by David Brooks | Apr 5, 2022 | Blog, Newsletter | 2 comments

Embarrassingly for somebody who’s an avid heat-pump fan, I heat my house with an oil-fired hot-air furnace. I also have a pellet stove in the living room, which I use as supplemental heat in winter evenings, when we tend to huddle in the living room anyway. This keeps the furnace from firing up so often, saving oil (although as a result, rooms in the rest of the house get chilly.)

It would be just as easy, it turns out, to combine a pellet or wood-burning stove with an air-sourced heat pump. They can be used separately, as I do, or linked via a back boiler. Either way, the wood could reduce the need for heating load to the point that solar panels can cover all of a heat pump’s usage.

Details are here in a site called DirectStoves, which sells wood-burning stoves in the UK.

Now that we have installed a mini-split heat pump we still use our cordwood stove but now more as a backup to reduce electricity cost.

Shortly after we built the house I modified the stove to install a water heat exchanger and a storage tank to act as a preheater for domestic hot water. During the winter the wood stove meets almost all our hot water needs, now somewhat reduced because of the heat pump.

Our stove is a Tempwood top loader. Over the years I’ve looked into replacing it but modern stoves are hard to modify to add a water heat exchanger forcing us to give up wood fired hot water in the winter.

David are going to do it? Would it be easy to do in a house like yours? Interesting, you were a reporter in Tennessee.

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Dave Brooks has written a science/tech column since 1991 – yes, that long – and has written this blog since 2006, keeping an eye on topics of geekish interest in and around New Hampshire, from software to sea level rise, population dynamics to printing (3-D, of course). He moderates monthly Science Cafe NH discussions, beer in hand, and discusses the geek world regularly on WGIR-AM radio..

Brooks earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics but got lost on the way to the Ivory Tower and ended up in a newsroom. He has reported for newspapers from Tennessee to New England. Rummage through his bag of awards you’ll find oddities like three Best Blog prizes from the New Hampshire Press Association and a Writer of the Year award from the N.H. Farm and Forest Bureau, of all places. He joined the Concord Monitor in 2015.