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Outdoor wood furnaces - the good, the bad, and the ugly

January 26th, 2007 at 11:02 pm

Ahh, apparently it's a homemade outdoor wood furnace. Smile

We have a central heat and air unit that also can function as a heat pump. We don't use the heat pump function as it just doesn't seem to warm up the house. The air that comes from the vents is simply cold air. So instead we use the central heat to heat the house. Now, part of the house is about 55 years old and not well insulated. Another part, added later, is pretty well insulated but still stays cold.

Even if we turn the thermostat up to 72 the house is pretty cool. We usually keep it down, though, and just wear layers when we need them. But we're looking into other methods of heating as a $250 to $300 electric bill (specially when the house stays cool) is just ridiculous! We've thought about putting a fireplace in the living room but don't really have room for that.

So, to the point...

DH went to play guitar with a guy last night who built a very interesting heating contraption for his house. He's a welder and he put together this huge heavy gauge steel cylindrical tank which sits outside the house. In it is another cylinder in which a fire is built with whatever kind of wood he can find. There's a smoke stack going up about 15 feet and the heat is piped, via insulated pipe into one room of the house. There was just a small fire in the contraption last night and DH and the guys were playing two rooms away and he said they had to open the front door after awhile to let some cool air in because the place was burning up!

We're going to talk to the man to find out what it would cost to build us one of those. Have any of you heard of one of these? If so, do you know what it's called and do you know much about them?

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