One of the most critical questions that wood stove owners ask is how to use the stove to warm the entire house.
Wood stoves burn small pieces of wood using a real fire to produce hot air. The hot air rises directly upwards and begins to spread to warm the air in the house.
However, this heating method may not be powerful enough to increase the ambient temperature in all the rooms in a house within no time. Therefore, you need to find ways to increase heat circulation from your wood stove to get the best from it.
In this blog post, we shall discuss some of the most common and effective methods and techniques that you can use to circulate the heat from the woodstove.
Can a Woodstove Heat an Entire House?
Wood stoves usually provide primary or secondary heat in rooms where they are placed and not for the entire house. For example, placing your wood stove in a huge room will heat the part closest to it.
As a result, the hot air that comes from your wood stove rises upwards and begins to spread slowly. However, you can enable your wood stove to produce enough heat to warm the entire house with a few modifications.
How do you Transfer Heat from One Room to Another?
You can use heat shifters to transfer heat from one room to another. These small systems comprise fans and ductwork. The fans push the excess heat present in one room to an adjacent room via the ductwork.
This process helps to make the entire home comfortable. Alternatively, you can use various methods discussed here to spread the heat from your wood stove from one room to another.
Some of them include the way you place your wood stove, different types of fans, and using the natural draft.
How do I Maximize my Wood Stove Heat?
You can maximize your wood stove heat by placing fans at a distance and directly in front of the woodstove.
The fan will continuously push the mass of cold air towards the stove. The warm air from the stove will then spread across the entire room.
This technique will help create a convective current in which cold air in the room will be pushed towards the stove to be warmed. There are different types of fans that you can use to maximize the heat from your wood stove.
How to Circulate Heat from Wood Stove
It is essential to circulate heat from your wood stove to make your entire home comfortable. There are many methods and techniques, which you can use to circulate heat from a wood stove. However, the efficacy of these methods varies.
Here are some of the most effective ways that you can use to circulate heat from a wood stove successfully.
1. Using Wood Stove Fans
You can increase the heat distribution in your house from the woodstove by connecting a wood stove fan. This process works when the furnace plenum effectively distributes the heat in the room according to its intake. They are popular because they do not need electric power to run.
A wood stove fan is placed at the top of the woodstove. Ensure that the woodstove is already running before you place the fan. Once the top of the woodstove is hot enough, the blade of the wood stove fan will start turning in the clockwise direction.
When the blades of the wood stove fan keep turning clockwise, they increase the rate of warm air from the stove moving across the room. Thus, the wood stove fan increases the circulation of heat around the rooms and helps to maximize the use of the woodstove.
This process increases the ambient temperature in all the rooms adjacent to the one where the wood stove is placed.
2. Using a Box Fan
Using a box fan is one of the most effective ways of circulating the heat from the woodstove. A box fan uses electric power to distribute the air in a room.
To use a box fan to increase heat circulation from the woodstove successfully, you need to consider its placement. It would help if you placed the box fan in the room or at the area where the temperatures are lower than near the woodstove.
Ensure that the box fan is blowing the air directly towards the woodstove. This type of placement is more effective than you would expect if you place the box fan near your wood stove and attempt to increase heat circulation by blowing the air away from the woodstove.
When you set the fan in the area where heating is needed and let it blow the air towards the wood stove, it helps heat circulation. The fan blows the cold air to the woodstove. Then, the wood stove heats the air and flows back to the cold room as warm and light air.
This method is more effective than placing the box fan behind the fan. Placing the box fan behind the fan will not help spread the warm air across the room appropriately. This is because the warm air from your wood stove rises, and the fan will not move the warm rising air.
3. Using Doorway fans
Doorway fans are small devices that help to move air into rooms. They are mounted at the top corner of the doorframe. When they are running, they help push air into a room and enhance the overall level of air circulation.
You can successfully use a doorway fan to increase heat circulation into cold rooms. This process is possible because warm air is light and rises towards the house’s ceiling. The doorway fan will distribute the warm air rising near the ceiling by directing it into the cold room.
Thus, using the doorway fan differs from using a box fan. The doorway fan pushes warm air into a room while a box fan drives cool air towards the wood stove for heating. You need to test the fan’s speed to ensure that it does not run too fast or slow.
4. Run Ceiling Fans in Reverse Mode
Ceiling fans are designed for use during summer and winter. Most people understand how to use ceiling fans to cool the room effectively. There is nothing complicated with this process.
The fan blades create a draft of cool air, which reduces the overall temperature in the house. However, you can use your ceiling fan to increase heat circulation in your house. To achieve this objective, you will have to run your ceiling fan in reverse or anticlockwise mode.
The warm air from your wood stove rises and settles near the roof of your house. When your ceiling fan runs in the anticlockwise direction, its blades begin to push the warm air down and around the house. This process leads to a steady increase in ambient temperature in all the corners of your house.
As more warm air reaches all the corners of your house, cold air gets heated repeatedly at the woodstove thanks to the rotation of the blades. This creates a cycle of repeated air heating and effectively distributing the heated air around the entire house.
5. Placement of Woodstove
Placement of the wood stove is another critical method that you can use to increase heat circulation in your house.
It would be best to consider several things when placing your stove to ensure that heat circulates in all areas of your life. Primarily, place your wood stove at the lowest levels in your house. It is ideal for placing the stove in the basement or storage rooms.
When you place your stove in a room where it is at the lowest level, you increase the ability of the warm air from the stove to rise and spread across a large area.
It is also essential to keep the doors of adjacent rooms open after placing the wood stove in the correct position. If you keep doors of interior rooms in your home shut, the warm air from the basement, for example, will not reach inside the rooms.
Therefore, remember to keep the doors open for as long as you need the warm air that rises from the woodstove to reach the adjacent rooms.
6. Using Heating Systems
If you have a forced-air system in your home, you can successfully use it to increase the circulation of heat from your wood stove. This method works when you set the forced air system on the fans-only mode. You can do this by using the switch to control the fans manually.
Once the stove is running, the heating ducts of the heating system become hot through the convection. The running fans then begin to move the warm air around the house.
One benefit of using this method to circulate the heat from your wood stove is that it is exceptionally effective. The fans can move large volumes of warm air from room to room. If you leave the doors of your rooms open, then the fans will ensure that the ambient temperature in the rooms rises rapidly according to your needs.
Another benefit of using this method is that it gives you great control over the entire heating process. For example, you can use the thermostat to initiate the process by turning it down to 55 degrees.
7. Using the Natural Draft
Modern homes are made so that air does not freely move in and out of them. Instead, airflow in and out of modern homes is strictly regulated. Furthermore, modern homes have much equipment that requires massive air to operate. Your clothes dryer, for example, exhausts a lot of air that is found in the house to do its work.
The wood stove requires a lot of air to burn the wood and produce the hot air you need for warmth. On many occasions, your wood stove may not burn the wood properly because it lacks enough amounts of oxygen. You can do many things to increase the supply of air to the stove.
By so doing, you can ensure that the heated air flows throughout your house. For example, opening the stove’s door will let the fresh stove air. The air may then increase the circulation of heat as it leaves the stove in the form of hot air.
In addition, opening the window slightly may help let in large amounts of air. The fresh flow of air will not only aid the combustion process but also ensure that the heated air circulates in every corner of your home.
8. Closing Unused Rooms
Unused rooms are usually full of cold air. If they are left open, the little warm air that comes from your wood stove gets wasted as it flows into the empty rooms. This means that you can maximize the heating of the woodstove by closing unused rooms.
First, ensure that no warm air flows into the rooms. However, you can leave the doors of rooms that are in use open. This will let the warm air from the woodstove flow into the rooms used at any given time. This technique works perfectly even when employing additional methods, including placement and fans.
If you have doorframe fans in unused rooms, ensure that you keep them off while the wood stove is running.
Conclusion
The heat from your wood stove is usually enough to warm a small house area. The area may be just the room where the woodstove is in or even a tiny part of the room. Therefore, you need to use any of the effective methods discussed here to ensure that the heat spreads to all the rooms where people may be at any given time.
Of course, the choice of increasing the circulation of heat from your wood stove boils down to your preferences and what you can afford. Nevertheless, each of these methods can help you increase the heat circulation from your wood stove and get the maximum benefits of using the stove.