Benefits of upgrading old wood furnace

Nat/gas and my garage with wood this summer I plan on puttin a wood furnace in the basement.

 

Just curious, how do you handle all those fans if the power goes out?

 

There is a few ways to deal with the fans when power goes out. One is you dont, if your stove radiates heat up, so it in the basment then the heat will rise. Our power went out for a week burner in the basment kept are house warm.
2 inverter off of a batteries to your stove will kick on the fan. 3. Generator will run the fans, a small one would probably work for just the woodfurnce fan.

 

A boiler is a pretty complex expensive upgrade unless you are trying to accomplish more than just replacing the furnace. Either way you go, having dry wood on hand is the only way to get the most out of your investment.

 

Using the your hvac fan to help the wood furnace works if it doesn't overpower the wood furnace blower. Mine was set up so that the ducts from the wood furnace feed into the main trunk in a way that the furnace fan created a venturi effect. It's not hard to overpower a 500 cfm blower. Make sure you have backdraft dampers to prevent it.

 

Your right its easy to over power the 550 blower, but i put my furnace on circulate air mode where is blower air for a few mins then shut off. Then the 550 blower pumps the hot air into the duck work. Not the most effective way but it works. Ideally i would like the twin blowers or the 1600 cfm blower. But at this moment i can afford the up grade. ...

 

Mine fed into the main trunk on either side of the plenum, and I made some custom angled connections. When the hvac blower was running, into would suck the hot air right out of the wood furnace. I never tried not running the wood furnace blowers, but I bet I could get away without them if necessary. I had the cold air return hooked up to the wood furnace, as well.

Running the hvac blower made a huge difference on cold days.

 

I've got this same stove in a 6'x16' "custom" walkout basement enclosure. I say custom in quotes because it's temporarily built on top of a ground-level deck that extends off our walkout basement. I built a replacement door for one side of the french doors and mounted a 10" cold air return duct at the bottom with a furnace filter over it and then piped in the two 8" hot air pipes to the top in large register boots. I did all this to avoid a total retrofit of our mechanical room in addition to the obvious requirement of running another stove pipe up the center of the house. In addition I run the fan on the main (for all intents and purposes currently the "backup") furnace but I still struggle to get enough heat upstairs without running the Lopi in the living room.

The Daka's are decent stoves but there's some improvements that could be made, in my opinion of course. A true OAK would be nice as would moving the door down on the firebox and/or installing a sliding bypass gate that would allow the smoke a more direct path out the chimney during reloading. I improvised an OAK by running a 5" round duct through the wall to an elbow pointed straight down outside with another elbow terminating just to the left of the ash drawer. I'm still running the single 550cfm blower that came with it and I can make the basement any temperature I want although with our current outside temps being below zero it'll get down to 70 at the end of a 7-8 hour burn.

 

Are there any hot ducks by your wood room that you can tie into? With out seeing picks i cant get a good idea. But if you can tie into your duck work add some register booster fans, that should power the heat up stairs. Now if the duck that you can tie into has a room up stairs the just close the register untill the room stays at a fair temp. The cold air return might beable to ran the same way. Something like that.. Moving the air is the trick... But i would love to see pics of your setup

http://www.menards.com/main/mobile/...-8-round-in-line-duct-fan/p-113777-c-6872.htm

 

I was thinking about doing something very similar as I believe one of the hot air ducts for the bathroom (which is colder than the rest of the house right now) is right above the french door and the hot air output of the Daka. The trick is that I need to do it in a way that doesn't look like animal feces That means drilling a pilot hole down from the bathroom to locate the joist space, cutting the drywall to remove the current register boot and install a tee, and then button it up nicely enough to satisfy swmbo!

 

They have register booster for the other side of the house. Put the double blower on the daka and that should power it throught the house.

 

Check out my post this morning titled Love My Clayton in the firewood forum. I answer several of the questions that have come up in this thread. I have been using it for 13 years with great success. My plan for a power outage is my generator - I have a sub panel with my breaker for the wood furnace in it.