Can a woodstove be connected to a furnace?

[Sharon Anne Leonard]

I would like to buy a woodstove for heating the house, but I don't really
understand how they work. Is the pipe from the woodstove supposed to be
connected to our furnace so that the heat travels evenly throughout the
house? Or is a woodstove only meant to heat the room that it is placed in?

Thanks!

Sharon

[Robert Hancock]

No, they just heat the room they're in - and maybe some of the adjacent
rooms through air circulation - but not the entire house. Maybe if you had a
huge-ass fireplace it might, like in the old days, but not a little
woodstove :-)

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from hanc...@nospamhome.com
Home Page: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Arcade/9967/

Sharon Anne Leonard <leon...@email.msn.com> wrote in message
news:#qb0uHcY#GA....@upnetnews02.moswest.msn.net...

[John Barry]

Sharon Anne Leonard <leon...@email.msn.com> wrote in article
<#qb0uHcY#GA....@upnetnews02.moswest.msn.net>...

> I would like to buy a woodstove for heating the house, but I don't really
> understand how they work. Is the pipe from the woodstove supposed to be
> connected to our furnace so that the heat travels evenly throughout the
> house? Or is a woodstove only meant to heat the room that it is placed
in?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Sharon

Hi, Sharon.
It depends. There are furnaces that are combination oil/wood, gas/wood.
Most simply, considering power outages, wood stove should be safely
installed at what you might call an adjacent low point. So heating effect
will readily circulate upward to the load, but not too far.
With a simple wood stove, the heating can be readily distributed with basic
fan- you need to move air in a loop, and without some help distant regions
of the loop can differ in temp notably.
Wood stoves heat continuously and more slowly than conventional furnaces,
and effective distribution can make the effect quite subtle, even in a
house like mine, with no insulation in the walls _yet_.
HTH,
John

[FNO Toolman]

You can extend your return air intake for your furnace to pull the warm
air from the room your woodstove is in. This works GREAT to spread the
heat more evenly throughout the house. You will however have to set the
fan switch on your thermostat to the "on" position and let the fan run
continuously to do any good.
You CAN NOT however run the chimney system from the woodstove
through the combustion exhaust system for your furnace. This will cause
all sorts of problems and is definitely a No-No! Keep the two
separated...
FNO Toolman
--
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Sharon Anne Leonard wrote in message

[Chris Matthaei]

In article <#qb0uHcY#GA....@upnetnews02.moswest.msn.net>, "Sharon Anne Leonard" <leon...@email.msn.com> wrote:
>I would like to buy a woodstove for heating the house, but I don't really
>understand how they work. Is the pipe from the woodstove supposed to be
>connected to our furnace so that the heat travels evenly throughout the
>house? Or is a woodstove only meant to heat the room that it is placed in?

The pipe coming out the top of a stove goes to the chimney. All the heat
from a wood stove comes off the actual stove body, and any part of the
chimney pipe that is exposed to the room air. They really only heat the
room that they're in. If you have forced air heat, you can set your
thermostat fan switch to "ON" to help circulate the heat to the rest of the
house. I have achieved marginal success with this method. For example, I
was able to keep the upstairs bedrooms near 70F when it was 30F outside
last night using only the woodstove for heat. The downstairs rooms were
more like 75F, and the family room, where the stove is located, was around
82F. The furnace registers and returns in my family room aren't very close
to the wood stove. I wonder if I relocated the return duct closer to the
stove, if I could get the heat to other parts of the house better? Hmmm, I
might try that.

Chris

[Sharon Anne Leonard]

Thanks for the information...it makes much more sense to me now. I guess
I'll have to go shopping for one!

Sharon

[Harold]

On Fri, 26 Feb 1999 20:43:26 GMT, "Robert Hancock" <hanc...@nospamhome.com>
wrote:

>No, they just heat the room they're in - and maybe some of the adjacent
>rooms through air circulation - but not the entire house. Maybe if you had a
>huge-ass fireplace it might, like in the old days, but not a little
>woodstove :-)

Hmmmm.... my little 22K BTU wood stove heats my 2900 sqft home just fine.
Takes a little while to get up there, but once it does, it maintains a temp of
70F upstairs and 75+ downstairs.

I wonder what I'm doing wrong?

[Greg Fretwell]

My niece has a wood stove that was made to connect to the ductwork. The
down side is the brown smoke stains that are on everything. No matter how
carefull you are about keeping the fire "clean", if you burn wood in the
house, you get smoke.
Greg

[Charles J. Gaffen]

My Godin used to do the same thing. When I used coal, sometimes the entire
house was too warm.
Chas