Oven stoves/Masonary heaters for central heating?

[Aglifter]

Admittedly, this is for commercial use, but building a brick oven is a very specialized thing.

[Weetabix]

I second the passive solar. When I lived in Fairbanks (average temperature 26 deg F), there was a lady up the way with a passive solar house. IIRC, she paid about $300/yr to heat it. I think she had fuel oil as the supplement to solar, but it may have been wood.

At any rate, passive solar designed right is free energy when the sun's out.

[SeekHer]

Chris, me laddy boyo,

Your idea of having one wall exposed to the elements is counter productive as heat flows to cold not the other way around...25% of mass exposed will rob you of up to 60% of heat depending on the outside temperature...

If you want a "pizza oven" or Indian bake oven outdoors, then just build the thing separate from the house, you could even make it into a fire pit and Bar-B-Que area--a conversation pit...

My father was the one who got me interested in "Kachelofens" (Google gives 3.1 million hits) or masonry heaters as the whole family in the shetl in Russia slept on one during the cold months and had an outdoor stove, under cover, for the summer...There, as in the Germanic countries they used glazed tile to surface the outside with and benches (sleeping areas) are built in...

I have one sitting in the center of the house as I'm writing this and it extends from the basement to the top floor of the house...basement has the opening for the 4' lengths of logs it takes, main floor has a woodburning efficient heater and a flue for connecting an old Elmira wood range and oven that is being refurbished and would only be used in an emergency...We also have a forced air natural gas furnace (super efficient w/side discharge so no chimney is needed with a central air system hooked into the system of a set back thermostat and even with this being the coldest winter in years we still had the windows open on bright sunny days to cool the place down and to let in fresh air...

One thing you have to do is have a fresh air intake when you burn with wood, even if it's just a window cracked open but better is an insulated duct from the shortest point to the bottom of the burn chamber but above the ash collection high point...

We just finished the brick work last year so had nothing to compare it to but this year it burned 5 cords of wood and cut my fuel (natural gas) by 70%…There was also a half cord used in the wood stove upstairs but that was more for ambience and taking the chill out of a rainy day then actual heat…

One thing though, you have to keep doors to bedrooms open, otherwise the heat stays in the hallway…and a couple of very small fans mounted at the top of doorways helps circulate the warmth around...

[SeekHer]

The one you have pictured is very nicely done but what is in the back section...that, I don't think, would get very hot unless that cook stove was used a fair amount...

Ours is just about the size of the front section from storage to fire box and about as deep as the storage bin...The firebox is running the length of it so it can take up to 4½' long logs which means you don't have to split them...The door is at the end next to the grill stove in your picture which is where the woodburner is located on the main floor and where your firebox is the flue for the wood stove, when it returns from being "prettified"...

We could have added two small circular (round airtight) stoves on the first (upper) floor, flues are there but we wanted to see how it would heat without the auxiliary heaters...It worked OK this winter and haven't bought them but they are fairly common here so if need be we can get one or both at anytime...

That looks like a nice timber frame home--what we've yearned for, with SIP (R40+)walls and ceiling (R80+), radiant flooring, Trombe Wall and heat sink, solar oriented and ideally totally off the grid...Looks as it will have to be the retirement house or we by some lakeshore property and use it as a year round home...

Our problem here is that although we get lots of sunlight in summer, the angle is so sharp that most of the rays just bounce off the solar panels so of course you have to angle them but them they don't catch the summer sunlight--either a moveable bank or two, three different banks with different degrees of orientation so we would have to back up the electrical portion with wind turbine(s) for battery storage charging...

It wouldn't work for us but have you thought about having a separate outside shed for your wood or pellet stove...there has been lots of articles about it but I've not really kept up with that technology as it wouldn't work that well in our -40F to -50F climate...

There is a site I came across that has lots of excellent information called AE - Alternative Energy especially about what’s new and forthcoming like very cheap and very efficient solar electric panels and super deep storage batteries, vertical turbines instead of fan driven and lots of new inventions…very good and informative site!