Finding out even a big wood stove is still just a space heater, the hard way.

[eernest4]

For newbie's info>

the last couple of years, i didn't realize it, but ct had 2 really mild winters & I thought, "Global Warming is setting in & so we won't see any more cold winters & with this big wood stove in the basement, I'm all set."
There won't be any need to insulate the house.

Last year, I was still using suplemental oil heat, when it got too cold, I'd just turn on the oil burner for an hour, just to bring the house up to temp & let the wood stove provide auxzillary heat.

Well, this year, I decided to try to go the whole winter with just the wood stove & the pellet stove and I find out that with this house, 3000 sq ft with no insulation and 6 deg above zero outside, its just not going to happen.

Last night it was 17 above but with 20mph winds and the house felt like every room had central air condtioning on extra full blast going 24/7 .

The only rooms that were hot were the basement where the wood stove is, 88 deg and the living room where the pellet stove is, 70 deg

The cold was comming thru the cracks faster than the heat from the stove rooms could flow into the unheated rooms.

So I ended up with a 64 to 67 deg kitchen, my bed room was 63 to 66, the living room 70 with the pellet stove on & 61 with the pellet stove off & the second floor 44 deg.

I keep the wood stove burning 24/7 ,with a 12 inch deep bed of red embers but it was not even hot enough when I had wood with flame & the heat from the ember bed was totally inadiquate with these outside temps & winds to deal with.

So, I am going to have to run the oil burner some to get the house up to temp and think about insulation & heat registers do it yourself jobs for the summertime.

Just so you know, the wood stove is 12 cubic ft secondary burn & can get the basement 900 sq ft up to 90, but the heat just does not come up to the first floor fast enough for these temps & trying to get the second floor over 50 is just a joke, it will never happen unelse I stick another wood stove on the second floor.

Keeping 1 wood stove feed is enough work 4 me ,thank you.

GOT 2 FT OF SNOW OUTSIDE & i am not looking forward to shoveling from the basement door to the 28 ft wood trailer, about 20 ft away.


COOL TIP IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR AN EAZY WOOD SHED.
I gave up on building my own wood sheds & just keep a eye out for old mobile homes or travel trailers. The first one, (28 ft long x 8 ft wide x 8 ft high) I bought delevered for $350.oo because the frame was bad, really realy rusty, & the wheels needed new bearings & tires.

The second one ,I got just last month, is 24 ft x 8 ft x 8ft,.
I got it for $100.oo & swaped the delevery fee of the trailer to my house for a 4 ft round x 6 ft long
wood incinerator that I had bought back in 2002 for $150.oo that i found out ate way too much wood for me to bother burning it for heat.
The guy that took it wants to heat a 8 bay garage with it & does not mind using ungodly amounts of wood as he hires a retired guy with a truck & a chain saw, to bring him scrounged wood.

I had actually bought the coachman cruisader to restore as a travel trailer when I thought I was actually going to sell my house, but the buyer backed out
of the sale because of the economony , & I can't realy blame him.

So I will be filling that one up with wood too, this summer.

The point was sometimes a little suplemental oil heat is not a bad thing unelse your house is well
insulated & set up properly so that the heat output of the wood stove can keep the house comfortable and reach the rooms where the heat needs to be when it is zero outside with a wind.

I found out that even with the wood stove & the pellet stove going together that they can't keep the house comfortable in more that 2 rooms in really cold weather.

So in a situation like this, run the oil burner just enough to get the house warm & keep it warm with the wood stove as long as you might & then fire up the oil burner again.

This mountian man of the great white north stuff is fun to talk about but gets real old after you been cold & chilly in your own home for going on a week.

The cure for this is insulation and fan forced heat transfer registers or just use the existing oil heat during the cold snap.

The wood heat will still allow you to drop your oil bill by 70 % from all oil heat and be warm & comfy too, even when the red stuff in the outdoor thermometer tries to all fit in the ball at the bottom. :lol:

 

[Backwoods Savage]

eernest4, along with the house needing insulation, I see a couple other problems.

1. That wood stove in the basement seems like a great idea because heat rises. However, those basement walls soak up most of the heat.

2. That 12" deep bed of coals is not so good. You need to get those burned down if you are going to have the stove working right. Once you get them down or get some out, on each burn, once the logs are almost burned, open that draft full to burn the coals down. Just think how much more wood will fit in the stove without a 12" layer of coals!

3. Keeping your wood in the trailer seems like a good idea, but that is a very poor way to season wood! If you split and stack your wood out in the open air, especially with sunshine and wind, the moisture can evaporate much, much faster. We don't even cover our wood pile until late fall or early winter and then cover the top only.

So, if you season your wood outside (even if you bought the wood and are told it is seasoned) and then come fall, stack it inside the trailers, you are okay. Then the trailer is a great idea.


Plenty of folks in colder climates than your heat their homes (even the size of yours) with wood heat and get along fine. Insulation definitely helps but is not the total answer. The placement of the stoves and the layout of the home has much to do with how that heat is distributed.

Even with a pellet stove. We have a relative who heats their home (2000 sq. ft) with a pellet stove and it does a reasonable job. A wood stove would certainly be better but for their situation it won't work, so they went with pellets and get along fine. They do use some oil (sometimes they are gone for a few days) but very little.

Now get out there and shovel that 20' path to your woodshed. lol Good luck to you.

 

[Malatesta]

EERNEST ,you need to release all that heat from the basement. You could easly cut a few floor registers or mid-sized grates if your pretty good at being a handy man. The kind like they had in the old days with the black iron grates. Id work on releasing the heat from the basement 1st then the insulation.

 

[Techstuf]

Good point, I heat nearly 3,000sq ft. with my basement stove. The reason earth bermed homes are so efficient is....drum roll....the earth. Basements are usually easier to heat because of this fact. Also, a big plus is the fact that I feed the stove O2 direct via a combustion feed vent tube, a 4in. aluminum duct tube connected to the dryer vent on an outside wall during winter. This helps equalize pressure and dramatically reduces the amount of cold air being drawn in through nooks and crannies in the rooms that need it the most. I use split doors on the stairways from basement and to the second story. The top halves stay open during winter. Only on the coldest of nights do we activate a small fan mounted to the ceiling of the basement stairway to augment convection. The whole house stays above 70 degrees, with the main floor usually at 80 degrees or so.


Here's to a warm winter for you and yours!


TS

 

[Corey]

Also curious what you're doing for airflow. If it's 88F in the stove room, you need to be blowing that heat out to the rest of the house...especially if insulation is poor or non-existent. As the local room gets hotter, you loose exponentially more heat, so you're much better off keeping 3-4 rooms at 70F versus one at 90F. Air flow around the stove will help a lot too. There always seems to be a debate on here about 'radiant' (no fan) versus 'convective' (forced air) heat. But more often than not, you'll see posts saying "Wow, I never knew how much heat I could get until I added a fan"

 

[LLigetfa]

The reason earth bermed homes are so efficient is....drum roll....the earth. Basements are usually easier to heat because of this fact.

That would only be true if you wanted the room to be near the same temp as the earth. Earth bermed houses are generally insulated. They just don't need as much insulation since the cold side of the insulation isn't all that cold. An uninsulated basement is a huge heat sink so you will be heating the ground, some of which would have been frozen if not for you.

My crawlspace walls go four feet into the ground by code since frost can easily go down four feet. In reality, frost can go deeper but the code factors that I am putting heat into the ground. I have R38 in those walls so the heat transfers mostly through the concrete slab.

My space heater comfortably heats a 2100 sq ft well insulated house. Mind you, I built it to R2000 standards so it's not drafty.

 

[Techstuf]

Yes indeed....nothing fancy or high powered is even required, just enough to nudge the flow where it is needed. In my case, radiant heat through the flooring helps keep all main level rooms above 70 degrees. The single small fan we use when temps drop below zero is never set above the lowest setting, and that is enough to raise house temps by 5 degrees.


TS

 

[Devo]

For newbie's info>..."Global Warming is setting in & so we won't see any more cold winters...

Thanks for the laugh!

 

[Adabiviak]

...priceless?

 

[drizler]

COOL TIP IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR AN EAZY WOOD SHED.
I gave up on building my own wood sheds & just keep a eye out for old mobile homes or travel trailers. The first one, (28 ft long x 8 ft wide x 8 ft high) I bought delevered for $350.oo because the frame was bad, really realy rusty, & the wheels needed new bearings & tires.

The second one ,I got just last month, is 24 ft x 8 ft x 8ft,.
I got it for $100.oo & swaped the delevery fee of the trailer to my house for a 4 ft round x 6 ft long
wood incinerator that I had bought back in 2002 for $150.oo that i found out ate way too much wood for me to bother burning it for heat.
The guy that took it wants to heat a 8 bay garage with it & does not mind using ungodly amounts of wood as he hires a retired guy with a truck & a chain saw, to bring him scrounged wood.


What an idea. Best suited for if you live in NY or VT where the lousey scurvy scumbug tax creeps call something like that an addition if its on the ground. Put it on wheels and they can go crap in their hat. Same goes for the good old retired school bus. You see more and more of those things just like the plastic tarp tents as we get taxed into oblivion to support illegal aliens and welfare bums. Trouble is around here those puppies are darned expensive and the tarp tents get shredded by the wind unless you have them in the woods.