For those who heat with a woodstove

[Valerie Johnson]

We heat our home primarily with wood via a wood stove that sits in the opening of our fireplace, I have been researching different types/makes/brands/models/sizes/and blade numbers of heat powered fans that are designed to be placed on top of your wood stove and generate electricity via the wood stove to power the fan, Does anyone use one of these, As I mentioned we heat primarily with wood but our stove has a blower that pushes the hot air out into the room, I basically want to either eliminate the need for that blower or at least turn the blower speed down to reduce the noise it makes, I would like to be able to not use it at all and being non dependent on electricity for the blower would be handy for when we occasionally get power outages, We do have a backup generator but the fan blower is not on a circuit that is connected to the backup generator.

If you use one,what is the brand/model and are you happy with it and how long have you been using it.

Thanks in advance
Below is a pic of my wood stove and the other pic is a typical heat powered fan

[Paul Okarma]

I have a Wilkening Ultra Great insert.  Has a blower.  Does a great job.  It is not our primary heat source, but it is our supplemental heat.

http://www.wilkeningfireplace.com/

I keep the thermostats set at 64 - 65 at the highest in the winter.  The insert does a great job heating the downstairs for us.

It was recommended to me by someone in the HVAC industry that is on a car web site I frequent.  He has his in his finished basement.

There's a picture of our Wilkening in here.  Had it for 12 years.

http://forums.vwvortex.com/showthread.php?2231945-Fireplace-inserts-Recommendations

A neighbor has a Jotul that he likes.  I mentioned Jotul to a chimney guy that was here, and he likes them.

[Adam Hoagland]

[size=12]We have a small two-blade Ecofan brand fan that sits on top of our Kodiak box stove.  The prop is made from a single piece of sheet metal, probably aluminum.  Each prop is 4.5 in. long from hub to edge and 2 in. wide at its widest.  It's as you say -- the heat generates the electricity; there's no battery.  We haven't got any kind of built-in blower, but our stove isn't a fireplace style, like yours.  The stove itself sits on a metal pedestal, which is on a stonework built into the corner of our living room.  Unless it gets unusually cold, we heat the house with firewood exclusively, but the rest of the house never gets very warm from it.  I can't say that the little Ecofan does a whole lot -- it was given to us as a gift two or three years ago.  It's fairly quiet, but I can't feel any air movement from it, even when I'm fairly close to it.  Unless you want a conversation piece, I can't recommend it as a replacement for a built-in blower.[/size]

[Valerie Johnson]

Hi Paul,
We are more than happy with our current stove, We keep our thermostat set at 60 all winter long and the stove keeps our home quite warm, It is just that the blower is a bit noisy and considering that it is in the living room next to our TV it is distracting, We heat primarily with wood and except for down times when we are cleaning out the ash dump and bottom of stove then we will turn the heat up, we burn less than 100 gallons of fuel oil each year.

Adam,
From the research I have been doing there is quite a range in quality and efficiency of the fans depending on CFM and RPM and it also depends on the location you place them on the stove.

Thanks guys for the input

[Paul Okarma]

Nan doth protest when I set the thermostat to 60.  :)

Can you tell she's borrowed The Hollow Crown from the library and I've been listening to a bunch of Shakespeare plays?  BTW, they are very well done and I highly recommend watching it.

[Valerie Johnson]

We keep our thermostat on 60 however most of the time the house is in the 69-71 degree range, We have a large open loft just above the living room with an open balcony that looks down into the living room and it sometime gets up to 75-78 degrees up there from the heat rising, Our bedroom is at the far end of the house and upstairs and it stays pretty warm up there also, We do have a small gas fireplace in the corner of the bedroom which we use in the morning sometimes but as I said we are generally happy with the heat output and distribution of our wood stove and it is much more fuel efficient than when we just used the open fireplace or even when we had doors on the fireplace, My goals are to eliminate/reduce the noise from the squirrel cage blower on the back of the stove and for the rare times we lose power.

We have never watched The Hollow Crown, However we have been watching Poldark on PBS and love it. Some of my distant ancestors came from the area or Cornwall and a lot of the surnames in the series are names of ancestors and people from the small town in NJ that I grew up in so it makes it all the more interesting.

[Paul Okarma]

75?  78?  I'm unfamiliar with those numbers in the winter.   :)

Where in NJ?  We lived in Kingwood Township.  Named from King's Woods: woods claimed by the crown due to the very large, tall, straight trees for ship masts.

The Hollow Crown was very, very well done.

Nan just subscribed to Britain magazine.

http://www.britain-magazine.com/

She watched Poldark, too.  She'll watch anything Britain.  She's a big anglophile.

Now watching the three-part (I think) series by historian Lucy Worsley on Henry VIII's wives.  If you haven't seen it, check your local PBS On Demand.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0853mvq

Nan's wound Big Ben.  Very hard to get inside after 9/11, but she was able to.  ;)

[Herman Gagne]

The wood stoves produce heat by radiation; the hot air goes up to the ceiling, and then it pushes cold air around; this is pretty much a convection process, much like baseboard heaters.
The purpose of the fan is to accelerate this process, by mixing the hot air with the cold, so you don't have to wait so long to feel the heat at" ground level" ;).
I had an airtight for 25 years with a fan, and rarely ran the fan for more than 15 minutes.

[Valerie Johnson]

Paul,
We currently live in Pemberton Twp but I grew up in a very small town in Ocean County, The Town is West Creek(Eagleswood Twp), Family surnames include Johnson,Cox,Barber,Paul,Gordon,Cramer,Cramner,Rutter,Phips Clendenning, Leek,Kelly,Hazelton,Seaman and quite a few more.

The town has a very small population at under 1800 people

Yes we love PBS and some of BBC and Hallmark, we are tired the programming on most of the regular stations as they are either graphic violence or sex or have a political agenda.

Hi Herman
    We have ceiling fans that we set on reverse in the winter that help pull the warm air down but the way our stove is set a lot of the heat would be trapped in the back of the fireplace if we did not use the blower fan on the stove which pushes air around the heated firebox and out into the room, The fan has a rheostat control and I can turn it off or vary the speed but generally high speed is the position that pushes the most warmed air out into the room/home.