Thermal mass

I'm definitely on your side about the thermal mass.

I don't try to run my stove low and slow much. If the fire doesn't hit 600-800 its not going to heat my house when temps are below 30° outside. The thermal mass just soaks it up. Room temp doesn't go as low between fires.

I just wanted to illustrate how MUCH it takes to really start working well. Usually my stove room temp will vary as much as 10° from peak fire to reload. In other words. During the hottest part of the fire the stove room will get to 77°+. When the stove gets refilled room temp is about 69-70° and there's hardly enough coals to start the next fire. Thermal mass is nice but can lead to alot of "new" or from scratch fires. Needless to say, i go through some small kindling. Lol

 

Not getting into drama but you say you have brand new LP furnace.. simple solution go grab (2) 100 pound lp tanks about $250 for both new.. attach to furnace set thermostat to 45*
Why I have never seen a house without water on outside wall you get frozen pipes and water damage your insurance co gonna luv you

 

Good point, let's say in a work day I average 12 hour reloads.
Without the stones let's say this stove pumps 700f for an average peak burn of 2 to3 hrs then tapers off after that
All that heat is gone by the time I get home because of poor insulation.
With the stones we get that same 700f for 2 to 3 hrs but the stones stay above 300 for an extra 3 hrs.
(Obviously this is all hypothetical times. I've spent a lot of time measuring temps during this process, but never for a full burn.)
When I come home even though the air temps have reached lower amounts they stayed higher for longer so that 12 hr cycle = a warmer house even though heat loss does not change.

Now if we streched that reload to 15 or 18hrs I doubt there would be a temperature difference between the 2 setups by the time I got home.
Make sense?

And just as an aside it's 72 in the stove room right now, when I'm home all day this stove is caple of heating very well.
It's also 28f outside so its a mild day.

 

I completely agree
The 1k lbs that I have really doesn't do that much.
Now if I could get 10 to 15k I bet this house would be hot

 

I've thought about doing that, but really don't see a need.
I've been very careful about water line routing during remodel.
The only exterior wall water lines are in the basement. The kitchen sink lines are inside the cabinets the bathroom lines run up dead center next to main drain

 

Doing the math. If this wall was a solid peice of what i think it is, sandstone, then the wall alone weighs 5800lbs. That's not including any of the cinder block of the chimney or the concrete floor. Hopefully this can help you plan your forever home a little.

 

Id get some thermal curtains or something else to cover the windows at night. Or like somone else said the wrap or a similar product for that porch. Our old house had no insulation or wadded up news papers in the wall.

 

I have 2 rooms with single pane metal framed windows. 1-room is 34ftx6ft high. 2nd-room is 24ftx7 1/2ft high. That’s why I put a stove in

 

Thats a sick looking room

 

Dude I bet your heat loss is insane.
Is a stone your secondary or primary heat?

 

Secondary. Have an oil boiler. But the stove takes care of 2 zones of heat for the most part. If I didn’t have the stove the boiler would literally never shut off. I replaced all the other windows in the house last year. They all were the same single pane metal windows. Those 2 rooms aren’t in the budget.

 

Believe me I understand that.
Just out of curiosity, how much does fuel oil run per gallon?
How big is house and how many gallons a year?

 

3.39 a gallon. I paid 2 weeks ago. It’s up to about3.69 since we got hit with this cold spell. Go through about 1000gallons a year on average . I have 3 kids so washing machine never shuts off and they take way to long in the shower. House is 4000sqft.

 

I think for a wood stove there’s a certain point where there could be too much added thermal mass (guessing over 2000 lbs) to be effective. At some point you’re just heating the block mass and not the home. You also need a good fully radiant stove for this to work.

Masonry heaters are a different animal since they use the heat from the firebox as well as the flue gases to heat up many thousands of pounds of mass. I’d love to build a home around a massive masonry heater.

 

Me to, that would be awesome

 

When I was in Germany back in the 80's, most of our German friends had massive masonry heaters in the middle of their homes. From what I remember, normally they only needed one large fire a day to heat the mass to ride out all day and overnight unless it was really cold. One of them at least also got their domestic hot water from it as well. I wish I had paid better attention, but at the time I was more interested in BEER, Schnapps, Schnitzel, and Helga...

As mentioned above, normally it's not a feature that gets added to a home... The masonry heater is the central theme and the home is built around it. The foundation would be critical to success. I'd almost want the firebox in a walk-out basement to keep the ash and mess down there with a mass column up through the center of the house as a chimney.