Don't we all get annoyed at those pop-up video adverts on YouTube! I try to contain my anger, because every so often something pops up which saves me a ton of money.
Here, in the Republic of Ireland, the government give reasonably generous grants towards your first solar power installation. A condition of getting the grant is you consent to a heat insulation survey being carried out on your home. The survey man advised us the most important item to fix was our old-fashioned open fireplace. When I asked him how bad it was, he said "Imagine, you leave a window wide-open in your house night and day, summer or winter - that's how much heat you're losing." He said we should either get the fireplace blocked up, or, if we still wanted a fire, to get a wood-burning stove which would effectively block the opening, especially if the air intake to the stove was drawn from the outside air, not the air in the room.
Of course, once we started researching wood-burning stoves, the popup ads on the computer latched on to our search and, one day, a video popped up on YouTube for a product called The Recoheat
What is the Recoheat? Put simply, it's a spiral tube of metal which fits out of sight inside the flue of the stove. Outside air is blown through it from a pump. The air heats up, expands and is blown out into your room to add additional heating. In effect, it's reclaiming a lot of the heat that would otherwise be lost up the chimney. You get a warmer room and save money. But that's not all it does. Because it's drawing clean air from outside the house, it creates a positive pressure, pushing the warm air further into the house, both heating it and also banishing mould.
I can vouch for the heating effect. In my upstairs office in our attic conversion, whenever we light the fire downstairs and turn on the Recoheat, I notice I either have to take off my pullover or turn down my office heating. Once, by accident, we left the Recoheat running over night with the fire gone out. In the morning the whole house felt noticeably cooler, showing how the relatively gentle current of air was reaching throughout the whole forty-foot-wide building. To guard against that mistake happening again, we now have the Recoheat air pump plugged into an electronic timer, set to always turn it off at midnight, in case we forget!
You've probably seen those fans that sit on top of your stove and run automatically as soon as the stove heats up, to assist circulating the air. These cannot be as effective as the Recoheat, which is capturing lost heat from the much hotter air inside the flue. Also, the stovetop fans only recirculate; they don't create the useful positive pressure into the house described above. We got one of those fans anyway, and wondered if it would be a waste of money, but it was not. Our living room is quite large and the stovetop fan seemed to improve the mixing of the air within the room, driving it more evenly away from the immediate vicinity of the stove, so I'd say using a Recoheat together with a stovetop fan is the perfect combination.
The photograph shows our Heta stove, on top of which from left to right are the magnetic stovetop thermometer for monitoring best burn temperature, the Recoheat nozzle on the flue, and the supplementary self-powered fan. Incidentally, the expanding hot air escaping from the Recoheat nozzle makes a pleasant quiet hissing sound, rather like the hissing of a burning log. Any humming noise from the air pump driving the airflow is cleverly silenced by a supplied small silencer device fitted to the pump. The self-powered fan on top of the stove is completely silent; it starts turning when the stove top heat has reached at least eighty degrees centigrade, converting the heat energy to electric energy which drives the fan. No messing around with batteries is required. You see these fans in a variety of finishes. Definitely get black, or the spinning might be visually distracting.
Take note that I am not being paid by Recoheat to write this. In fact, at the time of writing, they don't know I am writing it. My sponsoring website is below. Please click on the mystery novel book cover to find out more.
