Heating a house....

jimjimjimmy said
the problem i found with a wood stove it is either to hot or to cold i have a new yorker wood boiler in my house that also heats my domestic water just set the stat and keep the wood to it nice even heat that dosent dry the air to much

The pellet stove that I linked to does have a t-stat. It also self controls its heat output, the further you are form the set temp the more it will produce. Also self cleans, so no pot scraping is necessary.

12valve said
I recently added a 1200 sq ft addition over my garage and had a company come in and spray foam insulate it. I have a natural gas fired boiler with in floor radiant heat. I went from 2300 to 3500 sq ft and spray foamed all of the open walls. My heating bill has been within $5 of the previous year since the addition. While the spray foam wasn't cheap, not having to upgrade my boiler saved about half of the cost of the insulation.

Jason

Last I looked there was only one contractor that spray foamed around the Spokane area. There is getting raped......and then what he charges. To come in and just spray the underside of our roof, the building is 42x40, he wanted somewhere in the neighbor hood of 14k. The building we are in now has radiant heat in the floor. However, everything that could have been done wrong was and couple it with we do not have NG out here, only propane we don't bother with it. I am thinking about running tubing in the floor of the new place, just in case. Also thinking that we very well might look into an outdoor wood boiler at some point.

67Dart273 said
Doug especially out where you're at, I'd seriously want something "for backup." If nothing else, consider an LP room heater or "through the wall" and get one with a so called millivolt system (self powered) so it can operate if the power is out.

I would think if you have a large enough pellet unit, sized for the house, maybe consider putting a floor grill in above it, etc, you could do OK

Frankly, in my opinion, you'd do better if you had a separate heater, whatever the fuel, for both basement and main floor.

Let's say you had two pellet units, and either 12V backup or just a generator. Even if one unit quits, or if you lose power, you can still have some heat.

The pellet stove that I linked to is can be ran off of a car battery. We also have a generator from the Spud launching days, needed the generator to run a small compressor to fill the Spud gun with air.

Our pellet stove has one of the highest btu outputs. We have a second one now because of how poorly this building is insulated....and just in case the Quadrafire acts up. The stove is a multifuel unit. Takes a very hot ignitor to light corn pellets. Because of this the original style ignitors burn up pretty quickly. Quadrafire came out with a lower wattage unit that is just for lighting wood pellets. I have a couple of these as spares. They also came out with a new burn pot, one that was designed around the lower wattage ignitor.

We have looked at a few small LP in wall heaters. We have a couple of Parrots that need to be kept warm.

We will more than likely put a pellet stove in on the second floor as well. With Ernie's health problems it does not take much for her to get cold. Would just like to only have to run one stove if we can.

ramcharger said
Franklin stove.

Fireplaces pull almost as much heat out as they provide and they'll burn anything.

Guessing you mean a wood burning stove? This is also what we are thinking about. Like the simplicity of them over a pellet stove, the pellet stove has an electronic ignition and 2 blowers that can fail.