Moving heat about the house

[Black Jaque Janaviac]

I'm aware that fans help with moving heat.

But I'm wrestling with trying to get the second floor a tad warmer while using a stove in the basement (two floors down). The physics of rising heat has me confused.

The stove faces the stairway leading up the basement to the main floor which is in the center of the house. The stairway up to the second-floor bedrooms is directly over this basement stairway. Such that the ceiling to the basement stairway is slanted because it is below then upper staircase.

I thought I had a brilliant idea to install a grate in one of the risers in the staircase between the 1st/2nd floors. Then, I installed a grate in the ceiling of the staircase between the 1st floor/basement. The ceiling grate is almost directly below the riser grate.

For the amount of heat that one can feel rising up the basement to 1st floor staircase, it is disappointing in how much escapes through the vents.

What do I need to do to get the heat to rise through those grates?

 

[Lumber-Jack]

IMO grates in the risers is a bad idea. The reason being that is what you are trying to do will disrupt the natural thermal flow between floors. Normally in a multistory house you will get a sort of river of cooler air flowing down the stairs with an alternate flow of warm air above the lower cool flow replacing the cool air flowing out of the floor above. By putting grates in the risers you are trying to force the warmer air through that continuous flow of cooler air and actually disrupting the continuous flow.
If you want to get a better flow of warm air going up the stair wells, I would look at creating an alternate flow path for the cooler air at the other side of the house, or possibly installing some ducting and a fan that will suck the cooler air from opposite end of the house from the stairwell in the top story and force it down into the basement creating positive air pressure system down there that will assist the warm air flowing up the stair wells.