Moving heat in a ranch home - fancy sketch attached

[JeffHK454]

Hey All, I figured I might find answers here....my husband and I recently bought our first home. With winter fast approaching, in November we purchased a QuadraFire 5100, we had in installed in our fireplace in the far end of our ranch home that's 2,025 SF per floor, it's very long. Unfortunately with the stove being on the very end of the home, the heat does.not travel into the long hallway or bedrooms, it's very chilly in the rest of the house. We've tried everything,using the ac fan and even when the ducts warm up it doesn't carry heat in the rooms. We put electric baseboard heaters in the basement to help with the cold air in the basement, tried putting a fan in the hallway to move the hot air. The only things left to try are installing a ceiling fan in the living room and trying one of those self powered fans on the stove...any suggestions on how to get the heat to the other end of the house? I'm tired of waking up freezing. Thank you all for your help.

Best advice is ...learn to love it.

When you're heating with a insert/free standing stove it's always hot as hell right up next to it and cold at the other end of the house. I grew up in a house heated with a Buck stove , winter ment 80° in the family room where the burner was and 60° in my room at the other end of the house. We ran box fans and my dad even cut vents in the walls up by the ceiling trying to distribute the heat around.

I knew when I got my own place I'd be heating with wood and it would be with forced air.

 

[Kellbell]

Thank you, I'm trying to learn to love it but the wood, even when choked down, doesn't last long and yes ours 75-80 in the living room and 60 in the bedroom, but the bathroom well it's in the 50s, nothing like sitting on a freezing cold seat in the morning lol. I am hoping the ceiling fan will help significantly but I'm not so sure, the ducts didn't so squat so do I invest in a heat powered fan too? What do you think?

 

[muddstopper]

I dont have a answer for either the op question or for this newer question. My situation is different. I have my wood stove in my drive in basement. I have a vent in the floor above the stove that lets heat into the main floor. My basement is completely open and to move heat around I have a little sq window fan setting in one corner. The fan blows the air down one wall and pretty much keeps the heat in the basement uniform. My wood stove is not connected to the duct work of my heat pump. I am currently renovating my 1 car unheated garage into a heated living space. Moving warm air out to the garage poses a couple of problems but My solutions might provide some insite as how to get the air moving in the other situation. My renovations are not complete so this is more of what I plan to do than what I have actually done. To provide heat and air to the garage, my current duct work runs down the middle of my basement ceiling. The trunk line ends about 8 feet from the wall that connect to my garage. I cant just connect ducts to the trunk line at the end or there would be no back pressure to force the air into the other rooms. To get around this, I will be extending the trunk line all the way to the wall. I will attach my duct work for the garage to this trunk line extension but not at the very end where I would loose all back pressure. I am also going to install a thermostaticly controlled baffel in this trunk line extension so if I dont want to heat or cool that portion of the house, I can just shut down the trunkline extension so no air goes to the garage. Getting heat/air to the garage solved, almost. If you have air pushing into the room, you also have to have a way to get air back to the heat pump, otherwise the air will be static and wont move. To solve this, I am going to be cutting in a return air vent in the ceiling. This ductline will run thru the acttic to to the area just above my current return air vent. Not perfect, but its either that or try to cut and duct another return thru the basement ceiling and the floor band the house sets on. This little bit of work I am doing myself and the total cost will be about $150-$200. The big difference in the improved property valve of the house. Currently the unheated garage is treated as unheated space and is valued at around $25sqft. Once the heat/air is added, sqft value jumps to about $100 sqft. This is about a $20,000 increase in property value, not a bad return on investment. The reason I mention this is because if you have a room that the temps arent to your liking, adding a vent in the ceiling and running 6in flex duct isnt that expensive and is very easy to do yourself. Add a duct fan and you can move air from one end of the house to the other. Now if I had a fireplace or stove at one end of the house, I probably wouldnt place a vent directly over it as it could draw smoke from the fireplace, but you should be able to locate a ceiling vent somewhere in that room and send some of that heat to the other end of the house.

 

[blades]

Duct work in basement seldom works as all the heat is lost to the ducks down there. ceiling fans an a some small fans to push cold to stove room will get you further. cold pushing fan about the size of computer ones work best most others like a small box fan are too big and block more than they help. as you pull cold from those rooms warm air will filter back in to even out the created negative pressure.

 

[muddstopper]

blades, Just need you to clarify for me. What you are saying to do with the small fans is to set them up so that they pull the cold air out of the cold room, instead of trying to push warm air into the cold room. I am not a hvac person, but what you say does seem to make some sense, altho, I dont think it applies to my situation, since all heat to my garage will be supplied by current heat pump.

 

[john taliaferro]

We pump cold air out of the back bedroom to the basement which forces cold air up the stairs in the stove room at the other end of the house . Stove hot air goes down the hall turning the thermostat off then to the bedroom it's 2 maybe 3 degrees cooler 50 ' back in the back rooms .

 

[CountryRhodes]

Thank you, I'm trying to learn to love it but the wood, even when choked down, doesn't last long and yes ours 75-80 in the living room and 60 in the bedroom, but the bathroom well it's in the 50s, nothing like sitting on a freezing cold seat in the morning lol. I am hoping the ceiling fan will help significantly but I'm not so sure, the ducts didn't so squat so do I invest in a heat powered fan too? What do you think?

Kellbell, I have a similar situation to yours, albeit a smaller ranch house. My wood stove is against one end wall in the living room, and our bedrooms are at the opposite end. There are 3 things I did to even out the heat in my house, and one thing that I didn't do but you might need to:

1- My living room (stove room) was only open to the rest of the house by one 3' wide door opening. I removed a large portion of the wall, opening the living room to the dining room/kitchen area, facilitating better passive heat transfer to those rooms. (I'm not taking responsibility if you screw up the structural integrity of your house, that's on you to figure out.)

2- I installed a ceiling fan near the stove. When it is running in "reverse" (blowing air up), it noticeably raises the temp towards the far end of the house.

3- I cut a floor vent in the back corner of the far end bedroom, and attached 4 feet of ducting to it with a 150cfm squirrel cage blower similar to this: (http://electricmotorwarehouse.com/d...6Yut5P87pZdaIaAsiy8P8HAQ#sthash.uYuqqZKC.dpbs). The blower is positioned to "suck" air down through the vent in the cold bedroom and just blow it out into the basement. Then, I cut two floor vents in the living room on either side of the wood stove. These are just holes in the floor with decorative grates in them. The cold air from the bedroom is pulled down by the blower, moved through the basement, and comes up through these vents next to the stove, creating a circuit that works very well and is MUCH easier to install than a maze of ductwork through an attic. As has been said before on this site, it is much easier to move cold air than hot air.

The one thing that I didn't need to change, but you might, is attic insulation. It is futile to try to move heat through your house if it is escaping through 50-year old attic insulation. Look into the blown-in stuff that you can rent a machine and do yourself; it takes a while and costs money, but you knew that owning a 2000-square-foot-per-floor house wasn't going to be cheap, right?!?

 

[mga]

we draw cold air from the furthest room (I cut a small return in the wall near the floor) and use 4" pvc piping connected to an in-line blower in the basement and that is fed into the heatilator of the fireplace.

the bedroom stays at about 68 to 70 and the air temp coming out of the heatilator is usually 150+ degrees. this helps keeping the main room to about 82 and comfortable. the theory is as stated above: it's easier to move cold air than hot air. also, this creates a negative air pressure in the back room, thereby drawing the warm air down the hallway into that room to replace the cold air being removed.

blower is something like this one:

 

[muddstopper]

I dont know if all these new replies are helping the person that brought this thread back to the top, but You all are giving me some good ideals. I currently just put my house on the market with intentions of building a new, much smaller house on the old home place. The new house will be much more energy efficient than the one I am currently living in. One thing I do plan on having is a heat pump as well as some sort of wood stove. I installed a new heat pump in my current house a couple of years ago.It does a much better job of keeping the temps even and is a lot more efficient than the old 1984 model that was used back when this house was built. The uneven heating using a wood stove is something I have noticed in just about every house I have ever been in. Always toasty next to the stove, but not so much in the back of the house. It would seem some of the suggestion made are pretty affordable and should be very easily incorporated in a new build. Mu current problem, and the reason I plan on taking my returns thru the attic is my floor truss design. Since my floor joist are all 2x10,s and run perpendicular to the direction I need to run duct work, to go thru my basement would mean dropping the ducting below the floor joist. Its pretty cluttered down there already. Going thru the attic is pretty easy, Just cut in the vents and run the duct over top the ceiling joist and connect the two ends. All duct work is out of site and out of mind.

Using a wood stove to heat with, and some of the ducting methods that have been proposed, It should be possible to connect a thermostat to a small blower for each room. rooms that are not being used, just set the thermostat down so the blowers dont come on. Since with my current wood heat/heat pump combination, my heat pump doesnt ever kick on, the extra duct work and fans should just circulate the air from room to room and make heating much more even. I plan on doing a little more research on this, but I like the ideals already given.

 

[Sandhill Crane]

Wood stoves are for the most part room heaters, not really whole house heaters.
We use a ground source heat pump for heat/air conditioning, and supplement 80% with a free standing wood stove.
In our home air and light movement is aided by various capped walls, wall cut-outs or penetrations in dividing walls, and a shallow cathedral ceiling in a large portion of the house. There are also three ceiling fans. One mostly isolated is in the bedroom but still aides in making a difference verses not using it. The other two are diagonally in opposite corners of the house, one operating in reverse flow of the other, or one pulling the air up, the other pushing that air down. By morning the stove is all but out and the heat pump is circulating/balancing the heat/air throughout the house/bathrooms in the early mornings.
We have also found more even heat, and more complete burns, from the wood stove if we load the stove half full or less, and burn wide open until the coals settle considerably before reloading.

None of that probable helps balance the heat in your situation, so the thing to do may be to move your bed into the living room for the winter months, and get a space heater for the bathroom.