I can’t get my house Warm!

[joysman]

I just had a beautiful Lopi Leyden cast iron pellet stove installed which is supposed to warm a 2200 sq ft space. My entire house is that size, however, it can't even keep the downstairs warm, other than the living room (where it is located) and the kitchen. I have two bedrooms and a bathroom down a ten foot hallway which are 12 degrees colder than the living room. So with the stove raging at full speed and power, the kitchen gets up to 72 degrees and the bedrooms are 60 degrees. I tried installing a vent with an inline fan between the living room wall and my bedroom and it raised the temp in the bedroom one degree! After that experiment I read that the best thing is to redirect the cold air, not the hot air, so I've tried setting fans in the hallway to shoot the cold air coming out of the bedrooms down the hallway toward the stove. No effect.....anybody got some more ideas for me to try?

 

[sfriedri]

When we heated our house with our woodstove, this was the same thing we experienced - a big difference in temperatures in the different parts of the house. Our stove was in the central living space in our house and it kept this area very comfortable, and we were OK with cooler bedrooms because it helps you sleep better. Our bedrooms would get down to 55*F on some cold days, and it makes getting out of bed harder, but we all slept well.

There is no way you will get even heating of your whole house with a single radiant source in one part of the house. If you have a forced air heating system, try running the furnace fan to move the air around.

You may want to try posting this over in one of the other forums where they talk about heating with stoves.

 

[beau5278]

It's really hard to move hot air and keep it hot at least I've never found a good way to do it.I know this isn't what your going to want to hear but if you want to heat most of a house with wood,the woodburner needs to be in the basement,if you can get the temperature up in the basement,it makes the floors warmer and that will keep the house warmer but then you can put vents into the floor that will work even better.I don't care what anybody tells you,a woodurner in a room will only heat that room unless it has a boiler that can be hooked into a baseboard hot water setup.

 

[joysman]

Thank you folks for your input - as the weather changed over the week and we went from the teens to the 30's, I found that the stove could heat the house adequately. I guess I'm just going to have to use some oil on those really cold days and figure on adding some insulation in the the walls and maybe some new windows on the northside of the house next spring.

 

[Corey]

A couple of things come to mind...First, there is a big difference between 'getting' the house warm and 'keeping' the house warm. You say 'keeping warm' which is the easier of the two. But if you're having trouble getting a cold house up to temp, that may be just the 'nature of the beast' so to speak as it takes a lot more BTU's. Secondly, I do see where that stove is rated for 800-2250 square feet and ~14000 to 45,000 btu's per hour. That doesn't strike me as a lot of btu's when it gets really cold...that is about 6-7 pounds of firewood per hour or as they state 5.5 pounds of pellets/hr . Are you actually seeing ~5.5 pounds of pellets go through the stove per hour? If not, there may be some issue with the burn rate. If you are getting the full burn rate out of your stove, how does that compare with your furnace?

Overall house insulation, layout, outside temp, etc effect how much space a stove can heat. It could simply be that some of these factors combined mean the stove is a little small for your application.