Best Location
of Wood
Stoves
Placement of your wood stove is critical to overall heating success in your home. The
best location of wood stoves in a home might not be
where you want them for appearance reasons. Let's
take a look at two different scenarios:
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.
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