Woodstove Heat Circulation

[robson]

2 story house. Stove is in livingroom. Planning of putting small vents in the ceiling to vent warm air into 2nd story rooms. Should I approach this as a warm air furnace circulation? Ie: circulation will only occur when there is a return for cooler air upstairs (cold air falls)? Plan is to put this vent in the hall ceiling outside the livingroom. Would I need some small inline fans for either the ceiling vents or the return? Currently I have a fan in the livingroom doorway that does a poor job of blowing warm air out the door let alone sending it up the stairwell to the second floor. Ceiling fans (3) on second floor do not help either.

Thanks

[Edwin Pawlowski]

A vent above the stove would help considerably. It also may be against the fire code too. It is where I live. Should there be a fire in or near the stove, the last thing you want is a hole above it to help spread the flames.

If you are pumping air upstairs through a vent, the stairwell will probably be sufficient for the return. Even though you are not getting the distribution you want, you are getting some movement now. Take a candle to the stairwell and move it from bottom to top and watch the flame.

Ceiling fans are useless, as you see. You may want some sort of fan in the upstairs hall to push the air along.

[Tom G]

I remember when I was a boy that our 2 story house was heated only by a free standing oil burner in the living room. Both upstairs bedrooms had good sized registers in the floor open to the room below. I remember it always being extremely cold upstairs in the winter. Used to heat pajamas on the open heater door, put them on and run upstairs and jump completely under the covers and shiver and shake until our body heat warmed up the sheets. If you also have a central heating system, wouldn't it work better to run the furnace on fan only to circulate the heat. To heat adjacent rooms in the house, we used to mount a strange looking squirrel cage fan to the top of the doorway. It had the intake and fan in a larger housing, then a thin ductway that ran under the doorway, leaving the larger fan area on one side of the opening, up and out of the way of your head. The previous tenant in my house, used to heat the house with a woodburner in the living room (ss chimney still here) and I know his kids (he was my cousin) always complained about how cold the rest of the house always was. I'm quite comfortable using gas but then I don't have the free source of wood that he had.

Tom.

[Harry K]

I heat with wood. Only a single story. Getting the heat back to the beadrooms was a problem. Solved by hanging 20" box fan from the ceiling. Also run the ceiling fan to stir up the stagnant layer of hot air up by the ceiling. Attractive? Not even close. Practical? Very.

Yes, you will probably need one or more fans, natural convection won't gt the job done without grossly overheating the room the stove is in.

I did not find running the furnace fan very effective as it is basically blowing the coldest air around the house.

I use the same set-up in summer for the air conditioner but run the furnace fan plus the ceiling fan.

Harry K

[Bob F]

If your furnace has a cold air return in the area heated by the stove, when using the stove, close the furnace vents in the hotter area, and turn on the furnace fan. It will intake the heated air and distribute it to the more distant areas, and filter it in the process.

Bob