[Ayoob]

We're planning to do some work on our home heating setup. There's a lot to do. As it stands, everything runs on electricity. I can have natural gas run to the house, and there are all kinds of incentives to install gas if I switch from an electric heat pump to a nat gas central heat pump. The house has a pre-epa wood burning insert in the basement and a POS fireplace upstairs that apparently exists to shuttle warm air out of the house all winter.

From doing a little bit of internet research it seems that there are wood burning stoves that connect to the whole-house hot water system as a way of banking BTUs for various reasons. I could theoretically connect a wood burning stove to my hot water heater and possibly to radiators to heat the whole house. It makes sense for me to do this because firewood is abundant where I live. It would be no big deal for me to head to national forest territory and cut as much wood as I cared to at a minimal cost.

http://www.hydro-to-heat-convertor.com/faqs.html

My kitchen -->living room area has a fireplace that could easily be fitted with a wood burning cookstove. My wife is pretty much on board for that, I basically need to come up with a way to make it happen that makes financial sense. There is so much marketing BS out there that I have a hard time trying to put together a rational system that will meet our needs. It would definitely be a secondary cooking situation... make that a tertiary behind the microwave. Still, it would be nice to slide a tray of Panko chicken in to the wood oven as long as it's heating the house anyway.

I want a wood heat source that is EPA approved and efficient because wood is fucking HEAVY and carrying that shit around is a pain in my ass. If I can carry less wood I want to. Solar will not work for me under any circumstances and wind is just a fart for me.

You guys got any ideas?

[Don35]

I heat and cook with this and love it. Not sure it could be hooked up to your house system. I've seen options that do that though. http://www.antiquestoves.com/kitchenqueen/index.htm There are other options on the web site.

This site has options that can hook into a pressurized system safely. http://www.woodstoves.net

Good luck!

[Lore]

I looked long and hard at this too. I ended up going with geothermal and havn't looked back since. I've burned with wood for years in my younger days, but would only use it as a backup now. It's messy, labor intensive and more environmentally destructive then electricity that's produced cleanly through wind or hydroelectric. The neighbors that have bought into the outdoor wood burners have reported that they use a considerable amount of wood fuel more then advertised.

[Paulo1]

Why we use heat and would not use nat. gas:

Many years ago, they brought natural gas to Vancouver Island. There were huge incentives to switch from oil and electricity. The suppliers 'guaranteed' that nat gas prices would stay low. Well, they didn't, and for many years heating with nat gas cost more than electricity. It is not renewable and it will not stay cheap forever. We did swap out though because the incentives virtually paid for the system. We used it for backup to our wood. When we moved we left the idea of nat gas heating in the wood dust.

I would also stay away from wood fired boilers for a central heating or a floor heat system. My buddy put one in and he uses about 3X what we do with our radiant and pre-heat water tank.

Next to our stove, (with a home made water jacket/coil), we have a bronze tank scavenged from an oil stove system. We use it to pre-heat the water before it enters our conventional 40 gal electric HW tank. In the winter, our electricity bills are approx. $40 dollars per month and we shower daily. The bronze tank warms up quite nicely and acts as heat sink and keeps our house warm all night if the stove burns out. If it drops to -10c, I may get up and stoke it, but not usually. (It looks okay, tucked behind a half wall in a sunken combo tv room/study. We don't see it from the kitchen, eating area, or the livingroom.) When I renovated we put in a wood cookstove next to our kitchen, but it is actually in our new livingroom. The house is very open and conducive to a central radiant heat source. The living room has a 14' vaulted fir ceiling with a slow moving fan to circulate the air. I had a bunch of old brass antique pots and ladles including a copper tea urn from an English train station and we set up the one corner with the cookstove to resemble a slice if the 1800s. It looks pretty neat and is very pleasing to the eye. On a really cold day we might fire up both stoves. We use about 1/2 wheel barrel load per day during the winter. We have the cookstove in case the power goes out, which it does several times per year due to storms. I was going to use it to bake our bread (bakers oven model), but it is usually too hot so I still use an electric range. We do use the stove top for soups and stews, though. Or, for keeping a kettle warm for tea.

Get a stand-alone stove and lose any insert idea for a fireplace salvage. They are very inefficient. Pacific Energy makes an excellent wood stove. My son has one and it is very clean burning.

If you like staying busy and having natural excercise, then fussing with a wood stove is just the thing. If you resent chores and would rather walk on a treadmill at a gym or in front of a tv, then wood heat is not for you. I am 58 and have been looking after stoves and cutting firewood for almost 50 years. I love it. We get our wood from a dryland sort with cut offs and culls....12-15 cords for $350. It is old growth fir, hemlock, balsam, and yellow cedar. We get the occasional chunk of red cedar mixed in for kindling. I made a 40 ton splitter as the wood is too big to cut by hand. Some you can use a maul on, but much of it is corrugated butt ends 30-40 inches dia. Our biggest piece this year was a 9' long 5' diameter douglas fir butt. Two months heat in one piece!!

Oh yes, r60 in the attic, r20 in the walls and floor, and new double paned vinyl windows are key to effective wood heating for us. It takes out the cold spots and draughts.

best of luck with your decision.

Paulo

[BobInget]

As a Florida boy moved to Oregon, my first inclination was a wood stove. At 50 thinning on the wood lot was lots of fun and real manly. At 60 we wandered into a pellet stove and a second that served us till
turning 78. Today, i'm wishing for geothermal heat and tax credits that go with. (BTW, like rental property, farming comes with so many legal tax deductions)

Don't get shy about gas. In no time NG, could serve as fuel stock for your cogeneration fuel cell(s)
producing your own electricity (if you roof isn't right for solar). Instead of a fancy grave marker, six years ago we put in grid tie 8 KW worth of PV's that should be putting out like Miss Roundheal till she's 35 and retires.
With a solar water heater, the cheapest, most economical single thing one can do, our monthly power bill is under $10 (for some BS taxes).

[SamInNebraska]

Gas. Wood is amusing, and polluting. Gas is cheap, abundant, will probably stay that way for quite some time, burns pretty clean, doesn't usually require electricity to get to you if the power is out, can be used to generate electricity on site if you'd like, so when your neighbors lose theirs, you don't have to lose yours.

Have a buddy who did this one, enough electrical generation to run the entire house from natural gas, propane, or gasoline. He is officially doomerfied.

[Surf]

The first thing I would do is to get a lower test done on your home. A large fan is installed in an open exterior door. The fan can be set to low in or out and the pressure difference between the inside and outside pressure can tell you how much heated air leaking though your walls. using smoke or find powder they can even locate most of the leaks.If your home is like most they will find a lot of leaks. This old house did this test a few years in ago in a boston home before starting the remodel and also filled the home with theatrical smoke. From the outside I almost looked like the house was on fire. It was that bad.

Right after I moved in to my current home I felt a strong draft and the heater was on for about 40 minutes in an hour. I quickly found a 1/4" gap in the entry door weatherstripping. A little silicon rubber stopped that leak. I then spray foam at the hardware store and used it to seal the gaps between the sheetrock and the pips in the kitchen and bathrooms. I did the same for outlet and light fixtures and about $70 dollars later the furnace is now off during most of the day. Just by locating and stopping the air leaks you could greatly reduce your heating costs for only a fraction of the cost of a new wood system.

Surprisingly some of bigger leaks were in the new windows the previous owner installed. If your window slides up or down, left or right to open it, it probably has weeping holes. If you have wind blown rain it can penetrate the window seals and water can accumulate in the window frame. The weeping holes allow water to drain outside and unfortunately allows air to move in and out of the house. My place is in a fairly dry climate and roof overhangs do a good job blocking keeping the windows dry. I never had water get past the window seals. So I plugged the weeping holes with more silicon rubber. Casement windows don't have weeping holes because they don't have sliding seals.

Now I have my thermostat set to turn the heater off at 11PM and it doesn't turn the heater on until about 6:30 and then off again at about the time I go to work and the thermostat doesn't turn it back on until just before I get home. The heater only burns natural gas once or twice in the morning and then 2 or 3 times after I get back home. My place stays well above 60 most of the time when the thermostat is set to off even on a cold night. Many home in this area have air conditioning. I don't. But y just sealing the air leaks I don't need one. I open the windows at night to cool it off, close them when I get up. Inside temperatures are typically just below 80 F when I get home even if outside temperatures reach 100F. My place was constructed in the late 70's and only have 3 or 4 inches of fiberglass insulation in the exterior walls.

Note I live in northern california near the ocean so on a cold night it can get down to freezing and a couple of times a year I see snow on the nearby hills (tallest is 2500 feet high). According to my utility web site I consume only about 1/3 of the natural gas most people use in this area.

Next find out what rules apply to fireplaces in your area. For me there are times when I am not allowed to burn wood due to pollution problems associated with burning wood. For me burning wood for heating is really practical due to the local laws. However when I was growing up north of Seattle my dad did install a fireplace insert. The furnace had air intake upstairs and all the heater ducts were on the first. So when the fire was going in the insert and its fan was on we would flip the switch on the furnace to only turn on the furnace fan. The furnace fan would take the fire heated air accumulating upstairs and move it downstairs. We heated the place most of the time with the fireplace insert. Most of the time we got all of our heat from the fire. We did use the hot top of it to cook some soup a few times but it wasn't designed to give use good temperature control for cooking. Most of the time we just left a tea kettle on it for a hot drink whenever we wonted on.

While geothermal heat pumps are efficient they are costly to install. On the oil drum some posters from Canada found that air source heat pumps (which cost a lot less to install) actually worked we in below freezing weather in a a well insulated home. they also got good result with air source heat pump water heaters. A google search should be able to locate those drumbeat posts. I will eventually install a air source heat pump in my place. I personally don't expect natural gas to stay cheep for very long.

I have heard of wood fire water heaters but I have no experience with them.

[Ayoob]

Wow, this has been very informative. Thank you gents. I have a lot to do now.

[vtsnowedin]

I also have fifty odd years experience living with wood heat. Growing up the domestic hot water came off a galvanised tank that sat beside the kitchen wood stove and heated by thermosyphon in a cast iron water jacket on one side of the fire box. You could run your hand down the side of the tank and feel how much of the tank was hot. You needed half a tank to take a bath. I still have that stove but am in the process of swapping it out for a new one. My main heat source today is a wood furnace in the basement that can take a 36 inch log. My back says 20 inches is plenty.
Some things for you to consider. One is the dirt, bark and insects that come into your house with the wood. Many modern housewives have a very low tolerance to this sort of thing so having a fire in a liveing space that burns daily causes friction. Consider the travel path you will take each day with several armloads of wood from your covered wood pile to the wood box beside the stove. You (And only you) will have to sweep up after your daily fill up and taking out of the ash pan. Keep the travel path as short as possible and not run through laundry rooms or other sensitive areas. A furnace or wood stove in the basement is a cleaner option and you can stack quite a bit of wood in the basement so as not to have to go outside in bad weather. Even a simple woodstove running in the basement will heat all of the ground flooring from below and run up the stairs if you leave the door open. Good foundation insulation should be installed to keep from keeping the ground outside your house room temperature.
There are some nice combination systems on the market that will kick on the fossil fuel when your fire goes out late at night or when you are away. I want one but haven't ever had the scratch to put one in as yet. "HS Tarm" has done these for years and even has large storage tanks that fit in a small basement room that can store several days worth of heat. There are other brands and systems but I don't know who the industry leader is today.
Lots more of course but I'm off to work. Good luck with your project.

[Pops]

I agree with Surf, if your house has any age at all get a blower test done. Our house is 100 next year and I was amazed at the drafts that came in between the interior door casings and jambs when we had the test done. Of course ours is old balloon framing and newer construction methods (platform framing) are not as bad but the test is a good investment since infiltration is the biggest waster even in new construction.

Passive solar is so ridiculously simple and effective it amazes me. Cover up the windows on the North side and install a couple of patio doors on the south, be sure they have a roof overhang for summer, heavy curtains to keep the heat in at night, voila, free heat! Tile floors are good thermal mass.

The problem with heat pumps, at least in my experience, is they don't blow "warm" air, it may be warmer than the room it's heating by a degree or two but in the last house we had, sitting under the vent was like sitting by an open window, you were hoping the blower would turn off so you could warm up, lol. Maybe it was just that system.

Wood is a hassle but I just can't feel warm without a fire. I think the problem with any forced air system is it heats the air whereas whatever kind of radiant system heats "things". If you run a blower furnace enough the sofa and floor heat up some but not like a radiant floor, wood stove, south glass, etc. We use our gas central H/A unit like a big fan for the most part, just to circulate heat from the wood stove (Vermont Castings Defiant I think). The other consideration is independence, hard to be resilient on nat gas and electricity, of course hard to be sustainable on wood without your own lot.

I really wanted to expand the kitchen when we arrived here in order to work in room for a wood cook stove but it didn't happen, probably a good thing since I'm still working on finishing the cabinets here years later, LOL

I wouldn't want an outside boiler, the neighbor down the road installed one and every time I go by it's smoking like a train, the whole house looks like it's on fire. And Doesn't make sense to go outside to feed the fire, lol. I guess the same with one in the basement, you would get some radiant from the floor but I'd be down there standing in front of it all the time, LOL.

[Ayoob]

We have an old Orley in the basement now that can heat the house. When I run it hot it does a fairly decent job as long as I'm willing to live with the inconvenience of propping a box fan on a folding chair in a narrow hallway upstairs that blows cold air down towards the heater. That's not something I'm prepared to live with long term. Something's going to have to give.

I definitely understand the bugs and dust and bark that gets blown around the basement when the stove's burning. The master bedroom is downstairs in a half-daylight basement that wants to be 58*. I don't have a problem with that temp but my wife does. She would like it warmer down there. So to speak. I have a shop vac for picking up the crap. The dust flies everywhere, though. I have a whole house air filter in the central air, but that doesn't help much with things downstairs. A tabletop air filter should help with that, and I'm going to order one before I start firing up the insert.

There are three vents built into the floor upstairs (downstairs ceiling) that could be fitted with small fans that could pull cold air down to the basement to be heated. I like that idea a lot and will look into it as autumn progresses. That could be a very efficient way of pulling the cold air to where it is needed. Maybe I could block one vent off and install a fan to suck the coldest part of the air down to the heater.

I found a service that my local utility company provides that should find major air leaks in the house. Once those are taken care of the house will be more efficient.

[Shaved Monkey]

This is what happens when recession hits and you cant afford gas or bought wood
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/n ... nter-nears

[Heineken]

Quite a few people beating up on wood here. And yes, it has its associated work, dirt, and inconvenience. But for most people and at a practical level, only wood provides true "heating independence" east of the Mississippi and in certain Western locales. And I mean real wood, not pellets, which you have to buy, putting you at others' mercy. Wood heating is simple, low-tech, and totally reliable. It's not for everybody, but it sure is for me. The work I chalk up to exercise, recreation, and keeping in touch with my forest.

As for the environmental impact, burning wood is carbon-neutral, since the carbon that is released was originally sequestered from the atmosphere by the tree. (Of course, the same could be said of coal.) It can create temporary local air pollution. I haven't found the latter to be much of a problem---we are fairly isolated here---but I've driven through "hollers" in western Virginia and West Virginia where all those wood stoves and fireplaces create a palpable haze. Too much of a good thing.

You develop a certain natural rhythm with wood heating. The tree selection, cutting, splitting, toting, piling, stoking, adjustments, ash cleaning---it's all like a dance. I don't think any other form of heating gets you so in touch with the elements, and with yourself.

[SeaGypsy]

Geez Heinie HTFRU? LTNS!

[Heineken]

Hi Gypsy. Things are hanging together here. Prostate cancer got me a year ago and messed me up quite a bit, but at least I'm cured (after an awful surgery). Parents are still kicking, both of them in their late 80s now. The wife is a blessing and well worth all the hell I had to go through to "find" her. In addition to her PA (physician assistant) career, she's very much into gardening, chickens, mushroom growing, and various other projects here. I'm currently building a good-sized run-in shed for my tractor and other equipment. (I'm always building or fixing something, it seems.) Hope all's well in the Phil or Australia wherever you are now! PM me if you want to talk more.

[SeaGypsy]

(Done )
Welcome back! Hope your health is well now you can get back into things around here some- I guess you must have noticed the recent influx?

I'm with you on the wood thing. The posts along the line of 'hey there's plenty of NG'- sure there is- for now. Of course it's a matter of population density, functional regrowth systems, proper drying to minimize pollution. But there's nothing like the flicker of your own cosy woodfire on a chilly night- as another thread starter recently brings up- the aesthetics are not matched in any other system.

[keithrowan]

I also want a wood heat source that is EPA approved but enable to find the one but here I got many solution to my problem.