I have an old Orley in a lookout basement in a living room adjacent to my bedroom and the laundry room. Upstairs, there are two bedrooms, an office, the kitchen, and the main family room where my children spend most of their time. There is a fireplace upstairs with glass doors and a brass frame.
The basement stove was installed slammer-style, and the upstairs fireplace damper is rusted shut. The top of the chimney is not in good shape. According to my chimney sweep, you can simply lift the bricks up on the top two layers. Rain goes directly down to the damper, which could be why it's rusted shut. At the moment, I kind of ignore the fact that there is a fireplace upstairs.
Money is pretty tight right now. I can afford to have the top of the chimney redone for $350 or so. Other work may have to be deferred unless the house is in imminent danger of burning down. I'm pretty sure I could put together some kind of rain diverter above the chimney, but I don't know how much space to give it. In the meantime, I want to run the Orley downstairs safely. I use a box fan in the basement to try to keep from overfiring and to distribute the heat around the basement, that seems to work pretty well. I have a circulator fan upstairs that leans against the baby gate and is perched on a folding chair about a foot above the floor.
It seems pretty easy to run the stove at 6-800 degrees F, which keeps the downstairs at about 78F and the upstairs at about 74, but my kids' rooms are definitely cooler than that. I haven't measured it, but I would guess probably 68 or so. That's comfortable sleeping temp, so I'm not worried about that.
My bedroom gets kind of hot, though. 78 is a little much for me. The Orley doesn't seem to like the 5-600 range, or maybe I need to figure it out better. I probably need to figure it out better. In any case, my kids' bedrooms are probably 10 degrees F cooler than the room where the stove is, so if I got that room down to 72, their bedrooms would be a hair chilly.
My first idea is to zip tie an air filter to the box fan downstairs to catch some of the ash and dust.
There are a few vents in the upstairs floor in the living room. I thought it might be a good idea to install some kind of little electric fan in the vents to return cold air to the basement in the hopes that it would cool off the downstairs a little more and send warm air back up the staircase. That would vent straight down to the downstairs living room where the Orley is located.
In my wildest dreams, I would like to cool off the downstairs and heat up the upstairs so they would be roughly the same temp. It's a pipe dream, but it's a good pipe dream.
What is the most important thing to address?
Thank you.
The basement stove was installed slammer-style, and the upstairs fireplace damper is rusted shut. The top of the chimney is not in good shape. According to my chimney sweep, you can simply lift the bricks up on the top two layers. Rain goes directly down to the damper, which could be why it's rusted shut. At the moment, I kind of ignore the fact that there is a fireplace upstairs.
Money is pretty tight right now. I can afford to have the top of the chimney redone for $350 or so. Other work may have to be deferred unless the house is in imminent danger of burning down. I'm pretty sure I could put together some kind of rain diverter above the chimney, but I don't know how much space to give it. In the meantime, I want to run the Orley downstairs safely. I use a box fan in the basement to try to keep from overfiring and to distribute the heat around the basement, that seems to work pretty well. I have a circulator fan upstairs that leans against the baby gate and is perched on a folding chair about a foot above the floor.
It seems pretty easy to run the stove at 6-800 degrees F, which keeps the downstairs at about 78F and the upstairs at about 74, but my kids' rooms are definitely cooler than that. I haven't measured it, but I would guess probably 68 or so. That's comfortable sleeping temp, so I'm not worried about that.
My bedroom gets kind of hot, though. 78 is a little much for me. The Orley doesn't seem to like the 5-600 range, or maybe I need to figure it out better. I probably need to figure it out better. In any case, my kids' bedrooms are probably 10 degrees F cooler than the room where the stove is, so if I got that room down to 72, their bedrooms would be a hair chilly.
My first idea is to zip tie an air filter to the box fan downstairs to catch some of the ash and dust.
There are a few vents in the upstairs floor in the living room. I thought it might be a good idea to install some kind of little electric fan in the vents to return cold air to the basement in the hopes that it would cool off the downstairs a little more and send warm air back up the staircase. That would vent straight down to the downstairs living room where the Orley is located.
In my wildest dreams, I would like to cool off the downstairs and heat up the upstairs so they would be roughly the same temp. It's a pipe dream, but it's a good pipe dream.
What is the most important thing to address?
Thank you.
