Ideas for pushing heat around the house?????

[Wormyone]

I am getting some really good heat in the first part of my house as well as some decent heat at the top of the stairs. My question is does a ceiling fan help move heat around the house or just more for the room it is in. And would turning the HVAC unit on to just circulate help move the heat around the entire house??

 

[jeff_t]

Fans on the floor, blowing toward the stove, work best. Or at the top of the stairs and pointed down. It is easier to move cooler, denser air toward the heat source than vice versa.

My experience with ceiling fans is, it depends. I have found a situation where the fan, when run in reverse (blowing up), makes a 'wall' of air at the doorway, and doesn't allow for much movement out of the stove room. Turn the fan off, and the difference can be felt immediately.

When trying to find what works best for fan placement and such, I tape strips of TP at the tops of doorways. Then I can really see what works where.

Uness your heating ducts are in the conditioned space, using the hvac system usually gives negative results, due to duct losses.

 

[mfetcho]

I have a ceiling fan at the top of my stairs at the entry. The entry ceiling is the second floor ceiling. I run the fan to push the hot air down. I know you are supposed to pull air up in winter, but I have tried both and I run it on high once the stove is hot and is pumping out the heat. It really helps move air through the house better.

 

[BigBubba-Burn]

Hi . I move air with small PC fans that run on 9 volts .. I heat My bathroom with 1 in the air vent . and I pull the air from the basement .. I also placed a fan on the ceiling in the stair way to force down the hot air .. I am heating from the basement up to the main floor .. I alos cut a 12X12 cold air return over the stove . from the main floor and placed a grill over the hole ..seems to have helped ..

 

[Lumber-Jack]

I use my HVAC blower to circulate the air in my house and find that it works great, although other people have not reported the same sorts of results using their HVAC air handlers.
It makes sense that if you have cool air temperature in one part of the house, and warm air temperature in another part of the house, and you circulate, or mix, that air up, you are going to get a more even distribution of temperature throughout the house. However as already been stated, if your ducting runs through un-insulated areas, as some poorly designed HVAC systems do, you may get an overall net heat loss that will negate any benefits of trying to mix, or blend, the warm and cool together. It would be like trying to create a cross breeze in your house by opening the outside doors.
Fortunately in my case the ducting in my house is all within the insulated envelope of the house, and the three ducts in my stove room enter from the ceiling and blow down, so when running my HVAC blower they blow the relatively cooler air through the hot air in that room which has a very positive mixing effect and helps moderate the temperature in that room, keeping it from getting as hot as it might otherwise.
Best thing to do is get your stove going and put a thermometer in one of your cooler rooms and try the HVAC blower and see if it raises the temp in the cooler room at all. Try that for a day with no blower, with the blower, then try some fans on the ground blowing cooler air towards the stove. See what works for you. Just remember that you will never get it as warm in the cooler rooms as it will be in the stove room.

 

[USMC80]

Jeff t hit the nail on the head. I was running my ceiling fan in stove room and it was stopping the heat from flowing naturally into the other rooms. I turned the fan off in the stove room and ran ceiling fans in bedrooms on reverse and watched the temps in stove room go down to 74 and temps in bedrooms and kitchen shoot up to 70 within 15 minutes. It was awesome