Heat Exchanger for Woodstove, need critique

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I live in a 3 story house. Upstairs is front room & kitchen, middle floor is two bedrooms and bath, bottom is basement. We have a Jotul woodstove upstairs for our main heat. I tranfer heat to the middle floor with a ceiling fan over the stairwell. The basement (and the rest of the house when we're gone) is heated with an oil stove. However, the ceiling fan doesn't transfer enough heat down and the upper floor still tend to get too hot. I have an idea, will it work?

I'd like to build a stone enclosure around the side back and top of the wood stove and line the enclosure with copper tubing. Using water in the tubing and a pump, I'd try to extract heat and send it downstairs to be distributed from several radiators. I'm hoping the stone will buffer the heat the stove puts into the room (less heat over a longer period) and allow better heating of the water in the copper tubing. I could try to use a water coil in the fire box, but this won't help buffer the infra-red coming from the stove much.

Anyway, those of you that have experimented with this sort of stuff, so you think this will work? Any other ideas? Thanks.

-- Garth Morgan AK (gmorgan@gci.net), September 06, 2001


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