more fireplace quandary

[supermanotorious]

Until I make or buy an insert, I want to get more heat in my home from the fireplace. I came across this thread today which gave me some new inspiration. I have the steel already and can get the blower fan from Grainger for $50 BUT I was wondering, what are your thoughts on using a hair dryer after removing/disabling the heating element?

I discounted fireplace blowers in the past after reading how they reduce heat going up the flue and increasing creosote build up but I'm not worried about that if the pipe is drawing heat from the coals, that and my chimney is really clean and I keep a close eye on it.

 

[supermanotorious]

I do understand that hair dryers use DC, I have some old PC power supplies I could use to power it but now I'm wondering what else I might have around the house with a small fan in it. I'd really like to not spend any money if I don't have to and I don't think the woman is going to let me sacrifice her hair dryer, not that I'd want to, my hair is just past shoulder length and some days its nice to use it on myself.

 

[firemanjim]

Your first link is basically the same idea I had in post #16. http://www.diygokarts.com/vb/showthread.php?t=27344
You can buy small 12v fans and 115v fans REALLY cheap http://www.surpluscenter.com/shop.axd/Search?keywords=Fan&page_no=1&page_length=9999
Just pick what cfm rate fits your requirements.....

 

[Badot]

You won't get much usable heat out of that unless you pipe it to somewhere else in the house. It'll just suck the heated air right back into the fireplace. Generally you want the output higher up so that the heat can rise out of the path of the room air getting sucked in. Out the sides may work too.

 

[firemanjim]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense....

 

[supermanotorious]

I'm free from the soul snatching corporation today and want to get some welding done. Here are some transmission ideas I'm thinking of. I certainly took the high/low offset into consideration so I'm not simply reheating warm air.

A) is a simple design like the one from the welding forum

B) is a slightly more complicated transmission to allow the air to get hotter before exiting the tube

C) is more about routing the exiting hot air from the top of the fire box as opposed to from the bottom

What are your thoughts?

 

[Badot]

If you want to get a little 'fancy', run multiple smaller lines in parallel across two manifolds, matching the total cross section of the smaller lines with the inlet/outlet. Otherwise, a zig-zag design from front to back would be more effective than running the lines in parallel.

 

[supermanotorious]

hillbilly as ****- hellbilly????

Woke up with some fire in my belly to start this little project, turned out I had about 12' of 1.5" square tube from other endeavors and got to cutting it up. I struggled with the wide angle for a little before figuring it out. The old lady and I went to Goodwill and I found a hair dryer for $6 (more than I thought it was worth) but it worked so I bought it. Taking it apart was easy and the little fan is actually pretty powerful. Nothing about this came out very professional and I could care less since I plan on replacing it with a legit insert soon. I was drinking a Sprite with my lunch trying to figure out how to reduce the fan diameter to insert into the tube and wahlah! use the stupid Sprite bottle. It's up an running now and works amazing. The heat coming out of that tube is too hot to hold a hand to. I will measure temps throughout the house tonight to really see the "effect".

 

[landuse]

That looks neat