My wood stove insert is located on one extreme end of my home on the first floor. On a cold night my stove room may be 80 deg while my kid’s rooms on the other side of the house (and on the second floor). Are in the mid 60’s. Unfortunately my 1st floor air return for my forced air handler is on the opposite side of the house from the stove and is separated from the stove room by the transom area over the doorways of the adjoining rooms. I’m sure I’m not the first one here to encounter this issue and I wanted to see I f anyone has any ideas or potential solutions. Would adding another return duct to the ceiling level in my stove room help significantly ?
A small fan sitting on the floor at the far (cold) end of the house blowing (on low) back toward the stove room will do wonders...doesn't sound like it would do much, but try it, you'll be amazed.
Using the HVAC system to move the wood stove heat around the house only very rarely works...the fan on the floor trick works well for most people though...
Here’s a partial explanation of how we move heat from the basement to the main floor of our small ranch home- Which one would you install an insert in?
My kids room is similar, stove is downstairs and the other end of the house from the kids rooms. I put a fan on low on the floor of there room pointed towards the door and it brought their room up to 70 from 65 with the stove going. It works, and probably the only way to do it.
I haven't fully experimented with this just yet with my setup but I tend to agree with brenndatomu. My insert is in the center of the house, have a return vent hec not more than 5-6ft away and if I run the HVAC fan the air is still chilly, not what you would think. However there are some other factors that possibly come into play with my setup so I do need to experiment a little more. My upstairs warms with the insert cranking however we keep the kids doors closed and cheat using small heaters. We do keep our bedroom door open and our room gets heated but not too much as we like it cooler for sleeping. Living Rm on the other side of the steps tends to get chilly with really cold temps because all that hot can't make it past the steps it's just flying up the staircase.
Perhaps the most difficult part of trying to help people distribute heat is that it sounds backwards so many simply won't try it. To put it simply, it is very difficult to move hot air into cold air but easy to move the cold air into the hot air. This is mostly because the cooler the air, the more dense it is. This is why airplanes and kites and such fly a lot better in cool air and even the big planes sometimes have to not land at certain places when it is too hot; they lose lift. So, the key is to move that cool air out. Move it toward the warmer air. This will start a circular motion where the cool air moves the warm air out and it has to go where the air started to move, or to replace that which was moved. You do not need or want a large fan in order to go this else you will get a bad drafty house and you won't like it. Use a small fan; even a desk top with small blades, and run it on low speed so you won't feel the draft; it will still do it's job. In addition, if you have a ceiling fan, set that fan so it blows up; not down.
I will not be showing my wife this thread for fear she will find out some people have bedrooms that reach temps of the 60's in the winter.
We use our HVAC to move the air in our house. Sure the air isn’t hot coming out of the vent but it works well for us until it gets down to the single digits.
Thanks everyone for all the great advice. I do run a ceiling fan in reverse in the stove room and I normally run a small fan in an adjacent room to displace warmer stove room air. Maybe I will try stepping this technique up a notch and place one more fan on the far side of the house as well. Strangely it seems that much of my trouble is with getting the heat to rise upstairs which seems odd. I guess I could try blocking off my first floor return ??? Or maybe I should get another stove!!!!
The cold air blanket will slow or stall this, hence cutting ducts/or building chases will help letting cold air back down to the stove level.
