I have a woodstove (standing fireplace type with glass inserts) that has no efficiency equipment. Have any of you built your own plate or tubular heat exchangers to help you get more heat into the room instead of out the chimney? If so, are there do it yourself plans somewhere?

Thanks Todd O.

-- Todd Osborn (tosborn@cccglobal.com), October 20, 2000

Answers

I was about to ste up a day with a welder friend and do just that, when I checked on ebay and there is a guy with a bunch of them. He auctions them one at time and I got mine for about $35.00, and another 30.00 to ship (40 lbs. he says). It looks pretty impressive, I hope it works out. I'll let you know. The only other ones I have seen were from Harbor Freight or Northern or some such, and they were over a hundred dollars so I figure it's a deal. look under woodstoves on e-bay, he calls it "if you have a wood stove you need to see this". Let me know if you have trouble finding it.

-- Rod Perrino (redjouster@aol.com), October 20, 2000.

Not homemade but I would like one of the ovens you put in your stove pipe. Think if would be nice to bake in and am sure just for extra heat that usually goes up the pipe if you openned the door would help to heat a lot better too. Will be checking back to see if anyone comes up with something I could make. I am better with wood than metal as a material to build with so guess I would probabley have to buy instead of building. gail

-- gail missouri ozarks (gef123@hotmail.com), October 21, 2000.

There is a thread about 10 answers above this one kind of covers part of your question, I can say however that probably the simplest and most efficient ways of extracting heat from your stove is a very long flue inside the heated space of your house, you just have to make sure you dont get the flue temps too low or you have some pretty bad creosote problems and flue draw diffuculties.
With long flues and lower-than-usual flue temps you also have to watch out for sharp turns in your flue, it makes the above problems worse. I imagine turns of less than 30 degrees are okay though (hope so, thats the WAG I used when installing my stove).

Hope it helps a bit
Dave

-- Dave (Ak) (daveh@ecosse.net), October 22, 2000.