Best Location of Wood Stoves

Pre-Existing Wood Stove or Fireplace

Many older homes already have a chimney, fireplace or wood stove. A lot of people want to upgrade their selection and decide to purchase a new wood stove and simply replace the old with the new. And this works, however is your fireplace positioned for looks or is it positioned to provide heat in all the rooms of your home? How many rooms do you want this heat to flow too?

Placement of Wood Stove

1. Personally, you need to decide how many rooms you want heated first before you begin thinking about a wood stove, insert, etc.

Example: our new home is an open home from one side to the other. Our great room is located between our kitchen and dining area and a small recreation room. When we first moved in, the home had a zero clearance fireplace and it faced the great room.

The problem with this arrangement is we have a loft above the great room and it's open as well. The loft received the most heat and the great room was second. The kitchen, dining room, recreation room and the bedrooms opposite the great room stayed really cold during the winter.

Our solution was to knock out walls but not the support walls. We opened up that area and replaced the zero clearance with a Quadrafire wood stove. The qaudrafire wood stove is now located on the recreation side of the home and with a blower it will heat the rec room, hallway, dining room, great room, and loft. The wood stove now faces away from the great room.

The kitchen area stays a little colder than the rest of the home but when we are cooking it heats that room up well. What we have learned from living in two different homes is the fact that the heat will move in a home as long as there are no beams blocking it from moving into the next room. Heat rises and will flow into other rooms as long as there are no beams to block the heat.

For instance a bedroom door does not go all the way up to the ceiling therefore that wall between the ceiling and door frame will block the heat from moving into the bedroom. Yes, heat does make it inside but not nearly as well as the hallway.

Example #2

Our other home was a rambler sitting on one story. We had the wood stove in the family room and what we noticed was the heat would fill the family room, move into the dining room and kitchen. However, the heat did not travel into the hallway very well that lead to the bedrooms. Even though the wood stove faced that direction. The heat flow in that house was tied directly to where the outside air sucked the heat towards and that was our car garage that was attached to the home.

The moral of this story: Wood stoves are awesome heat sources and we heat our home entirely on wood heat. However, we also realize that some rooms will be colder than others. Wood heat is not nearly as good at moving the warm air to all rooms as a heat pump or central heating and air conditioning.

Take a serious look at your home and if you have an existing wood stove or fireplace determine if facing your stove a different direction will help heat more of the home. If your wood stove or fireplace already does a good job of heating the home; then don't move it, keep everything the same and just upgrade to a more efficient wood stove or fireplace insert.

Moving an existing chimney or stove pipe can be costly so try hard to figure out if you can make it work with the existing material.