how much heat I wanted I ran no fans, the crappy one, the better one, or both.

The muffin fans were not attached to the 28-3500.