Working for Heat

About 4" of snow fell today here in central New Hampshire, and though the winter solstice is more than a month away, the cold weather is with us.

We've been enjoying our wood stove and its carbon-neutral, if somewhat uneven, heat since mid-September.  The house has an oil-fired hot air furnace that works just fine, but since wood is plentiful and relatively cheap here in the state that insists on having the first primary, we've decided to do our bit to combat global warming and limit the amount of oil we use while saving some money at the same time.

Wood heat is very cozy but it also takes work.  Even if you pay somebody to cut, split, and deliver your wood (which we do, though we usually have to split the wood even smaller than its delivered size), you still have to stack it and move it into the house from where it's stored outside.  You also have to be willing to deal with cleaning up the bits that fall off the wood, and the ashes that escape the stove always seem to find a way to smudge your hands and face.  To put it simply, heating with wood is labor-intensive and sometimes messy.

The heat provided by the stove, however, has a great quality.  It all comes from one spot and cooks the room to a toasty 80 degrees with little effort.  When the temperature outside is below zero, there's nothing quite like coming inside and standing next to a 400-500 degree wood stove.

A drawback of its heating quality is that the rooms farthest from the stove can be as much as 10 degrees colder.  When you walk from an 80 degree room to a 70 degree room, the 70 degree room feels downright cold.  So one of the popular indoor winter sports here in the north is trying to equalize the temperature in a house heated by a wood stove.

There are various ways that you can try to move the air around the house to even out the heat, the most common being small fans mounted in the upper corner of a doorway.  Another way is to use a special device that operates the blower on your hot air furnace independent from the furnace itself.  This causes the warm air from the wood stove to enter the furnace return ducts and be sent to other parts of the house. The best way to heat a house evenly with a wood stove is to design the house with an open floor plan where the stove sits in the center of the main floor and near the stairway to the upper rooms.

We didn't have the luxury of reconfiguring the house to suit the wood stove, but we were able to position the stove so that it heats the living room, dining room, and kitchen well, and the rest of the house less so.  I installed a small fan to move warm air into the other two downstairs rooms, and this helps some, but in the near future I hope to install a larger ventilating fan with ductwork to move the warm air near the stove to some of the more distant reaches of the house.  Stay tuned....

handyman