[Greenbuilding] Oversized wood stove // was: H2k and NZE home modelling

Reuben Deumling 9watts at gmail.com
Thu Jan 27 10:46:40 CST 2011


I'd be curious to learn a bit more about this. While I can appreciate the
possibility--at the extreme--of a mismatched stove and house pair in terms
of heat output and airtightness, in practice I wonder what this over-sizing
would look like?
The reason I ask is that in my experience so far as I tighten up my small
house but continue to use the same woodstove I find I just burn a fire for
shorter periods of time. I've gone from an average fire duration per day in
January from ten hours (no insulation in walls or under the floor, brick
chimney with poor draft, wood that was less dry than I had expected) to just
under three hours (having learned how to burn a hotter fire with perfectly
dry wood, a metalbestos flue, years of careful record keeping, as well as
now complete insulation within the given parameters of the walls, joists,
and attic). I've also figured out how to make a fire that only lasts 50
minutes and adds about 4-5 degrees F to the rooms further from the stove,
which suggests to me that I'll be able to make this woodstove work when I've
completed my Larsen Truss/R-40 walls and the rest of it (someday).
Or am I missing something? Is there a stove size (however this is measured)
that is particularly well suited to tuning along this scale? Was I just
lucky?

Reuben Deumling

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 4:11 AM, John Straube <jfstraube at gmail.com> wrote:

> Over-sized wood stoves in ultra low houses are a real issue as Mr Orr
> pointed out.
> Great solution Ross since it also solves the hotwater problem, but not
> cheap.  I have seen numerous homes/retrofits in my area lately go with the
> small pellet stoves (like the one from Regency or QuadraFire) or inserts
> which have good controlled combustion and small output.
>


> Even with their 12 kBtu/hr output when running clean on low, they need to
> be cycled off/on in not really cold weather
>
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