Stove location

[Chas0218]

So I have been heming and hawing on where to put my wood stove I have 2 options. First being the obvious where most put their stove the basement and the second in a large family room (20'x16') on the first floor. My house is older 1950's construction 2 story 35'x46' footprint and cinder block walls for the first story and basement then stick built up top for the 2nd story. So my biggest concern is heating that 2nd story with no duct work if I put the stove in the basement but it would be nice to keep the mess to a minimum. My original intention is to put it in the family room near the sliding glass door where I will use that to bring wood in and out when needed if I run out in the basement. I plan to keep about 1 face cord maybe a little more at a time in the basement so my trips outdoors will be minimal. The basement has those nice hopper windows where I can just toss it down into the basement through a casement window.

Can anyone help me decide where to put my stove? Any suggestion are greatly appreciated.

 

[Nick Mystic]

We also have a two story house with the lower level being a finished basement with a full apartment. We have wood stoves on both levels, so I can give you first hand information on the advantages/disadvantages of stove placement. As for heating, it is always going to be better to place the stove on the level where you plan to spend the most time and want to have the most comfortable temperatures. Moving heat from a basement stove is a challenge and often not successfully accomplished. Judging from the comments here at the forum I would say it is seldom accomplished at high levels of satisfaction.

If you end up being like many of us dedicated wood burners you will also want your stove to be placed so that you can enjoy experiencing the radiant heat coming off it as you sit and admire the flames. Again, this means to maximize your pleasure you will need to place the stove where you will have such access to it. A finished basement tripped out as a man cave can deliver this enjoyment, but in most instances it is more likely achieved when the stove is on the main level of the house.

Wood stoves are inherently messy. No way to get around it. I've found if you develop proper habits it is relatively easy to deal with the mess. I keep a cordless hand vac handy and always take a minute or two to police the stove area after a reload. You get a good feeling from seeing everything neat and tidy around the stove. And keeping the wife happy is a must for most wood burners, so tidying up is always a good start in accomplishing this vital goal. Removing ashes is going to put some dust in the air, even under the best of circumstances. If this is a big problem it's going to hard to get around with a stove in the living room, etc. Placed in the basement might eliminate the problem on a practical level if you aren't going to spend time in that area. Or, acquiring the habit of picking up a dust rag and dong a quick once over on the nearby surfaces is another way to deal with it. Just don't think your wife should do the dusting unless you want to get her dead set against heating with wood. Of course, if dust doesn't bother the people living in the house, then this won't be as big an issue.

Your basement wood storage idea has its pluses and minuses. Wood stored in large quantities inside the house can lead to higher humidity (especially in a damp basement), but if your wood is properly seasoned that problem can be minimized. Bugs are going to be in wood and thus inside your house when you store wood there, but if you are selective in harvesting and storing your wood supply you can minimize this, as well. For me, bringing wood to the stove for loading is all just a part of heating with wood and I don't think of it is an unpleasant chore. It is what it is and I enjoy burning enough I rarely think of it in a negative manner. I have a wood storage bin that I built that is right outside the sliding glass door off the dining room in the corner of our screened room, so I keep that topped off and I only have to carry a load of wood about 30 feet to the living room stove.

Tending to the fire is usually more work with a basement install if you are going to be upstairs most of the time. Establishing a fire can take time (on a cold start up it can run to an hour) and you really want to be nearby to monitor and control the air, etc. You can't just throw some wood into the stove, light it, and then go about your business. Having the stove across the room makes monitoring things much easier. The same is true with reloads. Looking up from your easy chair to see how things are going is much easier than running down the stairs to check on things.

Finally, how you will be running your chimney is a fairly big consideration. You will almost always have a shorter run on an upper level install and that can reduce your cost. If you are fortunate to have a straight shot up through the roof, even better. Basement installs are likely to be longer runs and cost more. Also many basement stoves seem to have trouble initiating a good draft, but that can usually be remedied with some trial and error. Moving the heat is a bigger problem than the draft in most instances with a basement installation.

Good luck with your choice.

 

[yooper08]

I don't know that I'd classify a basement install as "popular." What I will tell you is this, put it where you spend most of your time and/or where it achieves your goal of buying a stove.

I have a basement install and I put it down there because I needed a better heat source down there AND because I spend most of my day down there (where my office is). I'm able to get heat upstairs successfully but that's definitely more a function of my layout than anything else. Plus, I was reasonably able to test this prior to install.

I definitely would get a lot more benefit out of it financially in terms of increased savings on my gas bills had I put it upstairs though. I probably could eliminate my gas bill if I had an insert upstairs.

 

[Chas0218]

We also have a two story house with the lower level being a finished basement with a full apartment. We have wood stoves on both levels, so I can give you first hand information on the advantages/disadvantages of stove placement. As for heating, it is always going to be better to place the stove on the level where you plan to spend the most time and want to have the most comfortable temperatures. Moving heat from a basement stove is a challenge and often not successfully accomplished. Judging from the comments here at the forum I would say it is seldom accomplished at high levels of satisfaction.

If you end up being like many of us dedicated wood burners you will also want your stove to be placed so that you can enjoy experiencing the radiant heat coming off it as you sit and admire the flames. Again, this means to maximize your pleasure you will need to place the stove where you will have such access to it. A finished basement tripped out as a man cave can deliver this enjoyment, but in most instances it is more likely achieved when the stove is on the main level of the house.

Wood stoves are inherently messy. No way to get around it. I've found if you develop proper habits it is relatively easy to deal with the mess. I keep a cordless hand vac handy and always take a minute or two to police the stove area after a reload. You get a good feeling from seeing everything neat and tidy around the stove. And keeping the wife happy is a must for most wood burners, so tidying up is always a good start in accomplishing this vital goal. Removing ashes is going to put some dust in the air, even under the best of circumstances. If this is a big problem it's going to hard to get around with a stove in the living room, etc. Placed in the basement might eliminate the problem on a practical level if you aren't going to spend time in that area. Or, acquiring the habit of picking up a dust rag and dong a quick once over on the nearby surfaces is another way to deal with it. Just don't think your wife should do the dusting unless you want to get her dead set against heating with wood. Of course, if dust doesn't bother the people living in the house, then this won't be as big an issue.

Your basement wood storage idea has its pluses and minuses. Wood stored in large quantities inside the house can lead to higher humidity (especially in a damp basement), but if your wood is properly seasoned that problem can be minimized. Bugs are going to be in wood and thus inside your house when you store wood there, but if you are selective in harvesting and storing your wood supply you can minimize this, as well. For me, bringing wood to the stove for loading is all just a part of heating with wood and I don't think of it is an unpleasant chore. It is what it is and I enjoy burning enough I rarely think of it in a negative manner. I have a wood storage bin that I built that is right outside the sliding glass door off the dining room in the corner of our screened room, so I keep that topped off and I only have to carry a load of wood about 30 feet to the living room stove.

Tending to the fire is usually more work with a basement install if you are going to be upstairs most of the time. Establishing a fire can take time (on a cold start up it can run to an hour) and you really want to be nearby to monitor and control the air, etc. You can't just throw some wood into the stove, light it, and then go about your business. Having the stove across the room makes monitoring things much easier. The same is true with reloads. Looking up from your easy chair to see how things are going is much easier than running down the stairs to check on things.

Finally, how you will be running your chimney is a fairly big consideration. You will almost always have a shorter run on an upper level install and that can reduce your cost. If you are fortunate to have a straight shot up through the roof, even better. Basement installs are likely to be longer runs and cost more. Also many basement stoves seem to have trouble initiating a good draft, but that can usually be remedied with some trial and error. Moving the heat is a bigger problem than the draft in most instances with a basement installation.

Good luck with your choice.

Those are some great points.

My plan is to be a dedicated wood burner, and the ambiance of the flames dancing with the lights off or dim is a big factor. Unfortunately I don't plan on doing a man cave but have an area where I will be wood working, maybe bad idea to have the stove in that area being lots of saw dust in the air and around the room. I bought the stove with a big viewing window so I would like to to be able to take advantage of that. Nice point about the bugs in the basement, I didn't think of that and the wife won't be very happy to be doing laundry and having creepy crawlies going all over.

I think with your points it will be going on the 1st story. The house is more of an open concept so the 1st floor should heat pretty evenly, I will be doing a large remodel to the whole house so I have the ability to add duct work in certain areas to help distribute heat.

 

[Nick Mystic]

Before you go too far with your remodeling plans and duct work ideas you should do a bit of research. It seems that the consensus here at the forum is that it is not usually an effective way to move stove heat through duct work. I've tried it myself using a large cold air return (that is not to code) that is just a few feet away from my basement stove and I got very little heating out of my registers when I ran my air handler to move the air. And that was with well insulated duct work. I think this is due to the fact that the air you are moving is just not hot enough to make it through a long duct and still possess meaningful heat. This makes sense when you consider a furnace is using heat coming directly off a very hot heating element as opposed to room air heated by a wood stove.

Most people have much better success using fans to move cold air out of the cool areas and blowing it towards the stove. This tends to start a convection current causing warmer air to replace the cold air you moved out of the room you are trying to warm up. Paddle fans run in a reverse direction also do a good job of moving warmer air down from the ceiling to replace cooler air near the floor. We have a 16' cathedral ceiling in our living room where our Jotul F600 is located. A paddle fan positioned almost directly over the stove blows the warm air up and the 45 degree angle of the ceiling deflects it down to the side walls of the room toward the floor. Our bedroom door is located on one of those walls about 12 feet from the stove and I can feel a nice warm breeze entering the room and a cool breeze exiting near the floor. I get a two degree bump in the room temperature soon after engaging the ceiling fan.

 

[Chas0218]

Before you go too far with your remodeling plans and duct work ideas you should do a bit of research. It seems that the consensus here at the forum is that it is not usually an effective way to move stove heat through duct work. I've tried it myself using a large cold air return (that is not to code) that is just a few feet away from my basement stove and I got very little heating out of my registers when I ran my air handler to move the air. And that was with well insulated duct work. I think this is due to the fact that the air you are moving is just not hot enough to make it through a long duct and still possess meaningful heat. This makes sense when you consider a furnace is using heat coming directly off a very hot heating element as opposed to room air heated by a wood stove.

Most people have much better success using fans to move cold air out of the cool areas and blowing it towards the stove. This tends to start a convection current causing warmer air to replace the cold air you moved out of the room you are trying to warm up. Paddle fans run in a reverse direction also do a good job of moving warmer air down from the ceiling to replace cooler air near the floor. We have a 16' cathedral ceiling in our living room where our Jotul F600 is located. A paddle fan positioned almost directly over the stove blows the warm air up and the 45 degree angle of the ceiling deflects it down to the side walls of the room toward the floor. Our bedroom door is located on one of those walls about 12 feet from the stove and I can feel a nice warm breeze entering the room and a cool breeze exiting near the floor. I get a two degree bump in the room temperature soon after engaging the ceiling fan.

Short answer: Yes.

I have saw the posts that mention it. I have also saw a few that used duct fans to blow heat. My plan was to use the duct work for cold air return and use the staircase as the heat source. The duct will use a booster fan to either suck or blow the air. If I can in fact use it to blow warm air into the rooms then great other wise I will wire them to pull the cold air into the stove room. My plan was to wire them to a 120v wall thermostat similar to those used in electric heating and use that to regulate the temp in the living room upstairs and possibly the bedrooms depending on space needed for the duct work.

On the stove itself I am planning on adding a convection deck to really strip the heat from stove top. If I understand this correctly the stove I have bought runs a consistent 650* stove top (obviously not with only coals) with seasoned hardwood.

Just got word the stove is in and ready to be picked up. Looks like tomorrow I will be doing the first couple break-in burn outside to get her seasoned and won't stink the house up.

 

[bholler]

I have to say personally i would never put the stove in the room i use most. To me the room with the stove in typically is unbearably hot inorder to get enough heat to heat the rest of the house. I like hesting from the basement but be aware you are going to want the basement insulsted of you will be wasting a large percentage of your heat

 

[Chas0218]

I have to say personally i would never put the stove in the room i use most. To me the room with the stove in typically is unbearably hot inorder to get enough heat to heat the rest of the house. I like hesting from the basement but be aware you are going to want the basement insulsted of you will be wasting a large percentage of your heat

Now that you mention it, that would be very pricey to insulate the basement added cost to the re-model we weren't looking to do right now.

 

[Nick Mystic]

When bholler says he'd never put his stove in the room he used the most he gives a very specific reason: it would cook him out of the room while he tried to get enough heat out of his stove to heat the rest of the house. In cases like that it wouldn't make sense to overheat the room where you spend a lot of your time. In other cases, for example my layout, placing the stove in the most used room makes the most sense. My stove is centrally located to disperse the heat through out the rest of the upstairs. The room with the stove has a 16' tall ceiling and is open to the dining room and kitchen. There is no overheating with that sort of set up and I get maximum heat dispersal for the other rooms. The bottom line is you need to look at your specific floor plan and heating goals and then make the decision that will best achieve your goals.

 

[bholler]

When bholler says he'd never put his stove in the room he used the most he gives a very specific reason: it would cook him out of the room while he tried to get enough heat out of his stove to heat the rest of the house. In cases like that it wouldn't make sense to overheat the room where you spend a lot of your time. In other cases, for example my layout, placing the stove in the most used room makes the most sense. My stove is centrally located to disperse the heat through out the rest of the upstairs. The room with the stove has a 16' tall ceiling and is open to the dining room and kitchen. There is no overheating with that sort of set up and I get maximum heat dispersal for the other rooms. The bottom line is you need to look at your specific floor plan and heating goals and then make the decision that will best achieve your goals.

Yes absolutely it all depends on the layout. In some cases the stove upstairs works best in others you will cook yourself out of an upstairs room. I did not mean to imply that a basement install is always the right answer.

 

[begreen]

When bholler says he'd never put his stove in the room he used the most he gives a very specific reason: it would cook him out of the room while he tried to get enough heat out of his stove to heat the rest of the house. In cases like that it wouldn't make sense to overheat the room where you spend a lot of your time. In other cases, for example my layout, placing the stove in the most used room makes the most sense. My stove is centrally located to disperse the heat through out the rest of the upstairs. The room with the stove has a 16' tall ceiling and is open to the dining room and kitchen. There is no overheating with that sort of set up and I get maximum heat dispersal for the other rooms. The bottom line is you need to look at your specific floor plan and heating goals and then make the decision that will best achieve your goals.

Exactly right. This really depends on the house and it's layout. I moved the stove into the living room in 2006. It has worked out great. With the Castine it was possible to overheat the room during shoulder season with a large fire, but you had to work at it. Since I put in the T6 it has never been an issue. The reason are that we have an open floorplan so heat convects really well throughout the first floor. And the T6 is a convective stove with strong radiant heat only from the front. The mass of cast iron that surrounds the firebox on spacers really softens the heat. In combination the result has been great for almost 9 yrs. now.

Now not everyone has the same setup. In a house with many rooms separated by conventional doorways the results probably would be completely different. Each situation has to be considered with those unique factors that make up the home.

 

[Chas0218]

Just as a reference here is the layout of the home after the re-model.

 

[begreen]

That's a nice open floorplan. It should heat pretty evenly with a convective stove. The location that is shown is ok, though the warmth would be biased toward the livingroom end. The den past the kitchen would end up being the cooler area, but if the place is reasonably well sealed and insulated a little fan help could even out the heat.

 

[Nick Mystic]

What sort of roof is on your home? If it is a pitched roof and the stove's flue pipe is going to come out near the peak that makes it much easier for installation and top down cleaning. If you come out of your roof near the eve then you have to deal with a tall chimney to get proper roof clearance for draft. That can be unsightly and need additional bracing, etc.

 

[Chas0218]

That's a nice open floorplan. It should heat pretty evenly with a convective stove. The location that is shown is ok, though the warmth would be biased toward the livingroom end. The den past the kitchen would end up being the cooler area, but if the place is reasonably well sealed and insulated a little fan help could even out the heat.

Yeah that would be right below the master bed and bath with the kids rooms above the kitchen and den. Between the bedrooms will be a great room 35'wide X 18'deep.

What sort of roof is on your home? If it is a pitched roof and the stove's flue pipe is going to come out near the peak that makes it much easier for installation and top down cleaning. If you come out of your roof near the eve then you have to deal with a tall chimney to get proper roof clearance for draft. That can be unsightly and need additional bracing, etc.

It will be a typical 4/12 metal roof (the remodel consists of new 2nd story with roof trusses). Unfortunately i won't be able to go straight up but will be going thru the wall then straight up with triple wall. Through the eave once i reach the roof. The idea is to have a straight run outside to help keep a good draft and easy cleaning. I would go straight up through the house but the tub and sink will be directly above the stove on the 2nd story and a little nervous of civet fires inside my home. If it means cleaning it a couple more times a heating season I'm ok with that.

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