Newbie considering an insert, will it really heat the house?

[[email protected]]

I am considering purchasing an insert for my fireplace.

the house is approx 3000 square feet, 26 by 56, it is a 1969 center hall colonial It has good insulation in the walls (per 1969 stds) and better insulation in the attics and under the main floor. windows have been replaced with modern double pane windows.

our fireplace is in our family room which is the center third of the back half of the house (will try to post diagram later today)
the fireplace and chimney run up the center of the house adjacent to the main stairs. clearly this room will get hot.

My question is how much heat will transfer without fans or aids to the adjacent rooms (particulalrly the kitchen) these are the two rooms that we spend most of our time in.
beyond that, how much will really rise to the second floor. we have three bedrooms there, none are directly over the room with the fireplace. Will the warm chimney really radiate more heat into the rooms around them on the second floor?

i am considering a high quality insert with fan assist that puts out 96,000 btu. the price, installed is about $3000. wondering if this is a reasonable deal?

any comments, thoughts or questions, would be most appreciatted.

 

[burntime]

I heat a 1400 sq ft 1957 exposed ranch with great attic insulation and r-7 in the walls, and mostly new windows...or should I say overheat %-P

 

[velvetfoot]

That seems like a smokin' deal, so to speak. Make sure you get a good liner and everything is good and safe.

But, and I'm no expert, and numbers can be b.s., but 96,000 peak seems pretty big.
The big-ish Quad 5100i is rated by the mfr at 71,000.

Is it an open floor plan on the bottom floor? Can the air waft around to the kitchen easily?

Our little (2000 ft2) colonial is open downstairs and the insert is in an exterior chase.
It warms up the downstairs well.
It definately has an effect upstairs: you can feel the cold air coming down the stairs.
I still feel that whatever you get upstairs is a bonus.

You can't make your family room unliveable by keeping too hot.

Hanging out around the insert is definately the place to be in the wintertime.

 

[Cearbhaill]

I heat 2,000 sq ft with an insert, and heat it really well.
I don't think that anyone can predict what air flow your home is going to generate as each configuation seems to play by its own rules. I was told not to depend on an insert in a walk out basement to heat the main floor above, and yet it does with no help from me.

I realize that it is a lot on money to drop on a "maybe", but I did it and would recommend it to anyone. If it fails to do what you want then start playing with fans to move the cold air around and distribute the heat a bit.
But someone is sure to come along and remind us that an insert is a space heater and should not be depended upon to heat an entire home evenly. Yet the rooms that it does warm will be cozy beyond anything you have now.

 

[burntime]

On point you will find out very soon when you get the insert is that when we say "heat our home" is that we are talking realistic living temps...70-80 for those who are cold blooded. My home is a favorite gathering in the winter. Even if it does not fully heat the home it will reduce the heating cost greatly and you will be much much warmer. If your family huddles around the stove when you take something out of the oven they will huddle around the insert and you will have to kick them out to put wood in!

 

[Corey]

To try and briefly hit some of your points:

With that amount of space on two floors, fans are going to be your friend. I expect you'll need a few spaced around to get good airflow and moderate temps.

Adjacent rooms usually get quite a bit of heat, of course ones farther away get less.

When i lived a a 2-story house, we would practically shut the heat vents off upstairs in the winter...enough heat usually just 'migrated' up there on its own. Shut the AC vents off downstairs in the summer as the cool would naturally flow down. Your layout may or may not be similar.

A properly installed chimney (assuming it's running through a chase on the second floor?) should radiate little if any usable heat. If you had a clear shot with proper clearances, say a vaulted ceiling, you could use single wall pipe, but anytime you have to go through a floor, in a chase, roof, etc you'll have to use insulated pipe and there just isn't much heat coming through that.

 

[VTSR5]

...how much heat will transfer without fans or aids to the adjacent rooms (particulalrly the kitchen) these are the two rooms that we spend most of our time in.
beyond that, how much will really rise to the second floor. we have three bedrooms there, none are directly over the room with the fireplace. Will the warm chimney really radiate more heat into the rooms around them on the second floor?

With a centrally located fireplace insert, the answer is, ALL of the heat that does not go up the chimney MUST transfer to adjacent rooms in order to escape the house. That's the beauty of your layout.

 

[[email protected]]

thanks for all your comments, not an Open floor plan. we did remove the doors from the family room to the kitchen and the family room to the front hall. The doorway to the front hall is a standard 30 or 36 inches. the doorway to the kitchen is wider, probably 40-42 inches. the fireplace is angled 45 degrees in the room it is in and therfore faces the door to the kitchen, about 10-12 feet away. i suspect one fan to blow the air towards the kitchen and another to blow it to the front hall where it can then rise to the 2nd floor through the vaulted ceiling will help things.

as for "heating our home" vs driving down costs. If i dropped my fuel bill 50 % i would be extatic. plus given that a portion of my home will be much warmer, a true apples to apples comparison would be if you heated your home to 72 or more with oil...!

the chimeny is the original masonry chimney built with the house. I am told that local codes only require 5 or so feet of exhaust pipe up the chimney. the chimney is shared with another fireplace (unused) in our living room that backs up to this one as well as the pipe that rises from the furnace in the basement right under this area. The dealer was the one that suggested i would get some heat from the "warm chimney in the center of the house" my qurery shows how little i believed that.

any other thoughts or comments?

 

[ControlFreak]

Wood Scott,

Whether you save more than 50% of your heating bill, or less, will depend upon how much you burn. If you burn 24/7, you'll do better than 50%.

For example: I have a 2900 sq ft colonial house, well insulated with 6" exterior walls. This place is NOT an open design floor plan. I have not turned on the furnace for heat yet this heating season, so I say it's a little better than 50% savings. Last night the temp was about 15 degrees outside when I went to bed and it was 12 when I got up. My Napoleon 1401 kept the upstairs at 70 degrees, while the kitchen on the opposite end of the house was at 67 this morning. My wife got up and tossed in a couple additional logs at about 3 am to keep it piping hot. We keep a small floor fan in the foyer that blows cool air into the living room where the stove is, and helps to move air through the rest of the house. I would like to add a second stove to the basement to give an extra boost for the days when the temps outside get really cold. That second stove would balance out the temperature differential between the living room and the kitchen. The living room will range between 74 - 85 degrees depending upon conditions.

Your house, with a centrally located chimney will do very well and you should expect to experience very good heat distribution. The final verdict of course will come when you get a stove and start experimenting. Your biggest issue for this year will be securing firewood that's adequately seasoned. You should have your firewood for next winter already stacked and drying. Wood purchased as "seasoned" is almost never ready to burn.

Dan

 

[stockdoct]

Hey

I just went through he same process as you're looking into, and here are my thoughts:

I have a brick house 2400 sq ft. with an unfinished basement. I thought an insert would help with heating costs, but it would also help me proceed with a "self-sufficient lifestyle" that I seem to need and my wife simply shakes her head and puts up with me. Two months ago, I bought a beautiful wood burning insert for my 100 yr old masonry fireplace. A Lopi Freedom. Its gorgeous. I love it and look forward to using it as a heat supplement to my natural gas furnace for the next 20 years. But here's a few things I didn't know when I bought it ....

If you have to purchase wood, its cheaper to heat your home with natural gas as we have in Illinois. In the NorthEast, heating oil is 2-3 times N.G price might be different, but here in Illinois, a cord of wood delivered costs $160 and delivers the same heat as $160 worth of natural gas. Just thought you should know that.

The wood burning insert might cost you more than $3000. With my insert, there is an additional fee for the door (black, pewter, or gold), there is an additional fee for the black plates that line the fireplace (VERY needed in my home), and a large extra cost for the blower, which --unlike a wood burning stove --- is absolutely needed in an insert. Mine, with the local "doctor tax" cost a little north of $4000

When I looked at my home heating bills over the past 3 years, they certainly vary, but average $800 - 1000 per year. But 1/4 of those bills are not "therms" for heat, but energy surcharges, taxes, additional fees which do not go down with lower N.G. usage. The MOST I might save if I went 24/7 heating with my wood-burning insert is about $600 per year this winter. Personally, I suspect N.G. prices are going to rise, but at this rate it would take me 5-6 years to even pay for the insert.

The insert is not the only cost you'll bear. $11

9 for an electric chainsaw ..... $29 for fireplace ash rake and tool set ...... $39 for a maul and hatchet wood splitter ..... $15 for an ash bucket .....$250 for tiles to be placed in front of the stove to avoid carpet burns (probably should have been there in the first place when I was burning my fireplace). $15 for protective eye glasses for when I chainsaw, $20 for ear protection ......Pretty soon I found I've spent $500 on "extras" --- i.e another year of N.G

You will need lots of wood. No, scratch that ...TONS of wood. For even a small town country doctor, it is almost inconceivable how much wood I found I needed need for one year's burning and a year's seasoning. The massive stack I obtained in September is 1/3 gone already, and I continue to scrounge 300-500 pounds of wood each week. Do you have space to store it indoors or out? I had expected to burn 24/7 to need 60-80 pounds of dried hardwood per day --- it turns out I need 2-3 times that much. I'm looking forward to getting my neighbors tree in the spring --- it'll be nice to have 3-4 cords stacked up and drying

The blower on the Lopi is louder than I expected. Running it half open is OK, you can have a conversation but its always there in the background. I wonder how I'll feel about it in February. Open the blower speed wide open and its like running a vacuum in the room. Scares my cats al to hell. And the heat delivered is really one enormous space heater, broiling you out of one room, heating the others with wild variability, and our laundry basement is 40 degrees.

The dealer says "12 hour burn" which suggests to you that you will need to fill the firebox twice a day to achieve a 24/7 hot box. For my Freedom, its more like "every 4 hours you need a refill". Actually, I like to play with the fire so I add a log every hour or two when I'm home.


I guess what I'm saying is that if you normally have a $800 bill for heating each winter, you're not going to see a return on your investment by buying a wood-burning insert for many, many, many years. And the scrounging for wood, bucking logs, splitting wood, stacking wood, hauling wood into the house ..................I bet if you put it down into pay it would come up to 50 cents per hour. If you're going to buy an insert, there needs to be something else you're interested in.

Personally, I don't mind the labor and at 45 years old I could use the exercise. I enjoy "playing with my wood" (my wife giggles when she says that), stacking, cutting, and hauling. I like the "self-sufficiency" concept, not relying on the government or on the gas company to provide heat for my home. I like the comfort that in event of a power outage (we have outages 2-3 times each winter) I have heat, no matter what. And I like the look of a burning fire in my living room, and the Lopi Freedom has a huge window to watch the fire. There's something ...ummm... existential ..... about burning wood to heat your home and it feels right and good to me, despite the disadvantages. But be certain your wife will not see that existentialism, and make sure you buy a "Dirt Devil" ( $49) to keep next to the fireplace to pick up wood chips and dirt, because she WILL see that.

I hope this rambling was helpful to you, and that you find what you're looking for. I'm enjoying my 2 month old Lopi, but I've learned its lifestyle is certainly not for everyone.

 

[wellbuilt home]

I don't buy any heat and haven't in over 5 years . Ive been heating with wood for most of my life and you will have to make it work . Ive never payed for wood . I get free wood on the side of the road or i get payed to take it away . You will need a truck or trailer to haul your wood . You will need a good chain saw. a log splitter is nice to have . I started out with a pickup truck, chain saw and i split by hand. Now i have all kinds of tool to help me out . Its a big process to cut your own wood and heat the house . I have a 40' long pile of wood and it took work to get it there , i think its worth it .My house is over 3000 feet and haven't turned the furnace on in 5 years. John

 

[jotul8e2]

I also wonder about the "96,000 btu" That is a lot for any fireplace size insert. And to generate that many btu is going to keep somebody hopping loading firewood!

As noted, the movement of warm/cold air around a given space is very hard to predict. Heat rises, of course, so one expects it to go up any open staircase. Yet, sometimes the air stratifies and keeps the air from circulating. More commonly, however, if you stand on a stairway with bare feet you will feel the cold air tumbling down the stairs and the warm air moving past your head. In general, if you give the air some kind of circulation path you get better results. Example: My kitchen is next to the family room, where our stove is located. the kitchen opens into the family room with two 4' openings that run all the way to the ceiling. I can actually feel the air circulate from one opening, across the kitchen, and back out the other opening. Dead end rooms are notorious for stoping airflow. So are conventional doorways - there is a reason the victorians built doors with transom windows. If the air can move through a doorway at or near the floor, and again at or near the ceiling, there is a good chance for convection to occur.

To totally heat 3,000 sq. ft. in a New England climate with any kind of stove or insert is going to be difficult. To provide a very large percentage of your heat needs should not be too hard, however. Some factors that would work against you might be large areas of glass, older and poor sealing exterior doors, and air infiltration from, well, everywhere. Other variables include the quality of your firewood, your patience at building and maintaining a fire, and your expectations as to what constitutes "warm".

As I type this I am sitting in the most distant room from our stove (Jotul Oslo), in a 2500 sq. ft. house (not counting the 2000 sq. ft. walk out basement). It is 26 deg. outside, and 72 here in this room. But I have r 28 exterior walls, r 50 in the attic, and the house is well sealed. I expect to make it through the winter without the furnace - unless we get an extended spell of sub-zero weather.

I hope it all comes together for you.

Mark

 

[southland]

I recommend you check EPA's web site if you're interested in comparing BTU ratings of different stoves. Or if you want to know the EPA tested BTU rating of the stove you're considering.

(broken link removed to http://www.epa.gov/Compliance/resources/publications/monitoring/caa/woodstoves/certifiedwood.pdf)

If you have a larger home, I recommend getting an insert with a large firebox.

I'm currently visiting my parents for the holiday. They have a Buck model 91 insert. It has a 4.4 cu ft firebox and puts out some serious heat. Their house was build in the early 1970s and is a two story home around 2900 sq ft. It's 17 degrees outside and I'm nice and warm in a tee shirt and short pants.

(broken link removed to http://www.buckstove.com/wood/model91.html)

 

[bsimon]

I am considering purchasing an insert for my fireplace.

the house is approx 3000 square feet, 26 by 56, it is a 1969 center hall colonial It has good insulation in the walls (per 1969 stds) and better insulation in the attics and under the main floor. windows have been replaced with modern double pane windows.

Scott, first & foremost, every house is different.

My experience is that an insert will not effectively heat a 2 story house. Our house has about 1200 sq ft on the first floor, about 1000 on the 2nd. With the insert going (with a blower) the living room gets toasty warm, almost too hot. In our house there used to be a door to the 2nd floor, which I've removed. The one foot of wallspace above the door seems to significantly block heat from the upstairs. It is on my to-do list to remove this wall.

When I turn on the air handler (for the a/c), I can move air around the house & get some heat upstairs from the fireplace. Without it, the bedrooms would be cold. As it is, the heat upstairs does still come on (it is a separate zone from the 1st floor), though less frequently. The end result is that, with the insert going, the 1st floor never calls for heat from the boiler, but the 2nd floor does, but less frequently. This is ideal for me, as it keeps hot water running through the pipes periodically, keeping the risk of freezing & burst pipes to a minimum. Obviously, your house will be different.

 

[[email protected]]

thanks all for your responses thus far.
a little more help for you all. the house is actually larger than 3000 feet. the garage is attached and is one half flight off the rest of the floorplan. from the mudroom it is a half a flight of stairs down to the garage and a half of a flight up to 2 rooms that are over the garage, one of those being a child's bedroom and then another half a flight back up to a hallway that connects to the front landing of the house. so there are in effect two stairways. I did not include this piece in my orginal descritpiton as i really don't expect those two rooms to get much if any heat out of this, but that certainly can help with the airflow! effectively no dead end at the kitchen or the upstairs.

the model i am looking at is the I3100 insert by regency, intersting that i have now found three different BTU ratings for this unit in a printed brochure i have, the website & a PDF to dl from their website. more research will be needed. it has a 2.9 ft2 firebox
anyone have reccomendations for insderts based on my needs?

as for burning: my dealer claims that i would put in about 6 logs in the morning, add about 2-4 in the late afternoon and load it up again (with up to 6) before i go to sleep

i am not looking to replace my heat, but drastically lower my bills. we heat with oil. we have antifreeze in all of our pipes, so we won't get bursts. we probably use around 1400 gallons per year. and some will go to heating the hot water surely as well as those two rooms over the garage.

i think i am going to keep researching and buy one next summer, oil is going to continue going down and problaby hold a bit. but it will be back up a bit by next winter and that is another conversation

 

[mcollect]

We put in a Jotul 550 this year. Our house is an open floor plan on the main floor 1500 sg ft. 1000 on the lower level. But it has floor to ceiling windows at 10 feet, then it goes up to 14 ft to a set of clerestory windows below those windows is another set of windows, all told we have 97 windows. The downstairs is where the bedrooms are located. the house was set up with infloor heating, great on the downstairs concrete floor, the main floor was never warm in the winter. Until this year now the main floor is at 70-75 with out the heat ever coming on, it was 10F this morning. If an insert can heat my home it has to be very useful in heating any house!

 

[Rockey]

My experience has been similar to Control Freaks. I have a 2700 sq ft house and am using a medium sized catalytic insert to heat the house. The past few years I came to realize that the insert does a great job down to about 25 degrees. It'll even cut the mustard down at 20 but below that and I would have to sleep on the couch and feed it to prevent the propain furnace from kicking on. That got old quick. I think you will do pretty good with an insert that has 4.0 cu ft and is catalytic. I have found that a non catalytic just doesn't have the same burn time as catalytic. I installed an Englander 30 in my basement to supplement the insert and it eats through the wood! It does a great job though as it was 12 degrees last night and we woke to house that was about 70. I don't forsee any need for the propane furnace this year and I think you will definitely do better than 50% if you burn 24/7 with just an insert.

 

[bsimon]

The past few years I came to realize that the insert does a great job down to about 25 degrees. It'll even cut the mustard down at 20 but below that and I would have to sleep on the couch and feed it to prevent the propain furnace from kicking on.

That is a really good point. My experience is based on a Minnesota winter where we often get a 2 to 6 week stretch of below zero (F) weather.

 

[runswithsizzers]

Wood Scott

The Englander 24-JC insert I have in the living room of my 1300 sq. ft. home does a great job of lowering my heating bills - as long as I have a fire, the thermostat does not come on, even when it's zero degrees and windy.

Does it heat the house - no, it does not. The living room is toasty, but the bedrooms are frosty. Even on this 30 degree evening, as I type in the back bedroom I have an electric heater running under my computer desk, while my wife and 2 cats are cozy by the fire not more than 30 feet from me.

The 24-JC specs claim it will heat approximately 2000 sq. ft. - but it won't heat my 1300 sq. ft. house - not because it lacks the BTUs, but because I have no good way to distribute the heat. I have tried fans in the doorways, but they don't help enough to justify the noise - and, of course, when the fire dies down, they just make the cold seem more drafty.

I would like to contrast my experience with that of stockdoct. I found my insert used in the classifieds, paid around $500 for it, plus $100 for Two Men and a Truck to deliver it. My Stihl 025 was about $300, and I already had a maul and wedges, so my total investment was less than $1000. My six acres is less than half wooded, but in the 10 years I've been here, the property has provided enough windfalls, ice storm damage, and prunings to almost supply my needs. I also scrounge a little wood as it becomes available. I've not bought any wood yet. Sure my wood pile looks scrappy - arm and leg sized round limbs of mulberry, hackberry, cherry, a little pecan, pear and hickory. No split oak to speak of - but it was all free.

Like stockdoct, I need the exercise and don't mind the work of cutting and hauling wood. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention the $1600 Emergency Room visit due to a head injury I received from a rotating felled tree - head injuries are funny that way. My point is, depending on your situation, both your initial investment and your costs of keeping the thing hot can vary quite a bit. And be careful.

Best of all for me is when the ice storms take down the power grid we can stay more-or-less comfortable and even do a little cooking. So, I am very happy to have the insert as a supplemental heat source - and I'm sure it does significantly reduce our winter utility bills, though at some sacrifice in comfort - but I'm not going to have my utility company turn off my natural gas any time soon.

 

[fredarm]

I'm mostly an evening and weekend wood burner with a Pacific Energy Vista insert in my fireplace, installed in September. The fireplace is in the living room on the end of a 1920 square foot colonial. So far, when the stove is going, the furnace (technically oil-fired hot water boiler) is not going, including the week before Thanksgiving when termperatures in SE Massachusetts were in the teens and 20's. The Vista was the largest insert we could get in our very small fireplace, but it really puts out the heat. Cruising at 400 to 500 degrees on the stove-front thermometer, it keeps the living room in the mid to high 70's, the kitchen and office on the other side of the center hall in the low 70's and the upstairs (if I remember to keep the bedroom doors open) in the mid-60's. It won't hold a fire overnight due to its small firebox size, so the furnace does come on in the morning, but I expected that. I'm sure we will have to supplement more with oil during the really cold winter months, but it's really making a noticable difference.

 

[bbeals]

Hello Wood Scott,

We also have a 3000sq/ft colonial (2x6 exterior walls). We installed a Jotul 550 this year, it has a 3 cu/ft firebox and is rated for 65,000 BTU and we have yet had the furnace run. We found that running the ceiling fan over the stove is a must, however; we can keep the downstairs around 75 with the upstairs bedrooms at 70 on the coldest days (so far). Regardless of your floor plan, stove, etc... 95,000 BTU is 95,000 BTU, so worst case scenario is that you will definitely save money. It's a lot of work, but if you enjoy the fire as much as all of us nuts at the hearth.com, then you are making the right decision. Good luck and please let us know how it works out for you. BTW, I have not been able to believe the advertised burn times, Jotul claims 10 hours for our unit and we can get 7 on a good day.

 

[bfgibson]

We installed a PE Pacific on Nov. 10th. To be honest the main reason we bought it is because I have wanted one since I was a child. At first I thought that I would realistcially only use it a few times a week and on the weekends since my wife and I both work full time. I have not turned the heat on once since putting it in. I think that I would call myself a 24/7 burner? I keep it going while we're home, get up once in the night to load if it's cold, load it up the next morning and let it burn down until I get home from work. I live in north Alabama and so we don't have super cold weather here, but we did have a stretch where we were in the low 20's with one night dipping down to 18. I was behind the curve a little, because the house cooled off while I was at work, but I was able to keep the house at between 68 and 69 on the 18 degree night. It was around 66 in the bedrooms. this was before I bought the box fan. I used the fan on our air handler, but that hasn't seemed to work too well for me. I'll turn it on and the temps will drop in the middle of the house as expected and the bedrooms on each end will warm up. The air coming from the vents usually measures around 70 degrees. Then, it seems everything starts cooling off and I can't seem to gain any ground. It may be that the insert is just too small, or I might be losing too much heat through the ducts since the ductwork is in the attic. I just abandoned the air handler approach after buying the box fan.

I really have to sing the praises of those who told me to put a box fan outside the bedroom and point it toward the living room. WOW! This made a big difference for us. On an average night so far (lows in the low to mid 30s and highs in the low to mid 50s) we seem to cruise at about 75 in the house. That is a little bit warm for me, but my wife loves it. I'm sure we could run cooler if I could bring myself to leave it alone. On the weekends when we're home I wind up getting us to 76-78 (80-84 in the living room) regardless of the outside temps by mid afternoon. I believe that problem can be solved by learning how to run it better, and more importantly, leaving it alone. haha It's amazing how fun it is to run, and how cutting and splitting the wood doesn't seem like too much 'work'. I think that I enjoy it because I have a desk job and enjoy getting out and getting the exercise. I can't really explain it, but there really is something about heating with wood.

My house is an open floorplan with the fireplace in the middle of the house on an exterior wall. I wish that it was interior, but I didn't know these things when we built it. I also thought a big clay liner was the best thing. My how much I've learned in just two years. The size is about 1900 sq.ft.

Brian

 

[Dix]

We installed a PE Pacific on Nov. 10th. To be honest the main reason we bought it is because I have wanted one since I was a child.

Boy, do I feel OLD :coolsmirk:

It's my finding that you will save $$$$'s. Over the longer term (2-3 years? with current oil prices).

 

[begreen]

wood scott the Regency is a good insert, but insist on a full 6" liner. If the dealer balks, shop around. If you can post a rough floor plan sketch we can help with fan placement. The guiding principle is to blow cold air towards the stove, not vice versa.