First you must be able to .....

First you must be able to offset or better the heat loss of your building in order to have a stable or increasing temperature inside your place.

Then you must be able to start and keep going a convection airflow that encompasses the area you are trying to heat (like your house).

Any questions?

 

Rule # 1 start with insulation

 

Yep, cannot be said enough. I had some insulation put in a year ago and it made all the difference in the world.

 

Heat loss is proportional to the difference in temperature between the two sides (inside and outside) of a building. This is the source of our friend Delta-T's handle.

Therefore if the difference is 10 degrees and then the difference becomes 20 degrees the heat loss doubles.

Considering the difference can get to be 95 degrees you can get a feeling for what takes place in the heating requirement area (the 95 degrees is 25 below with a maintained set point in the house of 70 degrees.

Heat loss is also proportional to the area of all of the building sides. If this area doubles so does the heat loss.

The largest usual heat loss a structure has is air infiltration and this figure can change with the pressure difference between outside and inside as well as the amount of holey area of the structure.

 

While in principle I agree with will711 and IHATEPROPANE, I'd make it rule #2 until air infiltration is properly taken care of or at least under control.

And as jtakeman discovered beer doesn't help at all in solving the problem of heating the cave.

 

No matter how large and flabby that tire around your midsection is it isn't large enough to insulate your entire house just a small amount of you. Your toes and nose can still get frostbite .

 

Screw insulation...Make sure you have an auger with tines that aren't tiny!! Warm as toast in my bistro once again!!

 

Thanks DexterDay.

The only problem is that no matter how many times the preachers get up in the pulpit and dispense the gospel according to the laws of thermodynamics there is always folks that don't get the message.

I'm always looking for things to do so we are warm. The actual doing them becomes a scheduling item. I'm going to do some work in the garage but that required depletion of the stash to make room for the job. I now have room to get two walls done, still working on the third wall. The fourth wall requires that a workbench and canning jar storage get relocated after one of the other walls gets done.

I'm also working at cross purposes at times as I'm reducing my electrical usage. But that has turned out to be a fun project. A new computer, tv, and a few LEDs are doing their job.

ETA: We also dumped cable tv.

 

After you have enough horses to cover the heat loss on the coldest day ever plus some spare at your location, you then need to get that nice heated air moved around, this turns out to be the hardest part of heating with a un-ducted space heater.

People try moving the hot air out of the room with the heater in it. It usually works better to move the colder denser air down low towards the stove room if you need to move the air.

Using various fans can actually interfere with getting the heat moved so it becomes a trial and error process. While heated air tries to rise it can only do so if the colder air is displaced. In a normal hot air system (that is what a pellet stove is) the hot air is kept moving by the influx of cold air in the cold air return (floor level air for the pellet eater). Setting up this separation can be a major problem for folks trying to heat floors above the one the stove is in (I'm a Cellar Dweller, so what do I know?). People tend to get carried away and punch holes in the floor to allow the heat to rise only to discover it really doesn't. Then out come the in-floor fans etc... Doing this can be a major code violation (code varies by Jurisdiction (location) and frequently involves more than one enforcement agency (They never let well enough alone.) and parts of the code can seem to conflict with other parts always assume that the more restrictive item applies. After code issues you have to deal with insurance companies. Do not get into any situations where you have a mortgage that will result in the insurance company dropping you without another that will cover you. Once an insurance company drops you they notify the mortgage lender (Did you read all of that document before signing, the part about maintaining insurance etc ... ? I hope so because not having insurance is a breach of contract and cause for foreclosure.).

Once you have the heat distribution taken care of you need to pay attention to keeping the stove from entering any reset situations (Like the four power fluctuations we had here late yesterday and early today) because most stoves enter a fail-safe mode at heat level 1 when they loose power. Certain stoves do not do this however a lot do. I just let mine do the reset and the boiler picks up if the temperature drops too low, as we rarely get this situation and only two of the four fluctuations caused a reset. This is where some folks add a computer UPS thinking about keeping the stove running so no smoke enters the house due to short power outages and/or to provide time to setup their generators or power the stove down.