Harman Magnum Stoker - Hot Water Coil to heat baseboard?

Hello Beattle78, welcome to the forum. Look at the size of the water pipe/heat collector that goes into the magnum stoker. Then take a look at an actual hot water boiler meant to heat a house. You can see that there is a huge difference in the surface area that is available to transfer heat to the water.

You can get some heat, but not enough to heat a 1100 sqft house. A few forum members are heating a 100 sqft room or two using a loop in a stove.

Most people use the water loops to heat domestic hot water, where there is a storage tank that sits all night and stove is making heat all night, so the tank can recirculate the water over and over, while the stove is making a lot of heat. This small amount of heat over a long period of time with a storage tank works pretty good.

Baseboard needs to have a lot of hot water to work at all, so I don't believe you will be happy with what you described. There is just not enough heat collector area on the stove loop or coil.

Greg L.

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Hi again Beatle, What is your home's configuration? Stove is in the basement, but is the basement ceiling insulated or bare joists? Is there a central stairway for heat to migrate up to the main level or what method are you using to try to get the heat upstairs??

There are many, maybe over a dozen threads on this site about getting the heat from a stove to spread evenly through a house.

I'll give you the 'readers digest' version: Put a cold air return duct from the most distant floor in the upstairs, add a piece of either ductwork or even just 4" clothes dryer vent tubing from the floor vent to the INLET of the distribution fan in the Magnum stoker. This will result in a HUGE increase in heat upstairs.

A ducted furnace in a house has a cold air return duct that returns the cool air from the heated portion of the house, reheats the luke-warm air and sends it back out the hot air ducts. The recirculation is what makes the furnaces somewhat effecient.

With your Magnum pulling cold [~50*f] air off the basement floor and trying to heat it effectively to warm the upstairs is a very ineffecient way to try to heat your house. Provide a closed loop and you won't believe the difference.

I'll try to find some of the threads about this subject from last heating season and post links to them.

Hope this helps. Greg L

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Hi Beatle, think of each room or heated area as if it were a balloon, you want to fill it with hot air, but you can only fill the balloon so much. Once you provide a vent in the balloon for the air to get out, it lets in more hot air, more out, more hot air in.... and your room gets toasty warm

If your living room is over a garage, is the ceiling in the garage finished [drywall/sheetrock] and insulated?? If not, and the floor joists run the right way, use the area between two joists as the duct, just cover the bottom with sheet metal and insulate it. Or run some insulated vent pipe or hose across the garage ceiling to the far wall/floor of the living room. Hook this vent to the inlet of the distribution fan and you will get lots of heat into the living room.

Greg L

Hi beatle78, I think that location will work very well.

To give you an idea of how capable the Mag stoker is, Matthaus is using one to heat his shop. This is a concrete floor, 16-18' ceiling, about 25'x45' poorly insulated [at the time] room. At the time I was there [last February during THE storm] the Mag stoker was doing a very good job of keeping up with the weather, even though there were areas of ceiling insulation missing and venting to the outdoors!!

So once you get the air circulation moving the right way, you should be very happy with the heat output from the stoker.

If you hook up your hot water coil to your domestic hot water tank, it will greatly recuce your gas/electric/oil use for hot water, which is usually around $40-60 per month.

Greg L