Freezing pipes seem to be going around in my family. It happened to my sister the week before Christmas, and not because a careless family member left an outside door open, which is how the pipes froze in my house.
No, in her case, it was caused by poor design.
My sister’s house is bigger and older and even draftier than mine. The oldest part, which contains the family room and two upstairs bedrooms, is built on a sill, which essentially means on the ground. The other half, with the living room and two other upstairs bedrooms is over a basement.
(The kitchen covers the back of the house, but it’s the newest section of the house and doesn’t figure into the story.) The living room and family room both have nice, big wood stoves.
Generally, the family room wood stove is the workhorse in my sister’s house, but since it was cold and windy, she had both stoves going all night.
And the thermostat is in the living room, so with both stoves going, the heat never came on in the rest of the house. And here’s a funny thing that happens at my sister’s house when the temperature plunges and the wind picks up: Air gets sucked in under the front porch and freezes the heating pipes under the family room part of the house. It’s happened at least twice before, she said.
Fortunately, my sister has a brother-in-law who is a plumber, electrician and general nice guy. He came over and thawed out the pipes, and then drilled a hole in the living room wall and moved the thermostat out of the room. (He also brought her a little present: a coffee mug that says “High maintenance doesn’t begin to describe it…” but that’s another story.) With the thermostat moved, my sister can make sure the whole house stays above 55, even with both stoves going, and not have to worry about the pipes.
Our thermostat is also in the room with the wood stove, but it’s on the farthest wall from the stove. We also have a full basement, so I don’t think we have to worry about the house freezing, but it stays significantly cooler in the rest of the house — especially the bedrooms upstairs — when the wood stove is blasting in the living room/kitchen. We’ve thought about mounting an oscillating electric fan on the wall behind the stove to push hot air out of the room. A friend who lives in a trailer down the road once installed a series of fans, lined up to move hot air from his wood stove around the main room of the trailer and then down the hall toward the back bedroom. He said it helped.
But fans are noisy, and part of the point of a wood stove is to generate heat without electricity. So we never got around to installing an electric fan.
But for Christmas, a friend gave us a gizmo we’d never heard of: an Ecofan, which sits on top of a wood stove and generates its own electricity to blow heat into the rest of the house.
The fan works on the Peltier-Seebeck principal, with a small thermoelectric generator that creates voltage from the temperature differential between the top and bottom of the fan. That means the fan blades spin quickly and constantly, just like an electric fan, but silently and with no power draw.
The design is simple — it’s maybe a foot high and five inches wide, a metal circle on a footed stand that supports three fan blades.
We got the fan on Tuesday, as we were celebrating a late Christmas dinner with our friend, and set it on the stove as soon as we opened it. Within five minutes the blades started turning.
My daughter claimed she could feel the difference at once, and was warmer on the far side of the room during our Scrabble game than she had been without the fan. My husband allowed that it was pretty, and a nice conversation piece, but wanted to reserve judgment on its effectiveness for a few days.
So we’re testing it out. Since we don’t keep thermometers around the house, our test will be entirely anecdotal: Does it feel warmer on the other side of the house or upstairs than it seemed before we had the fan? It seems like it’s got to help.
Do you heat with wood? Do you have a system for spreading the heat more evenly around your house? Send your tips and comments and I’ll share them with readers.
And thanks to all you readers who have been sending in comments and questions. I’ll dedicate a column soon to answering those questions.
Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and projects editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.
Have a question or a topic you’d like addressed on Greenpoint? Add a comment below, or email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.
