Trying to heat an old Grange Hall need advise

[Richardin52]

The hall area to be heated has a 14 foot ceiling. The floor area is 40 by 40 feet. We are planning on putting more insulation in the ceiling but right now there is only about 6 inches.

At one time they heated the hall with a wood furnace. That was years ago then with the advent of cheap oil they put in an oil furnace which does a poor job of heating the place mostly because of all the location they put it.

The old wood furnace was right under the halls main floor. The oil furnace is way on one end of the basement with a long distance that uninsulated metal heat ducts run the heat, poor setup. The wood furnace will go where the old wood furnace was which should make heating the hall easier.

I've found an furnace for sale that has a fire box that is 2 feet deep 14 inches wide and 20 inches high. Don't know if thats big enough.

Any ideas of thoughts will be welcomed.

Thanks

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Will this hall be constantly heated or left cold and needed to be heated in a short period of time?

Matt

 

[Richardin52]

It will be heated one or two days a week.

 

[littlesmokey]

Can't answer the question about the stove or furnace, but my immediate thoughts were the ceiling height. I would start with several well placed ceiling fans. Whatever heat you put in the building will cruse the top and not warm the people space. Where you are heating only a few days a week you are not going to get benefit of much radiant heat.

 

[SolarAndWood]

Is that a new or used furnace? I have been looking at furnaces and always look at used stuff first. There seems to have been a lot of relatively recent advancement in furnace technology that I think justifies buying new. Also, at least some qualify for the the tax credit.

You should post this in the boiler room for better feedback unless you want advice to put a stove in the middle of the hall to directly heat the people instead of relying on electricity to blow it through ductwork. Which, incidentally, is probably what I would do in that big open space.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

If you are only going to heat the place 2 times a week I don't think you will be happy with wood heat. Here's why I'd stick with oil:

With a 14 foot high ceiling, you have twice the cubic feet of air as a building with 7 foot ceilings. Most of the ceilings in my area are 7.5 feet high. So you have the normal heating requirement of a 3200 square foot home with poor insulation. Using a generic 45btu per sq foot figure we get 144,000 btu needed to hold a nice temperature in the place. Great, they have furnaces that put out that, no problem, right? But that number is the amount of btu needed to hold a temp. You won't be heating the place fast from 10-20 degrees. You can compensate by purchasing a larger furnace. So you decide to buy a 300K btu furnace... That's going to be a big firebox and will hold a pretty substantial amount of wood. I think there is a thread here calculating a 3 foot firebox that burns 85% efficient will hold 90lbs of wood and will generate about 60k btu for 8 hours? (Somebody check to see if I remembered that post correctly.) You will be adding a few hundred pounds of wood per load. It'll take a while for the fire to get that amount of wood burning. Then you get to reload. That's a lot of wood. Do you have space for it? Would somebody be available to run a much smaller furnace all the time so you could use less wood?

Oil doesn't take up much space and the heat is available immediately. Wood is nice to heat with, but for some applications I believe there are better choices.

Matt

 

[Dune]

If you are only going to heat the place 2 times a week I don't think you will be happy with wood heat. Here's why I'd stick with oil:

With a 14 foot high ceiling, you have twice the cubic feet of air as a building with 7 foot ceilings. Most of the ceilings in my area are 7.5 feet high. So you have the normal heating requirement of a 3200 square foot home with poor insulation. Using a generic 45btu per sq foot figure we get 144,000 btu needed to hold a nice temperature in the place. Great, they have furnaces that put out that, no problem, right? But that number is the amount of btu needed to hold a temp. You won't be heating the place fast from 10-20 degrees. You can compensate by purchasing a larger furnace. So you decide to buy a 300K btu furnace... That's going to be a big firebox and will hold a pretty substantial amount of wood. I think there is a thread here calculating a 3 foot firebox that burns 85% efficient will hold 90lbs of wood and will generate about 60k btu for 8 hours? (Somebody check to see if I remembered that post correctly.) You will be adding a few hundred pounds of wood per load. It'll take a while for the fire to get that amount of wood burning. Then you get to reload. That's a lot of wood. Do you have space for it? Would somebody be available to run a much smaller furnace all the time so you could use less wood?

Oil doesn't take up much space and the heat is available immediately. Wood is nice to heat with, but for some applications I believe there are better choices. (format edit by Mo)

Matt

All is this is true, but if there is any way this can be done with wood, and there are people willing to do it, then more power to them. It may not amount to much, but every drop counts and this country needs to reduce/eliminate oil consumption on every level possible. Generations of the future will look back at this age with great sadness, knowing that we gladly and willingly burned oil.

 

[Richardin52]

Read your posts and would like to comment

Right now the grange hall is shut down in the winter because it takes so long to heat it up and with oil prices what they have been it was too expensive. Again to oil furnace is way at one end of the basement and the duct work looses a lot of heat just getting through the basement.

The grange is looking at hosting a year round farmers market so we need to do something about heating the place through the winter at least on the day of the market.

There is a lot of space in the basement and we are right now redoing the basement so that we can possibly have a commercial kitchen down there for people in the market to use. The grange hall is very large and the basement will have a room where we can put the furnace and that room should hold 5 to 6 cords of wood all easy. There will still be plenty of room for walk in coolers, a kitchen and a dining area. The basement does not freeze and the walk in coolers compressors should throw enough heat to heat the basement if we insulate it well. I have a commercial kitchen in a building on my farm and that’s how we heat ours so I figure it will work at the grange too.

As far as feeding the furnace someone would go down the night before and get the furnace going, that’s what we do now with the oil furnace.

I know it will be easier to heat with oil but we may as well all face it, fire wood is easy to get around here and oil is not going to stay where it is now for very long so we need something that’s more sustainable.

 

[firefighterjake]

I'm afraid I can't really answer your original question about whether the wood furnace you found will meet your needs or not . . . but I will say a lot of these old granges and mason halls in Maine were heated with wood furnaces . . . add in a whole bunch of warm bodied folks and you can really heat up a place quick . . . the negative is a lot of these same places didn't use a lot of insulation in the walls.

Where are you located Rich? Just curious.

 

[Richardin52]

It's located in Farmington

 

[laynes69]

Do you remember what type of wood furnace it was for sale? Depending on the run of the ducting, you will need a blower thats large enough to push the heat through the ducting and then insulate the ducting to stop heat loss on the long run of the supply trunk. If you buy a furnace, get one that will squeeze out the maximum btus from the wood. You may find a standard wood furnace with that type of heating demand requiring reloading every 3 to 4 hours. Using a ton of wood. Something that has a secondary heat exchanger, and secondary air is a plus. I would insulate of course, then get some sort of heating demand calculation. I'm sure the old one removed was a beast.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Coal may make sense in this application. It's compact and can provide a lot of heat.

Matt

 

[laynes69]

Never thought of that. A stoker unit with a thermostat. All automatic, just empty the ash and fill the hopper. Less work.

 

[firefighterjake]

Coal may make sense in this application. It's compact and can provide a lot of heat.

Matt

True . . . but I suspect that in the Farmington area there are plenty of Grange members or folks who would be willing to give up some firewood for a good cause like an indoor farmer's market . . . but to my knowledge there aren't any coal mines.

 

[wg_bent]

How about using an add on wood furnace?

Englander makes one you can get at Home Depot:
http://www.englandsstoveworks.com/28-3500.html

It's an add on wood furnace that connects to your existing duct work.

Or:

Yukon-eagle - and this will also burn coal if needed.

http://www.yukon-eagle.com/FURNACES/SUPERJACKADDONWOODFURNACE/tabid/59/Default.aspx

There are others as well, but these are just examples.

I have no experience with them, but they seem like a good idea, and I think if someone got to the grange ahead of time one of these could do a decent job of warming things up ahead of time.

Warren

 

[Richardin52]

I’ve been looking for a wood furnace on craigs list and in Uncle Henry’s. There looks like there are a few furnaces around for sale.

The grange has several things it wants to do for the new farmers market besides the wood furnace so I don’t think a new furnace is an option right now. I just missed a wood/oil furnace last week for $300.00 that took a 4 foot stick of wood.

I figure if we keep looking we’ll find something this winter second hand that will work well for us.
I want to make sure we get something large enough to do the trick. If anybody has an idea on the size fire box I should look for please let me know.

 

[Dill]

All of the old halls I've been in around here had a giant stove either in the corner or the middle of the room, but also had stove pipe that went around the perimeter of the ceiling. They worked surprisingly well. I was at a grange hall up in Browington VT last winter and it was darned cold out, but comfortable inside. They fired up the stove around 6 or 7 am and we where in there at 11 am.

 

[ansehnlich1]

Put a big wood furnace in there and get to splittin

They done it before, you can do it again.

I'd go for a big firebox, something that'll take a 2 foot log, and I'd make sure it had a heavy duty blower on it...