Improving air circulation

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MikeM1968

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Sep 18, 2013
8
I'm sure this topic has been discussed many, many times. I just purchased and installed a Summers Heat 1500 model. We have an older iron enclosed fireplace in our living room, - it's not quite a wood burning stove, but similar. We have very poor access to wood. We decided to place the pellet stove in our kitchen.

Naturally we knew it would be much warmer in our kitchen and since the stairs to our 2nd floor come off the kitchen, we also knew our second floor would get some nice heat. The second floor is essentially one big room, which is our bedroom.

Our problem seems to be getting the airflow into the other rooms of our home. The house is built on a crawl space and is only two stories. Built around 1950. The crawlspace gets very cold and the first few inches closest to the floor can be very chilly when it's cold out.

In the below thumbnail, you can basically see how our place is set-up.

[Hearth.com] Improving air circulation

Please forgive my poor adobe illustrator drawing, the fireplace is basically left of center in the home with it's chimney running up the right side of that black rectangle (which would be right in the middle). The fireplaces' opening faces the living room.

We really didn't have too many options when we decided to put the pellet stove in. So it was decided it would go in the kitchen with the vent going outside under the stairs going up.

Even when we have just used our fireplace, that heat only heats up the living room. Every room seems so closed off from the others. What I'm trying to figure out is how to get the heat from our pellet stove flowing into these other rooms.

To give you some idea of the drastic change in temperature, it can be 70° in our kitchen with the pellet stove going at around 5 or 6, but as soon as you walk through the opening to our living room (the next room) you can feel a drastic drop in temperature. The other rooms will only get up to 60° - 62° nearly a 10 degree drop from the adjacent room.

Just trying to get some advice or ideas on how or what to do to get the heat flowing better into these other rooms. While it's great that the heat does go upstairs, we basically just sleep up there. Would installing registers going from the kitchen into the bathroom and bathroom into the right side rooms help? I'm thinking it might, but not sure. Before we put the stove in, the kitchen was one of the colder rooms, due to a very small amount of baseboard pipe running in there. Now it's the hottest, but it's all trapped in there.
 
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You need to open the wall opposite the pellet stove then get an issolating fan. I have an open floor plan cape and that's what I run. I can keep the house within a degree or two in each room.
 
I would use room to room wall fans,mounted near ceiling.They do not draw much current.Also,take drawing to an old timer hvac guy for placement.Just my thoughts.Bob
 
I would say yes on the heat register and can you put in a ceiling fan in the living room. Also, it's difficult to tell, but is there no wall going up the staircase between the kitchen? If no the my guess is that the heat is mostly going right up the stairs.
 
My advice is to use a box fan or just any regular oscillating fan with blades that actually moves volumes of air. Without the yellow fan in the drawing of my house, the air hardly gets around. Its a matter of finding a happy medium between moving air and creating a cold breeze. I run my box fan on 1.

Per your original post, you heat upstairs, but I just wanted to add that I used to not heat my upstairs (don't use it) but since I started heating it, my house is warmer.
Stove is red. Green is opening on steps to upstairs.
[Hearth.com] Improving air circulation
 
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