Wood Stoves & Heat Recovery

Windows

• Fresh air is important to keep a high level of air quality in your house. Normally, during the summer months you can simply open a window to obtain ventilation and fresh air. However, if you do this during the winter when you are running your wood stove, you will consistently lose heat energy out that window the entire time it is open. This means you're wasting fuel and lowering the overall efficiency of your stove. If you have a heat recovery unit you can attain fresh air without the heat loss.

How Heat Recovery Works

• Normally, when air from a wood stove leaves your home, such as when it travels up the chimney, it takes the heat with it, and that heat is gone forever. A heat recovery unit operates on a different principle. These units are designed to transfer the heat from the air inside your house to the air coming in. This means that fresh air comes in, stale air goes out and the heat, in effect, stays right where it always was.

Heat Savings

• The amount of heat that your heat recovery exchanger can preserve from the wood stove is significant. Different heat recovery units operate at differing levels of efficiency, but in a good quality unit as little as 15 percent of the heat in the stale air being expelled from the house could be lost. The rest will return to the home in the form of warm, fresh air being exchanged through the device.

Additional Ducting

• Normally, heat recovery systems work as part of a forced air furnace system. The fresh air is then mixed through the house through the same ducts that the furnace uses. If you use a wood stove as a primary source of heat, then you may need to have ducts installed in the home to push fresh air through that is provided by the heat recovery system. These ducts are usually installed outside, so the addition of a heat recovery system requires little construction within the house itself.