Many of you have called me lately while I was working on installing our new wood burning furnace.  I have promised pictures on it for some of you, so here you go.  Our building had all electric heat and the heating bills were pretty high.  With so many dead ash trees (emerald ash tree borer disease) on the property a wood burning furnce seemed like the way to go.  I searched many types of wood furnaces and decided on one that is located outside of the building.  Insurance companies prefer this type of furnace as they are much safer.  Forced air furnaces such as the Hopsco V1500 I decided to go with cost much less than the outside wood boilers, and there is no water involved that has to be kept from freezing.  Wood burning water boilers tend to have an overall cooler temperature which creates more smoke, another reason to go with the forced air design that I went with.  This is something that can cause neighbors to complain.  The above picture shows the inside of the firebox, and the firebrick that lines the side of the box.  I am going to add firebrick to the rear of the box to add to it's longetivity.  The ash falls through the grates into a cleanout area accessed through a separate door.

  The Hopsco wood burning furnaces do not come with plumbing or the required firebrick.  The firebrick is easily sourced locally but the required 10" pipes are harder to find.  Most local box stores do not carry furnace pipe in anything larger than 8".  The Hopsco manufacturer is located only one hour away from us, and the owner of Hopsco (Scott) http://www.airstove.com/ sold me the plumbing at his cost.  Scott is great to work with before and after the sale!  I took a sheet of aluminum and cut it down to fit in place of one of the basement windows.  I bolted four collars to the aluminum, two per each side.  This seemed to me to be the easiest way to run the plumbing in and out of the building. A neighbor of ours who is thinking of buying the same furnace mentioned a place where all the duct supplies can be bought. Here is a link to it. http://schaabmetals.com/catalog/Retail.pdf

  The above picture shows our temporary installation with the Hopsco V1500 sitting on a pallet.  Once Spring arrives we'll pour a concrete pad for the furnace to sit on.  The extension cord will also be replaced with outdoor wiring.  This picture was taken before I had taped all the duct joints with aluminum duct tape.  I found by looking through the duct pipe in the basement that sunlight could even be seen though the swivel parts of the 90 degree duct, so I added tape to the parts as well.  The heated duct pipe is the one that extends up towards the top of the furnace.  The return duct connects to the cold air box on the furnace, which houses a Hopsco supplied Dayton 1500 cfm blower.  The blower not only forces a lot of air through the heat duct, but keeps the fire burning quite well.  Hopsco claims the outside ductwork does not need to have insulation wrapped around it, and the ductwork is only warm to the touch, but I am going to insulate it to further increase it's efficiency.  It is two degrees outside as I am writing this, and it is toasty warm inside our building, so clearly the pipes really do not need to be insulated.

  Here is the ductwork entering through the basement.  I added insulation to the inside of the aluminum panel after caulking the panel to the window frame.  The duct on the left side is the cold air return, I added a section of duct to it, and for now will try the furnace as is for the cold air return.

  I cut the floor out above the heat side for the heated air to enter above the basement into the office area on the main floor.  The ductwork with a very hot fire is warm to the touch, but does not get hot enough to have to worry about anything catching fire.  The cold air return sucks the heated air through the first floor of the building and as long as the basement door is kept open, sucks the air into the basement to the cold air return.  You can feel this warm air in the basement stairway area, it works very well as is.  I will probably add cold air return ductwork down the road as time allows, but the system works even better than I expected.

  A register will be added to the floor, but for now I extended the plumbing up through the floor so that no one steps into it.  I could of cut the floor out closer to the wall but the floor joist would of had to been modified as one of them was in the way.  Once a floor register is added, it will be able to be walked on with no difficulty.  This system cranks out the hot air, you could easily dry your hair by standing above the pipe!

  How's this for suction?  The blower pulls air so well that a furnace filter is shown stuck to the pipe without any tape at all!  I am going to devise some way of adding a filter plenum box to the cold air side, possibly to the outside cold air return box.  I'll also cover the inside of the above window area with something that looks halfway nice, I haven't decided what I am going to use just yet.  The suspended ceiling will also have to get reworked in the basement, but not until we decide whether we are going to leave the cold air side as is, or run some cold air ducts.

Well I can see the need for an air filter, this is what the filter looked like after being stuck to the cold air return for 24 hours! In a month the air in the basement will be cleaner than ever!

  Hopsco recommends 6" dia chimney, and you can use either single wall, double wall, etc pipe.  Double wall is going to create a better draft than single wall as it keeps more heat inside the chimney.  A better draft keeps the fire burning much better.  Until I brace the chimney to the building, I only have two sections of stainless steel 6" chimney pipe connected to the furnace.  It was five degrees out when this picture was taken, and even with only sixty inches of chimney the amount of smoke emitted is very low.  I found Menard's http://www.menards.com/main/store.html?vid=20090519001&cid=6894&criteria2_facet=6+Inch to have the best prices on chimney pipe, and they tend to keep it in stock. I hope to have the chimney extending up approx two feet past the eaves in several days.

  Hopsco supplies their furnaces with a halogen light that helps when feeding the fire after dark. The light can be seen at the top of the furnace.

  This is all the fire that is needed to keep us warm at 5 degrees Fahrenheit!

  Here is a view of the ash cleanout which makes it very easy to clean out the ash.

    Update: 12/17/2010

  It is a huge relief to go out first thing in the morning and still find hot coals in the firebox! All I have to do is throw some more wood in there!  The wood I have been burning is mostly unsplit ash that we cut up this past Summer.  I really don't see a need to split the wood, unless the pieces are too large in diameter for the firebox.  I haven't run into this problem yet...

    Update: 12/17/2010

  I'm finally getting to the chimney braces. Scott over at Hopsco offered to make me some braces like the ones he made for his own chimney, for such a low price that I couldn't pass him up on them. Thanks Scott!  It's tricky locating the wall studs when a stud finder doesn't work on vinyl siding!

  I was able to add another section of chimney now that the first brace is installed. Two more braces and three more sections of chimney to go. I'll clean off the smoke residue on the second section of chimney pipe whenever I shut the furnace down.

 Apparently I have too much time on my hands, (performance sales are always slow this time of the year) so I decided to wrap the cold air return duct and the heat duct to maximize the efficiency of the system. I wrapped the cold air return blower housing as well, thinking the warmer the cold air side is, the hotter this air will become as it goes through the furnace chamber.

http://www.menards.com/main/search.html?search=insulation&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&queryType=allItems&cid=1307  Link to the insulation that I bought at Menards.

  I decided to insulate the bottom section of stove pipe that I used as a transition to the stainless steel chimney.

  I used black high temp header wrap that we sell for wrapping headers and exhaust systems on cars and trucks. This should keep the chimney temps a little hotter, and may help to keep creosote from forming in the chimney.  Next I wrapped the header tape with aluminum duct tape, then added aluminum insulation over it.

  We found a cast iron floor register that worked out very well. This one came out of an old house and I stripped the paint off of it and repainted it.

The thermostat that is supplied with the furnace is easy to hook up and install. Two wires from the furnace to the thermostat are all that is needed. We tend to keep it warmer than we did when we had to pay for the heat! The furnace blower shuts down when the temperature gets up to what the thermostat is set to, and it really does cut down on the amount of wood that is burned!

Update: 2/10/11

I woke up this morning and it is 10 degrees below zero, and inside this place it is a cozy 72 degrees! I am so confident in this Hobsco wood burning furnace, that I switched off all the breakers for our electric baseboard heaters several weeks ago. 

The cast iron floor register is just as clean as it was when I installed it, this is a very clean system!

Update: 4/19/11

The weather is downright ugly outside, with snowflurries in the area earlier today. The good thing about the weather is it allows us to keep using our Hopsco wood furnace! We're going to miss burning wood when it finally warms up to where we don't need the place heated. The smell of wood being burned in the outside air is a very pleasant smell, and this furnace does not produce a lot of irritating smoke.

Our electric bills have dropped substantially, as we had electric baseboard heat. Our monthly electric bills are now about 1/4 of what they use to be during the Winter months. This Hopsco furnace is going to pay for itself much sooner than we had even anticipated! 

Update: 10/18/11

Thanks to the ash borer, I have plenty of dead ash trees...  I have the wood stacked on pallets, so these stacks are four feet deep, and some of the stacks are over seven feet high. I'm not sure how much wood I'll burn in one full season, but the stacks under the two tarps should do it. The orange line on the picture shows the length of the wood pile. 

Update: 3/04/12

We poured a concrete pad for the furnace this past Fall and extended the chimney up past the roof line. The furnace produces a notibly better draft when the taller chimney.

This load of wood will last approx two weeks.  We have found the wood does not have to be split into as small of pieces as what we have here in the trailer. This furnace does a great job of burning logs that are only split into two pieces, and the wood will burn longer.

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Please contact Scott at Hopsco to purchase your wood burning furnace, and to inquire on current pricing.