The Adaptive Curmudgeon has been working on installing a wood burning (cook) stove in his workspace. The discussion reminded me of a set of fans that we bought for our woodburning stove, and a quick check of my blog shows that I don’t appear to have ever posted about them.
THIS* is an itsy bitsy thermoelectric powered stove top fan. It doesn’t require an electrical outlet. All it needs is for the surface its sitting on to reach a minimum temperature. And then it pushes air, almost completely silently. Quite well I might add. We have two, one is a two blade fan, the other is a 3 blade fan. The three blade requires a bit more heat to really get going, but pushes noticeably more air.
Now don’t get me wrong, our woodburning stove has an attached electrical powered blower. Which pushes alot of air all by itself. But what happens when the power goes out? Our first winter in this house the power went out several times, almost all of them for a span of several hours. Though certainly the stove itself works fine, without the blower to move the air the spaces further away from the stove chilled quickly. By themselves our two little fans can’t completely replace the electricity powered blower, but they move alot of air and can keep the house warmer than without them. And when we combine them with the powered blower the combination warms up the house very nicely.
If you go to buy one or more of these fans I do highly recommend shopping around. Prices vary ALOT depending on who’s doing the selling.
In addition we also have THIS* steamer, cause we couldn’t resist!
Update: pictures and short video clips
The top of one of the fans with the data for it:
The two blade fan:
[videojs mp4=”http://scaryyankeechick.com/picture-s/videos/fan1.mp4″]
And the three blade fan:
[videojs mp4=”http://scaryyankeechick.com/picture-s/videos/fan2.mp4″]
At the time that these were taken I had only just started a fire not long before, and the cheap little magnetic temp gauge that we put on the top of the stove was still reading less than 200 degrees (F).
I will try to get a video later today of what they look like spinning at full speed.
Here’s the 3 blade fan at full speed. The stove top thermometer says 400+. The noise you’re hearing is not the fan, but other stuff running in the background (promise).
[videojs mp4=”http://scaryyankeechick.com/picture-s/videos/fan3.mp4″]
*Links to Amazon in this post will take you to Amazon via my Amazon Associates account, which means that if you buy something from Amazon after clicking through one of these links I might earn a few cents. Also, this is not the exact fan we bought, but it was one of the less expensive links when I did a quick search for one to link to for this post. In addition all products mentioned in this post were purchased by me for my own use and I was not paid for this post in any form.
at the other house we had two of those fans, they were much more expensive (couldn’t get them thru Amazon at the time). Also, people should be aware that there are different sized fans, and some that don’t start turning until the stove is quite hot, so shop around indeed.
Funny – I also had a dragon steamer. It looked cool but since the soapstone top didn’t get as hot as a cast iron top, it never “puffed”. But then again, none of the kettles ever actually boiled or gave a show of steam (although there was evaporation, just not fast enough to see it).
This dragon is solid cast iron (watching the UPS guy deliver it was kinda funny, till I had to take the box from him!) and actually produces noticeable steam from the nose, very cool! The only downside is I have to take a thin brush to the nostrils once a year or so due to buildup.
And yup, different fans make a difference. Ours cost more too, and don’t really push much air till closer to 275-300 degrees. But at that point they move air!
The dragon was cast iron, the stove was soapstone, which was why none of my steamers actually steamed. Yeah, and that sucker was heavy for its size too 🙂