Oil furnace fan

[murferd]

What is the opinion of the brain trust on here of a furnance fan for forced draft & air over fire combined?

[smitty76]

well, to start I think that there is alot of brain on here. lots of experience and knowledge from many different senerious(spelling), second, do you mean a forced hot air furnace blower and finally, if you put gate valves in both the forced draft and the air over so that you can experiment to find the right adjustment between the two, yes, a blower from a forced hot air squirrel cage blower would most likely be sufficent as they produce a large amount of air. And it would be nice to only have to run one blower instead of two.

[Bucket Head]

I'm not saying it would'nt work, I don't know how big your blower is, but the forced air-over set-ups are usually a high pressure type blower. Like the blowers on those engine driven walk behind leaf blowers. Those are high pressure and the squirrel cage ones are low pressure. High volume yes, but a lot less pressure than the leaf blower style.

Steve

[802maple]

I have alot of experience in this setup. On your 2x6 if you don't undersize whatever you are going to use for air ducts and there isn't to many corners it will work to a degree, It will certainly be better than no air at all. Also if your over fire air is only coming in from the rear and not your front and door it will work okay. Give it a try and if it doesn't work to your expectations then go with somekind of high pressure blower as they will work.

[Haynes Forest Products]

Bucket head is right about the Squirrel cage motors. They will move alot of air but they also NEED a large size to do it in. Its all about moving a large amount of air over a large area to heat a house. you cant take a big cage fan and taper it down to a small size duct work and expect the same air flow. In the application we are trying to do we dont care about the air picking up heat and sending it down the line. ALL we want is High pressure CFM's. So I would look into using a blower that is designed for Blacksmithing........WHAT........... YUP well built elec blowers that can be controlled by a simple dimmer. The are a paddle type that puts out CFM's and PSI's..........SEE a box fan will put out CFM's but very low PSI's. Google Blacksmithing blowers and SHAZAM $150.00 for a 165 CFM blower that will kick butt..$250.00 for 400 CFM and they can take the heat. I built a blacksmithing shop for a guy and the blower used a 1 HP motor paddle blower and a dimmer from Home Depot.

[Sugarmaker]

Blacksmithing, now there is another hobby idea. More playing with fire and making something out of nothing!
May have to check out those blowers too.
Chris