Posts Tagged ‘wood burning stoves’
Just Say NO To Outdoor Woodburners!
Outdoor wood burners were considered to be a great way to heat your home about 10 years ago. The “mess” and smoke was outside the home, and these wood burners not only could heat your home, they could also heat your water since they sent heat to your home in the form of hot water. But after talking to a friend who recently decided to scrap her 7-year old leaky and non-working unit, I must recommend that you stay clear of these units. Here is why:
In short, don’t buy one! Your much better option is to spend your money to better insulate your home – for tips on this, see http://savehouseholdenergy.com/homeinsulation.html. If you really want to use wood heat for the aesthetics or as a backup heat source, consider supplementing your current heat with a free standing decorative wood fireplace – these require smaller amounts (1 full cord or less) of dry split wood that produce less smoke, cost far less to purchase, and can keep your home from freezing up in the event of an extended power outage. See http://savehouseholdenergy.com/woodheat.html for a summary of wood heat choices. Make sure to check your local codes first to see if wood burning appliances are allowed. If a wood burner is not allowed, a decorative gas fireplace might be a nice choice.
Heating My House With Only a Fireplace
We live in northern Wisconsin in a 40+ year old ranch home. Read here about the wood burning stove that we can now heat our home at temperatures down to zero degrees F! 
The wood burning stove pictured left heats our house thanks to the new blower system and many improvements in insulation I made this fall, documented on this blog and on my site SaveHouseHoldEnergy.com. Also, you will find a host of other resources for saving money while on a budget on this site, including a page on how I cut my oil hot water bill nearly in half, along with a homemade solar shower I constructed.
The stove is in our basement on the finished side. We live in a fairly modest 1200 square foot mid-sixties era ranch home with another 600 square feet of (somewhat) finished area in the basement. Our basement was always very cold so we decided to put in a free standing wood stove. The stove worked great, but much of the heat tended to stay in the basement, too much at times.
And our upstairs was not really getting much heat. To send more heat upstairs, I put in a floor grate (pictured on left) a few years back. This helped somewhat but still did not deliver a lot of heat. The way to get more heat upstairs was to install a blower run on a thermostat. The blower was purchased at Home Depot online and is nice in that it is fairly quiet. This blower is designed to be part of a 6″ stove vent pipe. The thermostat was purchased from kkontrols.com and works incredibly well. This is the same thermostat that is used in controlling temperatures on large greenhouses I see listed in seed catalogs. This blower will turn on, and stay on, as soon as heat builds up and will turn off, and stay off, when heat levels diminish. About the hardest part of rigging this whole system up was fishing the 14-2 wire through my finished basement ceiling to connect to a power source. For safety sake, consult or hire an electrician when installing this system.