Yep I'll pass too. I have no problem heating my house. Except for the basement. Still working on that.
I was kinda lucky since mine was given to me by my father in law who burned on Vancouver Island. When they moved they gave it to us which was real nice of them. I didnt have to look at the financial aspect of owning one.
I have one, and Stinny does, we both like them. I paid just over $50 for mine. There have been a coupleof threads about them, here is one: Stove top fans? | Firewood Hoarders Club . There is a link to another thread on my post in that one.
We have 2 on our stove at the cabin. No power there. They work perfectly to drive the heated air under the loft area instead of it going straight up. Tried one for a while and loved it, but knew a second one would be better able to disperse the air. They will only work well on a stove if you can set it at the rear edge pointing forward across the stove top. The cooler the air coming into it from behind the stove vs. a hot stove top that it sits on... the better.
Get two and you can process 36% less wood. Get three and you can process................well you can practically sell your saw.
If you come up with something great, please share it. I found last winter that my basement was colder than ever because the new stove kept the furnace off the whole winter. Best thing I could come up with was to run the furnace fan for an hour of so. As I recall, this brought the temps up from low-mid 50's to upper 50's. Thought about space heaters, but just didn't think they would work that well.
Harvestman- that tells you how much heat you are losing in the basement duct-work if you do the math. Most of which (in an un-insulated wall basement) is just being dispersed into the cold ground next to the wall.
Is your basement unfinished? I heat a 1300 sq ft x 2 house with my little 2 cf wood stove and my basement is warmer in the winter than it is in the summer. Fully finished basement with rec room several bedrooms, office etc. On both levels we will run 2 oil heaters on low at opposite ends of the house from the stove because the furnace is off but we dont even notice a blip from the heaters on our power bill.
Our basement is foam sealed from the top of the joists down to a few inches below the top of the poured walls. Half of the basement is finished with fiberglass between metal studs and drywalled; floor is carpeting. The other half is unfinished and exposed concrete floor. Our home is a two story and we had all the duct work sealed and all the rooms pressure balanced many years ago. I can't say for sure what is happening, but my simple theory is that since the wood stove is on the first floor, the furnace fan effectively mixes the cold basement air with the warmer air of the other stories. I found that there seemed to be a maximum temperature gain I could expect in the basement regardless of how long I ran the fan. After a few hours, there did not seem to be an increase in basement temps. My assumption was that for a given upstairs temp, I could only expect to increase the basement temp so many degrees as the heat is being lost to the walls/floor or the gradient between basement/upstairs temps was reduced. I never tried getting the upstairs temps above our preferred temp range of 71-74 ish. See above. I did think about getting a couple of those radiant oil filled heaters, but never went through with it. Also had this crazy idea of having some kind of flexible venting that I could run from the basement up our stairwell up to the 2nd floor and using fans to pull the cold air from the basement hoping that this would somehow push the warmer air down into the basement. Never could find any of this venting and wasn't overly excited that it would work; but any solution that only involves moving warm air produced by the wood stove is one I think is worth considering even if it violates the known laws of science (since I don't personally know what all those are ... my thoughts are quite boundless at the expense of being utter nonsense ).
to add to the above - couple healthy belts of some single column Irish Whisky- you will be warm and .........
My cellar, an old New England root cellar, dirt kind from 1880 goes down to 35 deg in the winter and stays there. It is just the way it is. When it starts to get real cold, lower than 10 below zero we put a fan at the bottom of the cellar stairs to move some air. But the temp down there really doesn't change.
