Help on how to get my pellet stove heat upstairs in my rancher

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conley

New Member
Hearth Supporter
Nov 12, 2008
1
Eastern Pa
I installed a pellet stove in my basement and am having trouble getting the heat to warm up the upstairs of my house. The basement (finished) is about 700 sq ft and the upstairs is about the same. The stove was rated for 1500 sq ft. When I have the stove on and get it to about 77 degrees downstairs I still do not feel anything coming up the vent into my upstairs living area. I have tried to use the central air fan to move the air but it actually seems to make the house colder and not bring that warm air up. Anyone have any sugguestions or help? thanks in advance
 
Hi conley,

If you search this forum you will find all kinds of disussions on stoves in the basement and moving the heat around. Some folks use fans to move the heat around, others find their house layout moves the heat naturally. The biggest thing to remember is you need to put the stove where you want the heat.
 
conley said:
I installed a pellet stove in my basement and am having trouble getting the heat to warm up the upstairs of my house......

As was mentioned above, I hope you put the stove in the basement because you wanted to heat that space mainly. Pellet stoves are basically space heaters.....you should place them where you want the heat.

As for the problem of getting the heat upstairs, what seems to be an easy task (let warm air rise up the stairwell), turns out to not work well in most cases. The heat just doesn't want to travel up stairwells.

If you had wanted the heat mainly upstairs, (and had room there), you should have put the stove there.
 
conley,
do you have a furnace with vents in the floors? If you do, you might as an experiment disconnect the heat ducts, and try to move them slightly to the side, and see if the heat will move up through the floor vents. We had a wood stove in our basement years ago, and we added a plenum above the stove and connected it to our furnace, the heat naturally flowed up to our floor vents. We also had a magic heat installed, we had a 2 story 5 bedroom saltbox with a full basement. Once we had our woodstove running fully, round the clock, the floors seemed to warm up nicely then,,,,,good luck
 
I have a similar situation and have found this worked quite well.

We leave the door to the upstairs open, at the other end of the house we had an old laundry shoot that we no longer used for that purpose. If we leave the laundry shoot open and the door to the upstairs open, the hot air goes up the stairs and the cold air down the old laundry shoot to the basement. (natural convection)

So far this seaon we running about a 4 degree temp. defference upstairs versus down stairs.
 
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