Help getting heat through our house

[DebE]

Hello!

We are new to wood stoves - this is our second year with one. We live in South-East Wisconsin, and ideally would love to heat just with wood but have not been successful yet. We put in a Drolet 1800 last year and the stove heats the house fine with the temps are in the teens and 20s but not any colder than that. (We have the heat come on at 60, thermostat is in the living room). House was built in 1901, and probably needs new attic insulation, it currently has vermiculite and so we don’t go into the attic at all. House is about 2000 square feet, with the upstairs being about 700 square feet. I’ve attached a layout of the downstairs.

I have two questions.

1. What would be the best way to get heat to move more through the house? I’ve tried a fan in the living room pointing toward the stove and didnt notice any difference. There is a definite temperature drop in the living room and upstairs is really cold - probably 70+ in stove room, 60 in living room and 50 upstairs. Would a transom help? Wall vents with fans? I know some drop in temperature is to be expected, and perhaps the single doorway between the stove room and the living room is just too narrow to expect much heat movement. I expected the heat to naturally go upstairs.

2. Looking for recommendations on a better stove for the cold. We would love a cookstove but I’m not convinced we can find one we like aesthetically that can put out enough heat. To get enough heat currently we have to have the drolet running pretty hot and then it only burns for a few hours, definitely not all night. Is this all just because of wood quality or is it also stove quality? My husband would love to get a Homewood heritage stove from New Zealand but I’m concerned that the firebox is just too small to get enough heat for our house.


Thank you!

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Hi! How hot are you running the stove? It may be a little small for the job if your insulation isn’t keeping enough heat in the house.

Blowing new cellulose into the attic to cover and encapsulate the vermiculite will be a cheap, quick and easy way to keep more heat in the house. If your windows are still single pane windows, applying heat shrink plastic will double their R value. Is the sill plate insulated?

Many new burners don’t get the heat out of their stove due to the wood they burn. Sometimes it’s just too wet still. It needs to be below 20% moisture content. If the fire is forced to boil off the water, it can’t heat the house!

 

[DebE]

Hi! How hot are you running the stove? It may be a little small for the job if your insulation isn’t keeping enough heat in the house.

Blowing new cellulose into the attic to cover and encapsulate the vermiculite will be a cheap, quick and easy way to keep more heat in the house. If your windows are still single pane windows, applying heat shrink plastic will double their R value. Is the sill plate insulated?

Many new burners don’t get the heat out of their stove due to the wood they burn. Sometimes it’s just too wet still. It needs to be below 20% moisture content. If the fire is forced to boil off the water, it can’t heat the house!

Hi! How hot are you running the stove? It may be a little small for the job if your insulation isn’t keeping enough heat in the house.

Blowing new cellulose into the attic to cover and encapsulate the vermiculite will be a cheap, quick and easy way to keep more heat in the house. If your windows are still single pane windows, applying heat shrink plastic will double their R value. Is the sill plate insulated?

Many new burners don’t get the heat out of their stove due to the wood they burn. Sometimes it’s just too wet still. It needs to be below 20% moisture content. If the fire is forced to boil off the water, it can’t heat the house!

Thanks for your reply! Right now stove top temperature is reading 450, that’s with the air intake wide open. Blowing insulation would be a good idea, I had wondered whether we could do that. Windows are new, double pane windows (except for one room), will have to check how to test if the sill plate is insulated.

I’m sure some of the problem is our wood, I don’t think it’s too wet but it’s free stuff we collected over the year from people getting rid of it so some of it was outside a long time and maybe is too old.

My bigger question though is how to move heat around the house - as the stove room will get plenty warm but the rest of the house is still cold

 

[Gearhead660]

Welcome fellow Wisconsinite!
First think to remember, wood stoves are zone heaters. They heat the room they are in.
Being and older home, any air sealing/insulating you can do will help tremendously.
The Drolet 1800 may be a little undersized for your home. Bigger stove can put out more BTUs. Are you set on a stove or is a wood furnace an option? A furnace would get heat to all rooms of the house.
Start getting ahead on your wood supply. Consider any wood you get is green and needs to dry for a couple years. Dry wood makes a big difference.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Have you tried turning the stove down?

It seems counter intuitive, but with the stove wide open, you send most of the heat straight up the chimney. Closing down the air will hold the heat down in the stove, allowing it to radiate into the room. Do you have a blower on the stove?

For the sill plate, look on top of the foundation in the basement. Uninsulated will just look like bare wood. Is your home drafty? Stopping those drafts is often more important than insulation.

 

[NickW]

Welcome! We used to live just north of Milwaukee. Getting heat to disperse throughout the house is a challenge. Cold air is denser than warm air, so moving the fan to the farthest reaches you are trying to heat and pointing it towards the stove room will create a convective loop. Low fan settings will keep the lower cold air mass moving towards the stove from mixing with the warm upper air mass heading towards the fan. Insulation and air sealing is typically more important than replacing the stove.

With the current weather we are having I would have been struggling with heating the old place that was built in 1978 and pretty well insulated but not well air sealed even with the heat beast NC30 that we had there.

Immerse yourself in learning about burning properly. Rule #1, #2 & #3 is burn dry (well seasoned) wood. Search for a firewood BTU chart that gives approximate seasoning times and learn to identify wood by bark. Common WI woods (give or take depending on starting moisture content, size of splits, and storage location)... Pines take 6 months; poplars, box elder, silver maple, red maple, cherry, ash - 1 year; birch, sugar maple, locust - 2 years; oak 3 years. Many of us try to get and stay 3 years ahead so we know that if the pile is 3 years old it is dry. This takes a lot of time, effort and space. If you are actually "in" Milwaukee space may be an issue.

There's a tree service near Cedarburg that used to let people scrounge through his log piles that covered a couple of acres. Hundreds of cords worth of wood; but it gets picked over and there's no leaves to help with ID so recognizing by bark is important. Unlimited pine, box elder and silver maple. Fall of '24 I got a bunch of BIG honey locust. EAB killed white ash is usually able to be had. I even got some ironwood one year.

 

[EbS-P]

I have an 1800 insert. 23’ of insulated liner. I needed a damper to control it. I can’t run it any lower than 500. And that’s on a cold start.

My thoughts this is a heat output issue and not a house circulation issue.

Low output sometimes is do to a stove over drafting pulling in more cold air than the fire/wood can heat. My experience with this stove and dry wood is that an over drafting will over fire the stove on 22 ft of chimney.

How tall is your chimney? Any bends?

Second and think most likely cause of low output is wood with too much moisture. Do you have a moisture meter? When was the wood split and stacked.
Consensus is two years stacked and top covered is the minimum for most hard woods. Pine can dry faster. Some oaks need three depending on climate. Burning wet wood sucks. We all learn this lesson. Some of us will have a trarp blow off and get to relearn it😉 it sucks less the second time. First winter I bought a cord of firewood in December that I was told was dry. It wasn’t. We had a hurricane come through and dump 40” of rain on us in September. I’m sure that pile had been laying split for a year or two but it wouldn’t burn.

I ended up buying some compressed saw dust bricks. They worked well.

 

[begreen]

Right now stove top temperature is reading 450, that’s with the air intake wide open.

The stove should only be run with the air control wide open on startup. Once the fire is going well, if the wood if properly seasoned, the air control should be almost closed and the stove top over 500º. Closing down the air to at least the 25% open point creates a vacuum in the firebox that then pulls in combustion air through the secondary tubes. This leads to a hotter fire and much cleaner combustion with less heat heading up the flue and more heat into the room.

 

[DebE]

Thank you everyone for your responses. It seems lije before we go and buy a bigger stove or cut holes in the wall we should get a moisture meter to check our wood. We do close the air right down to get secondaries but then end up with big lumps of charred wood, is that also because the wood is too wet? A lot of the wood we have is ash that was cut three to five years ago but has been sitting outside in someone’s wood pile, so maybe never properly seasoned. I figured since it was that old it would be fine. Hopefully we will get this figured out in the next few years!

Thanks again for all your help!

(o, and the farmhouse is on a stone foundation so I’m sure there is no sill insulation).

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Some species of wood produce a lot of coaling, but I believe that you’re wood is wet.