[Stoves] Chimney vs. High Efficiency Fans.

[Kyle Thompson]

In response to  "Kevin Chisholm" <kchisholm at ca.inter.net>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] High Efficiency fans.

Please forgive my lack of technical terms as they apply to thermodynamics:
 
1) OK, first, I just like building fires.
2) Chimneys cost money also.
3) If chimneys are so great, why hasn't everyone built them on their own?
4) It is hard to carry a 4 foot chimney on my back when camping.
5)  HAD only goes so far.
 
I grew up cooking and heating with a wood stove.  It was our primary heat and secondary cooking stove.
A chimney does not provide near the efficiency of a fan(s) assisted stove.  Heat is wasted raising the gases out the chimney.  I used to long for a good system of fan(s) to redistribute the heat from the stove and improve the efficiency of warming our house.
 
Here in Wisconsin we make 20,000 boiler systems a year that aren't even 50 percent efficient and contribute a ton of air pollution.  Basically you load the thing up with logs and let it simmer until heat is needed.  It is very, very smokey when not burning full blast.
So for the person using it, the chimney is great, if the wind is blowing up and away, the person is not in a valley with stagnant air ect .and so forth.
 
On driving accross the midwest in winter of th USA you will go into several Valleys that it is hard to breath in.  It is not from car or industrial pollution.  It is from people burning wood with chimneys inefficiently.  If they used better designed wood stoves the air pollution would be reduced greatly... at least at first, until more people use stoves as a result of higher efficiency... I think it might be a Catch-22
 
If you live in Canada 10 kilometers from your next neighbor in a river of tress then the smoke should be diluted enough not to bother others, and efficiency isn't on your mind.  Having cut wood growing up though, a 25-50% improvement in efficiency would have interested me.  I could have spent half as much time cutting and splitting wood.  
 
The other thing about gasifiying stoves that I'm trying to "push" and maybe someone at stove camp could look into this:  If they operate above specific temperature  they break down thing such as dioxins.  I just stepped right outside of my comport zone on that one.  In Minnesota you are not allowed to burn trash because it is a pollutant...  but if you gasifiy it, it should greatly reduce the toxins coming off?  Which is all politics anyway, because they want to burn their food in the form of ethanol and burn their chicken droppings instead of recycling them.
 
A fan to assist in burning fuel may not be "expensive" at all if you burn 1/2 the amount of fuel you normally would, and fuel is very expensive.  Example:  when gas if $4.00 a gallon, a new car that doubles your gas mileage starts to look attractive.  At $2.00 a gallon driving a $1000.00 beater that gets 15 miles to the gallon saves $$$ over a $25,000.00 car that gets 50 mpg  (I don't know the kpg's....)
 
A stove design that can use a fan assist or without a fan assist makes the most since to me, with a chimney.


 
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