Heating Back Rooms

Homesteading & Country Living Forum

Help Support Homesteading & Country Living Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Caribou

Caribou

Time traveler
Neighbor
HCL Supporter
Joined
Dec 3, 2017
Messages
10,320
Location
Alaska
If you have a heat source in one end of the house it may be hard to move that heat to the other end. A fan may do the trick but things like bedroom doors will block that heat. Every corner slows the flow as does distance.

If you look at the design for a forced air heating system, you have a fan pushing into a heating duct. Then you have a return duct coming back to the fan. This causes a negative pressure on the return side and a positive pressure on the supply side.

Think of a garbage truck. You dump the trash in the hopper and the machinery compacts the trash until the truck fills up. Open the back of the truck and you can put trash in the hopper all day long. A fan may do the trick in a smaller home, or one with a straight shot down a short hallway with open doors.

Upper floors can can sometimes be heated with a vent in the floor/ceiling, far from the stairway where the stairway acts as the return duct. The cold air will fall down the stairs while the hot air naturally rises through the vent. The size of the vent controls the heat flow.

What are your tricks for heating distant areas?
 
Our add on is 25 ft by 25 ft, and we just put in it's on split unit. Heat and a/c
Couldn't overtax our existing a/c on our main floor. And it would of been difficult to hook up to our heating on the main floor. Our woodburning stove is in the kitchen, so not even near it.
We don't have heat or air on the second floor. Just use portables for both when we need it. One room upstairs has the pipe from the woodburning stove, so that room heats when the stove is burning.
 
We have one spare bedroom that we use only for storage. We don't heat it but it stays above freezing.
I use ceiling fans to circulate the air all year round.
I have found box fans are not that efficient moving heated air into a room. You need a way for the air to exit the room. It's like tossing a bucket over the side of an anchored boat. If their isn't a hole in the bottom the bucket will just drift around. Cut a hole in the bottom and the bucket will immediately pull your boat down current.
 
This is a good question, our house is mainly on 1 floor, but there is a partially finished basement that has minimal ducting, it generally runs about 5 degrees cooler than the main floor. On the main floor the rooms on the south side of the house pick up a lot of heat due to direct sun, in the winter we open the curtains in the day time and close them at night. In the summer we just keep the curtains pulled, unused rooms on the south side are kept closed in the summer, but we open them in daytime during the winter to provide some extra light and solar heat gain.

I have 2 tower fans that are low wattage to move heat from the living room's wood stove to the bedrooms if needed.
 
My place heated with fire places then coal fired convection heat when ducts in the floor were added to let cool air return to the basement. Latter the convection was replaced with forced air furnace.

I latter converted to HVAC and ran ducts to all rooms through the walls to deliver heat and AC. Worked fine in the winter because bedrooms upstairs stayed cozy. But in summer the heat stayed upstairs while the rest of the house was cool.

This year i ran a 10" duct to the second floor and it now sucks up the hot air and routes itback to the air handler in the basement.

Ben
 
When I put heat and air in my shop and garage I used a heat pump with a mini-split system. Both are well insulated and stay at the temperature set. The cost is very low and I am considering a multi-split system for my next house. Each room will have its own head and thermostat. There will be rooms that are not heated or cooled that will rely on the rest of the house to maintain appropriate temps. Pantry, closets, and the like don't need to be heated to living temps and will remain cool in the summer.
 
We have a three story cabin with an out room on the ground floor. The wood stove heats the main floor and the design of the staircases to the upstairs and the basement, plus the grates strategically located on the floors allow heat from the wood stove to warm the basement (yes, it does) and heat the upstairs. The out room on the main floor which is a bathroom is a different story. We leave the door open and unobstructed, plus have vents in the floor to the basement. We have a toyostove in the basement set a 52 degrees to make sure nothing freezes while we are away. We also beefed up the insulation on the outside of the bathroom this summer.

We have always winterized the house converting it to what is called a dry cabin each winter, meaning that we have no running water. We would bath and wash clothes from buckets, etc. With this summers projects to address this issue, we hope we are successful having water year round. We have not known this luxury for the previous 7 winters! The true test will be the Jan - Feb high winds and cold where we will be at -50 plus below zero F. for multiple days in a row.
 
My wood stove is in the living room on the first floor, if the warmth fails to work it's way to the upstairs I plan to put a small, quiet fan, similar to a bathroom exhaust fan, at the top of the wall in the vaulted ceiling and use that to bring warm up to the second story of the house. I think I will be OK, but this winter will be the test now that the house is fully drywalled, in previous years I just cut a hole in the plastic sheeting I put up trying to keep the heat on the lower level.
If you have room to run the 4" flexible duct work you could use this same type of fan to either move the warm air to the cold area, or move the cold air from the floor area of the back room to the ceiling area of the warm room.
 
We have a story and a half. Kitchen/living room is mostly one big room. Vaulted ceiling to our bedroom. Easy to heat, harder to cool. Built in stove in the living room that has a built in fan that pushes the air thru the rest of the house well. Ceiling fans work well too. Our downstairs bed and batch are around a corner and down a hall. They are on the north side of the house and stay much cooler year round.
 
South facing windows could help, central ducts with a fan to rotate air.
 
My bathroom used to be a bedroom, upstairs and on the north end of the house. What was the bathroom became a closet and the laundry area in the former bedroom, now bathroom. The bathroom is always cold in the winter. When I tiled the bathroom, I wanted to do heated floors and got talked out of it. I have a couple space heaters that I start before I get ready to shower. I get up, let the room heat up a while, and then shower. I know not to leave space heaters running because I know of houses that burned because of them.

Both sets of grandparents had upstairs rooms in their homes which were not heated. When we were with either of them, the door upstairs would get opened at bedtime and that was all the heat that was allowed up there. The last time I stayed with my favorite Grandma, I knew this and told her I would be okay sleeping on the couch. She insisted I sleep upstairs. The next morning she told me the furnace ran all night and she was concerned about fuel for her furnace (delivered to a tank in her yard). I again told her that I would be happy to sleep on the couch if she didn't mind. She agreed.
 
Hydronic heat may be another option, especially if you heat with a wood burner, some kind of a heat to water unit to set on the wood stove and a small circulation pump to get the heat where you want it, or if you really got at it you could set up a thermosyphon system
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top