Most effective means of moving hot air?

[jmeeter]

What is the best way to move hot air? Would it be blowing air across the heat source (ex: wood stove) or suck the air away from the heat source?

I use a wood stove to heat my home which works perfectly, but it occasionally gets too hot in the living room (where the wood stove is). I want to disperse some of this excess heat into the other rooms.

 

[FredGarvin]

Best way in terms of what? If you have already made the heat, then pretty much it stands to reason that a fan is really all you need, right? Are you possibly thinking of something else? It would help to know the layout of your home to find out just what is involved with moving air from one room to another.

 

[jmeeter]

What I want to know is, is it better to blow the air across the wood stove or suck it away from the stove?

 

[darkwood]

Whichever way you do this you will effect the way the stove burns, your best bet (although it not my area so just an educated guess) would be to fit some kind of heat exchanger over the stove then have contained airflow through it vented into rooms or closed system like radiators piped through, this way the waste heat is used to heat the rest of the house and the burn rate of the stove dosn't change.

 

[FredGarvin]

Actually, the best way is to have it in the basement and allow convection to do it's thing. I can't remember what those older systems were called that did this.

IMO it is better to draw the hot air from the stove and duct it somewhere. Simply blowing over a hot surface does not allow the air a lot of residency time to pick up the heat.

 

[russ_watters]

What I want to know is, is it better to blow the air across the wood stove or suck it away from the stove?

For reasons of heat transfer and avoiding overheating the fan, it is better to push air across the stove.