Please Help!! Hitzer 50-93

I have a 1400 cfm blower mounted to a plenum above stove, which puts the heat into ductwork. The blower operates thermostatically. When the ambient temperature around the stove is 85 degrees, the blower engages.

All well and good but how is your cold air return set up. Many posts on this issue.

There's two cold air returns at the far end of the house, which is the coolest. Is there a correlation between cold air returns and fuel consumption? I had no idea.

Well you have a big nut to crack in a cold part of the world. 2400' up x 3300 sq ft up in that part of the world. I would think you need every ounce of heat from the wonderful Hitzer beast and then some. Of course, it all depends on insulation hence the questions on how much wood. I hope you were not using last years balmy numbers. In order to have a hope of winning you need all that heat straight into a duct and then an efficient return. However, your mileage may vary.

Thanks for the tips. I really appreciate all the info. I would welcome all advice you all would like to give me.

What size is your ducting?

Ducts are 8"

cmk9180 wrote:I have a 1400 cfm blower mounted to a plenum above stove, which puts the heat into ductwork. The blower operates thermostatically. When the ambient temperature around the stove is 85 degrees, the blower engages.

At your vents upstairs have you checked to see what the temp loss is coming out, if it is going in at 85* what is it coming out at? 1400 cfm to me seems like a huge amount of air being moved. If you are moving to much air to fast you would need to run the stove hotter (using more coal) to maintain that comfort level up stairs. I suppose you had this plenum deal with the wood ? What temps did you run your wood stove? (stove temp)

Wood stove was a HotBlast. That thing made the whole house above 80. It was uncontrollable which is another reason I got rid of it. It was all or nothing with that thing. I'm just wondering if this isn't an ideal setup for this place.

You will notice a deafening silence from those that know as there are so many variables here you may need a heating engineer.

A good quality in line 8" duct fan can put out about 600-800 cfm. So I am a bit confused about your cfm calculations. Does this mean you have two separate 8" ducts each with an in line duct fan? Rather than double guess where you are let me tell you about my set up in the Lower Hudson Valley at elevation 330' in a land where the wind chills are modest. So my wind chill is much lower than yours (and that is a big deal) but I estimate my stove is heating about 3500sq ft and that is close but I do have a leakbox for a home. I am using an Anthraking stoker (110,000BTU) with roughly a 1000cfm+ fan which punches straight into ducting but the stove has an 20"x20" inlet. Leisure Line stoves advised me to use a 14" take off and that works very well. So our BTU outputs are close but somehow our duct sizes are not. Now I'm no heating engineer but I don't think you can get that much heat through that duct without a lot of noise, special fans and a really hot inlet temperature. So your Hotblast was 140,000BTU but more importantly had a 1100 CFM blower inline I presume.

This is my setup

Are you filling the stove up completely with coal???? should be filled to the top of the fire brick.



Eric

Plus totally filling the hopper

Maybe that's the problem. I just shake down and top off the hopper. I don't scoop in coal around the hopper.

cmk9180 wrote:Maybe that's the problem. I just shake down and top off the hopper. I don't scoop in coal around the hopper.

no that is all you have to do, just fill the hopper



Eric