Wood burner for garage...

[Oldschool777]

Hi all, new guy here. I recently moved back home to Western New York, forgot how cold it is here compared to Southern California...! I'll just dig right in... I have a detached garage/shop that I would like to heat, I found a wood burner on craigslist for $300.00. It was made in Canada by Haugh's Products Limited. I think the business has been sold and has changed hands a few more times over the last 20 years. The stove is probably not up to code, but it will have to do for now.


I tore it apart, cleaned it, pounded it back into shape and welded in a few cross braces for the top and bottom. Also welded a nut for a lift hook on top of it and replaced the door rope/sealer on both doors. Had one fire in it so far and it works great, heated the 2 1/2 car garage up in 30 minutes.


The 2 main hot air blowers work fine, they turn on and off as they should, but the small middle blower(feeds the fire box fresh air) does not come on at all. I hot wired it before I had the first fire and it spun very slowly and was not moving very much air at all. The bearings in it are fine, it spins freely. It did not come on at all during the first fire. I'm curious as to what tells it when to come on? and at what RPM? Should I have a remotely mounted thermostat in the garage somewhere? I ended up opening the ash door to feed the fire fresh air and it worked good, if I closed the ash door, the fire would go out.


I could not find any wiring info on these stoves threw a long Google search. Any help here would be great, thanks ahead of time. Here are a few pics....

 

[Oldschool777]

 

[Oldschool777]

Sorry about the 3 pics being the same in last post... learning the ropes...

 

[xman23]

Looks like something I would envision making. Not that that makes it a clean burning machine. But that's what you have, so run it and see if it works.

 

[jetsam]

That looks like a moderately old wood fired furnace. You did a lovely job cleaning it up.

No clue how its internal thermostats work. Throw away that reducer that was on the flue pipe!

I know you put some hours into it already, but if I wanted to heat my garage with wood, I would sell the furnace and get a small cheap woodstove. I don't know how easy it would be to find a buyer for a pre-EPA furnace though; it'd have to be someone with a large ducted area to heat, and who cared about price more than burn times or wood usage. You cleaned it up nicely though, so I could see someone taking it.

 

[Blaine]

My first guess on seeing this unit-and it is only a guess- is that it may have been designed to burn coal. As such, the small blower would have acted like the bellows on a forge. There may even have been some sort of control (like a rheostat) for the small blower so the user could adjust the level of heat produced.

 

[Woody Stover]

Check to see if a solid fuel heater is allowed in a garage by your local codes.

 

[jotul8e2]

Check to see if a solid fuel heater is allowed in a garage by your local codes.

... and insurance company!

 

[jetsam]

My first guess on seeing this unit-and it is only a guess- is that it may have been designed to burn coal. As such, the small blower would have acted like the bellows on a forge. There may even have been some sort of control (like a rheostat) for the small blower so the user could adjust the level of heat produced.

Ohh, that would explain the third fan! Coal stoves still have that firebox fan, I think.

 

[electrathon]

Check to see if a solid fuel heater is allowed in a garage by your local codes.

The word to use is always a "shop", never a "garage". It is the technical difference between it being safe/legal or unsafe/code violation.

 

[bholler]

The word to use is always a "shop", never a "garage". It is the technical difference between it being safe/legal or unsafe/code violation.

It doesn't matter what you call it if it has a door that you can pull a car through legally it is a garage and in most areas of the US you cant have a wood stove in it.