heat exchanger add on

[dave simons]

I am new to the site but living in northern Minnesota I heave dealt with woods stoves for awhile. I was thinking about trying to build a simple wood stove but some way a copper coils that would feed to a simple radiator with a fan on the back to push the hot air around. Has anyone tried this or seen such a thing? It would just be for a two stall garage that isn't insulated. Thanks for any advice. There is a wealth of knowledge here and I am a sponge

 

[Fred61]

Been done probably thousands of times but I'm guessing the success rate over time is very low for several reasons. I wouldn't recommend it for the following reasons.

Safety is the first priority. You have few controls to come to your aid if something should fail. If it happens to overheat for one reason or another you have a bomb on your hands. Both bodily harm or property damage could occur. There's only a small volume of water in your proposed system so things could get out of hand quite rapidly.

You will need more hardware than you think. You will need supply water, expansion tank, various hardware such as check valve, etc. unless it can be made to flow by gravity.

Usually the amount of heat generated by equipment that isn't originally built to do the job usually costs more than the value of the resulting heat (ROI)

Open flame wood stove in a garage could be dangerous or against the law. Gasoline fumes can easily ignite.

A water coil in a stove that isn't engineered to accept one will usually suck enough heat out of your fire to cause the stove to burn extremely dirty causing build-up of nasty creosote and other unburned particles to adhere to the chimney walls and I don't have to tell you what comes next.

If there are not going to be any vehicles or gasoline cans in the area, I would suggest constructing a
heat exchanger out of pipe or other materials that will give you a large amount of surface and set it on top of the stove then force air across it.