It's official, I love the wood stove in the living room. On average the room the living room is around 70-76 degrees. This is with temps ranging from the 30's to the 50's. Last night with the temps down below freezing, the room was a comfortable 72 degrees. I had to open the air a bit more to maintain those temps. The kitchen and the upstairs is warmer as a result. The furnace is not running at all. . I'd like to see a week straight of 30 and below to see how it operates. The Envi-8 bricks are wonderful, and I'll be getting another ton the end of this week. This will allow me to season the wood as we've talked about. One downside is that the eastern end of the house (our house faces south and the wood stove is on the western end of the house) is colder. My daughter's room required that I put an electric heater. She does not benefit from the heat from the wood stove. :-(. With an open floor plan and the wood stove more central, I'd not have to worry about that. However; we all have to work with what we have. All and all I am very happy, and will be keeping this setup. Only room I need to figure out is our bedroom. Right now we are heating it with a Pelonis ceramic disc heater. Makes for a very dry room at night, and my wife complains that the room is too cold when we go to bed. However; she does not like to run that heater when we are not in the room. Yes I've told her that there are safety features on the Pelonis that would allow us to operate throughout the day. She's still not comfortable. Today I ordered a Delongi TRD4 0615E oil filled radiant heater. Hoping that will heat our bedroom more efficiently. Still working on a permanent solution. Hopefully the Delongi will get us through the winter. Looking forward to an extended period of cold. Christmas was a whopping 65 degrees. Might as well move to the surface of the sun at that temp.
A fan pushing cold air toward the stove room might help even things out a little bit, but it is hard to get even heat with a stove when your layout doesn't work well (I'm in the same boat you're in).
The path for the heat to reach the western side of the house is next to impossible. Here is rough drawing of the house. First Floor (notice wood stove on left side of house. Also note that the stairs go up to the second floor.) Second floor (notice that the hot air must travel the front of the house then along the front wall to the right to reach our bedroom on the far right. The room next to ours is our daughters bedroom which also does not receive any of the heat.)
From this shot, I see an opportunity to drop a duct in your room(hope I got that right) at the opposite side of the house from the stove, back down to the stove floor- did I miss what room is under your bedroom? You can enhance natural convection by giving the cold air along your bedroom floor a way to "sink" back down.... I use such a trick here- no cold room in the house, heating from the basement up^ Glad everything is going well for you boettg33! Merry late Christmas
I was suggesting a duct back down to about 6-8" from the floor surface of the same floor the stove is on... To allow the "cold air blanket" some place to go.... But a register is also helpful at letting heated air along the lower floor's ceiling to continue to rise. But the cold air still needs to be "evacuated."
I have a small square "hole" that I cut through the wall and then finished off. This hole in the wall is at the top of my basement wall and about three foot off the floor at the bottom of the stairs that go up one end of the house to the living area above the garage. This allows the heat from my basement that radiates off the boiler to come up this set of stairs as well. Works great. The other stairs, closer to the boiler, are open so that lets it up at the other end of the house.
I can see that working gooder than most, Gasifier! Do you have any cool spots in the house(keep it on track, boys) which could/might benefit from letting cold air drop, or do the stairs handle it....handily?
boettg33 the suggestions here are sound. push the cold air to the stove with SMALL fans(small enough to not make turbulent air but move the air) or provide a duct or floor register for the cold air to return to the stove on its own. dont ever try to move the hot air where you want, the laws of physics (High to Low) will always win. BTW i use an oil filled heater in my sun room where my dog crates are, its the hardest room in my house to heat, I only REALLY need it below 20 degrees but its there and works great. I hope yours has a temp scale for degrees on the thermostat for it, ours doesnt and makes it hard to find the sweet spot.... Also, use it on the lowest wattage/output setting needed to do the job, higher isnt better, the oil is there to be a ballast. if its set higher you will have wild swings in temp as the ballast heat is used up and cycled on again, not good when sleeping. Low and slow.....
Yes I am afraid all is not as it seems. I don't even know where to start. Let give it a try. Keep in mind this all makes sense to me as not only can I see it, but I was also there when he did all this as a young kid. Don't forget I call my dad captain shortcut. The garage foundation was not integrated into the existing foundation. Instead my dad poured it's own foundation against the existing foundation, and used cinderblock construction for the other two walls. In the front, he tied in the granite. The level of the room above the garage is 8" below the second floor for the original house. No idea why he did this. I personally cannot make any sense of it. This change in floor height along with the double foundation wall makes running any ductwork impossible. I should note here, as some might recall this house does not have cold air returns. I looked into replacing our forced hot air heating system with a forced hot water system. This could be feasible, and I could run the forced hot water into the room over the garage. The problems I ran into were many. On the first floor, my dad put up wallboard for the ceiling with no access points to get at any of the mechanicals. In order to put in forced hot water, I'd have to drop the ceiling for the whole downstairs. We are on a slab as my dad had converted the basement into the first floor of the house. The second problem is that since we are on a slab, getting the pipping in for the first floor would have required me to bore a hole through granite to go from the living room to the kitchen/dinning room. That would have run us a pretty penny. Next would have been removal of the existing duct work and the repairs the the second floor for the removal of the vents. Not enough wall space in the kitchen to put any forced hot water radiators. They would have needed to use toe kick registers. Price tag for the just the first floor with two zones would have be between 14,000 and 20,000. A price tag that I could not stomach nor could I afford. In hindsight, this would have been the way to go. With a cold garage below our bedroom, we get no residual heat on the floor below. I have considered heating the garage. I know this makes my dad sound bad. He's actually a very smart individual, and I rely on him for a great deal of work. I grew up in a mason's house. Much like a carpenters house. Most carpenter's cannot be bothered with working 10-12 hours a day and then coming home to work on their own house. This results in shortcuts. Remember captain shortcut? I love him, and fully understand why he would take shortcuts. I hope this paints the same picture in your head that it does for me. Understanding the limitations will assist in suggesting fixes. Honestly only two fixes are possible for this house. One, completely gut the house, and perform a new floor layout that utilizes forced hot water for heating. The other option would be to tear it down and start over. There is a third option which is not a fix, but would solve our problem. Sell it. Both options one and two have merits, but I just don't have deep enough pockets for either option. Selling it would require the right person to come along and want to take on the work to fix it.
DeLonghi TRD40615E Full Room Radiant Heater https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G96S4Y8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Thank you for the advice. The Pelonis ceramic heater we use today works, but is loud and runs all the time. We plan to use the timing controls to setup heating times that make sense for us.
Yes. That makes a whole bunch more sense! Hmmmmmm. Your Mason father sounds a lot like my carpenter father! I totally get where your coming from-and a striking similarity exists between your home and my childhood home- The Sunken Living Room! We had the same thing, and it was over our garage!
I put in a floor register in the bedroom upstairs with the open and close louvers in it. The heat rises from the living room downstairs where the stove is. The cold air slides down the stairs to the living room to be heated, this brings air flow past the bedrooms in the hallway off of the stairs. Those rooms are cooler, but heavy quilts keep all comfy and warm. We frequently have to close the louvers on the register as the upstairs gets too warm. It works for us.
