Mitch Newton got me motivated over in another thread and I finally put a reflector sheet behind the woodstove to put the heat back into the house instead of the basement wall... I mounted it to the wall with 1" spacers to allow air to flow up behind it. With it in place the wall behind it is cool to the touch where before it was very warm. I much rather have the heat in the house than in that wall. The double doors to the right also got very warm so I worked on them too. No plans for ever fixing this "room" up so the function takes precedence over looks. This is the working side of the basement. Now that I'm motivated to tweek the heating monster, I have a couple other ideas to try having to do with the air flow in the house. There's always a better way... The inside wood racks are to the left of the wood stove and the woodshed is just outside the doors to the left 20'. When it gets really cold again, I'm hoping this will assist with keeping the furnace from kicking on as much. Before doing this the furnace rarely kicks on above 20* unless I totally neglect feeding the beast. The shop rag in the door is to stop up a little air leak there, this door faces the prevailing winds and gets the worst of the cold blasts coming up the hill. Thanks Mitch for giving me the kick in the keaster I needed to get this done.
Nice job on the Doors. Get an IR gun and you will be amazed at the temps coming off those reflective surfaces. As we all know heating from the basement has its challenges, but the small improvements can help greatly. I also hung some insulation on the foundation walls. Disregard the cold stove, that's about to change!
I got an IR gun years ago to play with on stuff like this, muffler and engine temps, even use it when cooking sometimes. The cold air return duct in our house is right above the wood rack that is closest to the stove and I took the end baffle off of it so it can suck in warm air coming off the stove and the furnace blower moves it through the whole house. It pretty much heats the whole house without the furnace coming on down to 20 or 25 degrees outside, depending how diligent I am about loading wood and keeping on top of the temperatures of the stove. With the reflecters to keep the heat in the room and a couple of baffles (old shower curtains) I'm going to try to get the warm air directed to the duct input better. I play with the set up every year trying to get the furnace to run less. I even set up a on / off duty cycle timer for the furnace blower. I used that for one heating season but decided I'm better off just letting it run all the time instead of pulling the surge every 15 to 20 minutes to start the blower. It seems to move the heat more effectively when it's on all the time anyway. Our house is 2,700 sq. ft. with dual zone heating for the sleeping area vs. the common areas and I'm happy it's working as well as it is, but I like to tweek things to get it just a little better if possible. Thank you again Mitch for your reply that got me motivated on this again.
As Mitch mentioned, an IR gun lets you see what the temperatures are doing. To go with it (since I quit smoking back in 2003) a stick of incense taped on a long handle works well for "seeing" air movement. I was playing some more in the woodstove area of the basement and have been trying to get the cold air return to pull more hot air into the furnace blower to distribute throughout the house. A few of the things that I have found that helped: Using the IR heat gun Using incense to make the air movement visible Reflective material where you don't want heat Flat black paint where you do want heat (I still have to do some more painting and reflecting) Opening the top of the cold air duct so it pulls hot air out of the floor joist cavities Putting up some air dams (cut up shower curtain) to direct the warmed air to the duct and blocking it from going to other areas that don't need it SHUT OFF the blower on the stove... the convection movement of the warm air rising moves it very effectively up and over to the duct, this was counter-intuitive and I wouldn't have figured that out without the incense stick showing me the turbulent hot air being blown way out past where it needed to be directed to. If air flows under the basement door from the basement to the upstairs, put a doorsock on it If air flows under the basement door from the upstairs to the basement, good, leave don't put a doorsock on it Have some warm air registers open at the opposite end of the basement to assist pushing air into the cold air return at the woodstove regulate this to balance the temp in the basement and the air flow at the basement door. Incense on a stick. My camera can't really get good pix of the smoke wafting up into the duct. Both of these floor joist bays had cold air return thermOpan on them from the cool air return of the living room above. The top of the duct is open and pulls warm air in that has risen and is trapped in the floor joists. Another pic of the thermOpan being removed. The cold air return duct is on the right and the first floor hot air duct is on the left. The end cap of the cool air return is removed also. You can see an air dam (18" of shower curtain) behind the wood to stop the warm air from going over into the workshop. There was insulation panel put up into the floor joist bays above the curtain to stop flow through there. This curtain helps keep the warm air in the woodstove area Here are a couple more pictures of the area, the old stove, new stove, and wood racks. I'm no expert by any means, but through trial and error and some time playing with the IR gun and smoke, this seems to be working pretty well for our house. I'm not advocating any of these things that seem to work here, but just showing how my playground works for me. Any observations that you see that could help are more than welcome.
Last week I was setting down by the woodstove waiting for it to get up to temperature after loading it up. I was barefoot and drinking a beer (OK, 4th beer) and noticed the concrete floor was getting warm enough to almost burn the bottoms of my feet. Hmmm, the PBR can said to me, that feels like wasted heat going into the floor instead of the house. So a new improvement project was born. I'm also motivated by the fact that the heat pump quit in October right after I lit the wood stove. I still haven't put a new coil in it due to the high expense of a coil vs. total replacement with a newer heat pump with much higher efficiency. This is extra incentive to get the most of the heat from the stove throughout the rest of the house. Anyway, here's some pix of of a new reflector that I set on the lip of the stove to reflect any radiant heat comeing out the front window up to the ceiling. I made a scale diagram to figure out what angles and size the reflector needed to be to optimize heating of the 4 ceiling bays that channel warm air over into the return duct to be sucked into the furnace. 2" of flat, 7" at 20* and 7" at 40* seemed to reflect well to the ceiling area I wanted most of the radiat heat to end up. Frame was made out of some leftover locust slats from another project. The reflector is a piece of 5" duct left over from adding the OAK for the stove. 16-1/2" flattened out. It's light, strong, and easy to move then put back into position, notches at the front catch on the shelf of the wood stove under the door. Added a black panel to absorb heat and warm air and delflect it up into a floor joist bay that leads to the opened up furnace return duct. I confirmed the air flow with an incense stick on a long stick that I could position and watch the smoke move to see where the air was flowing. This is the temperature of the new black panel warming air to go into the furnce duct. This is 25* higher than I've ever seen before up at the floor joists. The plan is to keep the E-heat mode of the furnace from kicking in this weekend when they are forecasting 0* over night temperatures. I'm sure the furnace will kick in some to help keep us warm, but these few modifications seem to be heating our house pretty effectively so far. I also like having the OAK on the wood stove for the reason that when I'm burning down coals that build up when burning high and hard when it's cold here, I can pull the coals forward, toss in a couple of pine cookies and leave the primary air wide open. It gets the stove temperature up, burns the coals quickly and by having the outside air kit, I'm not pulling cold air into the house from other places to replace the high flow of air going up the chimney.
