Re: High efficiency wood-furnaces?

Posted by jdemaris on February 28, 2005 at 06:17:48 from (209.23.30.13):

In Reply to: Re: High efficiency wood-furnaces? posted by VaTom on February 28, 2005 at 05:20:41:

Yeah, I've thought about it. Maybe next year I'll try it. I just put the new wood-stove in this year, so I wanted to use it at least one winter to find out what it's capable of. Same goes for the new furnace I put in. I was leary of the new technology and also the price of these new stoves. Seems the consumer bears the cost of the EPA testing.
I've been heating with wood for over 30 years and have had gravity-air wood-furances, pot-belly wood/coal stoves, Rumsford fireplace, air-tight stoves from the 70s era, etc. All my children were grown and gone until last year. Then, my wife had a new baby and holds me partially to blame. So, I had a son born the same month as two new grandchildren and he's an automatic uncle. This changed everything. We are living in a house built 1820 and had not been lived in since 1945, and are trying, to a degree, to keep it original. So, we had a pot-belly stove in one room, a wood cook stove, a Rumsford fireplace and a wood-fired bake oven in another. Now, with a little kid in the house, we can't use a lot of this stuff. Thus my attempt to have a good central wood-heating system. The new Hearthstone wood-stove is in a room that, so far, the new kid cannot get to. I built an an entire new room attached to the house just for the woodfurnace. This way the chimney does not pass through the house, and, it provides wood storage in the same room as the furnace. It works great in that way. I bring in ice and snow covered wood, and it's dry in a couple of days. The water gets steamed off the wood and helps keep the humidity level up in the house. That's the main reason why I did not want an outside woodburner - I now get the benefit of the radiant heat the furnace throws off, and I do not have to go outside when it needs to be loaded.
When I started this project, I was hoping someone else had it all figured out, and I'd just buy it. Seems that's not the case. Just about any woodburner can be run efficiently when run full-bore. Problems comes when you want to turn the fire down. That's the big improvement with the newer EPA woodstoves - you CAN turn them down and they still maintain a hot-enough fire to be efficient. I've been looking for the same technology in a wood-furnace, but so far, no good. One exception though - is a system that ONLY runs full bore. You hook it to a heat-storage system, like large tanks of water, and only fire it up once every couple of days. You control inside temperature with the hot water flow, and not the actual fire. I was almost going to build one, but then said the heck with it. I've gotta' have time to work on my tractors too. Furnaces get boring.

Follow Ups:

• Re: High efficiency wood-furnaces? VaTom 14:54:45 02/28/05 (0)

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