!44: What Everybody Ought To Know About Barrell Wood Stoves

!±8± What Everybody Ought To Know About Barrell Wood Stoves

The long and freezing winter months will be a much more enjoyable experience, not to mention less stressful, if you have a reliable heating system at home. While many folks are lucky enough to have central heating fuelled with oil, gas, or electricity, these however are expensive to use and with oil prices at their all-time high, many homeowners today are looking for ways to cut down on heating bills. One of these affordable alternatives includes the barrel wood stoves. To start with, a barrel wood stove kit can be purchased below 0 and the parts that you have to supply on your own around 0.

Typical barrel stoves are actually parts of a kit which include legs for the barrel, a cast iron hinged door for the body, a flange joint to attach the stove pipe to the body and some screws. The rest, like the barrel itself, stove pipe and cap, and other parts that guarantee a safe egress of the pipe through your roof; you have to give them through your local stores.

These pre-fabricated kits have actually been made available for several years now most predominantly in the northern states of America and Canada. Manufactured mainly for average household handyman to change an oil drum into a simple, affordable and effective heating option for a workshop or garage space. Today, the new and improved kits are widely used and have stimulated new interest especially for people looking for cost-effective ways to heat their homes.

Assembly and Safety Precautions - The main draw of the barrel stove kit is that the thing can be assembled in less than an hour. It also requires little in terms of special skills. Once assembled, the stove itself throws out a huge amount of heat. While this is ideal for workshops and open space areas like a garage, they present serious fire hazard when exposed to anything flammable that is within meters from the stove.

In observing safety measures, barrel wood stoves (and all wood burning stoves for that matter) must sit on a fire-proof pad, starting from a concrete floor to the walls. Certain clearances around the stoves from all directions should be stringently observed.

Also, you can choose to upgrade your barrel stove not only to make sure a safer burning experience, but to improve the performance of your heater. You can do this by adding a layer of sand, stones or fire bricks at the base of the drum. This heat storage mass will absorb and store the heat produced by the stove and release it long after the fire from the stove has died down. Additionally, it will also aid in reducing the heat directed towards the floor.

Suggestions for Improvements - To further enhance and improve the efficiency of your stove, you can actually do several other things. For starters, you can join a fireplace grate to elevate the fuel from the floor of the barrel, giving the much-needed air circulation for effective and complete burning of the embers. A wood burning stove insert is also a good addition to fully maximize the heat from your stove. Using the technique called air convection, a stove insert through its outer box traps the air before it escapes, drawing it back into the firebox, and then releases it back into the room.

Additionally, you can also add a second drum to further boost the heat transfer as well as the efficiency of your stove. You can buy the kit parts in many home improvement stores and online stores.