A few days ago I got a call from a gentleman on the east coast who was concerned about his stove working correctly. The specifications on the stove said it should heat a 2200 square foot house. His house was under 1900 square feet and his stove was not heating the whole area. Perhaps you have experienced something similar; you were told your pellet stove would heat your whole house only to find that your bedroom was freezing.
My house is around 2500 square feet and my pellet stove will heat most of the house. I’ve found a few things that help out a lot with getting the heat from the stove to the rest of the house as my house is a long rectangular shape.
Keep a wall thermostat in the middle of the house. That will give you a good balance to know what will be comfortable for the rest of the house. I’ve found that when my wall thermostat is at 70 degrees, most of the rest of the house is at a good temperature.
Install ceiling fans or other fans in all major rooms of the house. This makes a huge difference. In the rooms furthest away from the stove I supplement the heat with oil heaters. These are a cheap, efficient heat source you can buy at any Wal-Mart. Since heat from these heaters rises straight up you really need a fan to move the air around the room. In the rooms closest to the stove this really helps to keep the temperature close to the same.
This is a golden nugget. Last year I started playing around with a small floor fan. In the morning the sunshine cast good light on my pellet stove and I can see the shadow of the heat radiating off the stove. While the stoves blower puts air out into the room, I noticed that the whole stove radiates heat and that heat is just rising up to the ceiling.
I experimented with pointing my small floor fan at different points of the pellet stove to see if I could circulate the air a bit better around the room. I was surprised to find that the room heated up significantly faster when I blew air back behind the pellet stove.
If you have a free standing pellet or gas stove you can try this too. Take a small floor fan and position it to the right or left of your stove with the air blowing behind the stove. I’m sure there is an engineering principle here that is over my head. All I know is it works in my house and might work for you too.
