Transoms away

Another pellet stove update, this is. Pellet stoves are not magic, they are merely producers of energy that cause the molecules in the air to fly around faster. That 'hot air' doesn't know where you'd like it to go, it just follows the laws of physics. And such it was with our house. The front room, where the stove is located was toasty but the very next room, the dining room, was not toasty. While temperatures up front could be almost 70 the dining room didn't break 60. Naturally this mystified me and I wondered if the stove just wasn't very powerful. Remember that I purchased the cheapest new pellet stove on the market and so my first thoughts tend to be negative.

I was wrong however. A little web browsing brings a host of site/forums/blogs on how to move around the heat produced by wood stoves. I thought that was interesting. Wood stoves certainly pack a heating punch but apparently folks had some of the same troubles as I did. So I've made two alterations at the moment.

(1) I put up a plastic curtain along the stairwell which is next to the stove. My thought was that the heat was drifting upstairs to the largely unoccupied rooms instead of heating the downstairs (largely occupied). The curtain did cool the upstairs, though not as much as you'd think. Its got me wondering about sectioning off the upstairs in the future to keep it cooler and keep those energetic molecules where I want them.

(2) I cut out the transom. The transom, as you'll see in the pictures below, is the mini wall above a door frame. Ours was pretty considerable, probably 16 or more inches (I don't feel like getting up to measure) and it turns out these things act like dams to hot air, much in the same way you can create a dam for water.

Above: from the living room. The cuts you see were exploratory to see if there was still plaster on these walls (some of the walls in the house don't have it anymore) and there was....yuck.

Above:Seen from the kitchen. Below: the paneling and plaster removed.

Below: Starting on the dining room side. There was a mixture of sheetrock and plaster and of course the usual layers of wallpaper. The trouble here is that the lathe runs the length of the wall and so it gets a little messy.

Below: All hollowed out. What you can't see are the jagged wooden edges of lathe that I had to snap off (because I don't have time to demo the rest of the wall...yet)

Below: The fan is in which seems to work well, though the air moves much better even without it. Eventually (someday...sometime) when the house is in the finishing stage it'll get framed in nicely.

The wall with the picture montage above the desk piled up with books is my next target. That wall forms part of a corner of the living room and if it wasn't there (or if part of it wasn't) then you could see the stove. The idea is that taking that wall down to a half wall and the other adjoining wall (forming the short hall to the living room) would further increase the flow of hot air.