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I’ve dealt with a lot of headache with heating my home this year.. Someone recently gave me a wood stove and I’ve been thinking, “how could I heat the whole house with this wood stove?” I’ve seen some similar implantations to what I’m thinking but not exactly the same. I wanted to discuss it with you guys and get your input. From what I understand, wood stoves heat by convection and this is nearly useless for anything outside the room the stove resides. Plus, with the Way my house is, the only location for the stove in in the garage, so no venting the warm air into the existing AC. I want to use water instead to transfer the heat from the stove. I’m no engineer and I will probably never try this idea, but I still want to get some input. It’s fun to think about.I generally understand the concepts of how a boiler heating system functions. Water is heated in order to transport and distribute the heat in other areas. What if I coiled copper pipe around the stoves chimney pipe where water would circulate with a high temp pump. Then that heated water circulates to a secondary coil in the Central AC system to remove the heat and distribute it though out the house with the existing duct work and blower motor? The coil in the AC would be just like a regular HVAC evaporator coil or radiator without the valves and such.I could coil the copper around a regular 6 inch diameter stove pipe for wood stoves, and then use an 8 inch diameter stove pipe jacketed over that and then filled with vermiculite to insulate and make sure as much heat as possible is absorbed into the fluid. Pressure relief valves like the ones on hot water heaters could be used for safety.Microcontrollers or arduinos with sensors and relays could be used to turn on the pump and control its speed when a certain water temp is reached and then control when the fan kicks on and off at optimal temperature for maximum thermal exchange. They would control pump and fan speed so that everything stays as efficient as possible. This would automate everything so all that’s required is to build the fire and the system would turn off and on accordingly. I assume I could log all kinds of data such as temps from several points and vectors with various variables to determine optimal on and off settings for each system to optimize it as much as possible.I’ve seen people on YouTube use coiled copper on stove pipes to simply produce hot water with thermal siphoning, and I’ve seen videos of wood stove systems outside doing similar things, so I assume it’s possible, I’ve yet to find an example of exactly what I’m thinking, I’ve also seen commercial products for similar systems. I know that a simple wood stove isn’t going to effectively transfer the heat as well as an actual boiler or commercial system but I assume this could be compensated with the size of the coils used.There’s a limit to how much thermal energy is transferred per length of coil contacting the pipe because of the lower suboptimal temps in the pipe and thermal barriers, so I think that maybe these limitations could be compensated for by a long enough coil because that increases the time for thermal transfer. The pump could initially pump slow at lower temps to increase available transfer time and incrementally increase in speed as the temp of the water rises, and then as thermal energy is removed in the AC coil, the pump slows down as thermal energy is removed. This would make a balancing act of water speed in relation to overall water temps.I also understand that this will also cause the exhaust in the stove pipe to cool and potentially reduce draft as heat is removed. To prevent poor ventilation and carbon monoxide hazards, a variable speed booster fan could be put in the top part of the chimney(to prevent heat damage to the fan itself) that automatically increases in speed if a drop in draft is detected. This would be on a logic circuit to where it would only compensate draft if a high temp is detected in the stove in order to prevent the fan from running if there is no fire in the stove.What do you guys think? via /r/DIY http://ift.tt/2nebzp8

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