DIY Home Heating

"If it heats my car, why not my house too..."

How to turn car radiators into an alternative heating solution

I dont know exactly where the inspiration came from, either my gearhead background or my inherited frugality but my idea of using a couple car radiators in my house in cunjunction with my woodstove worked amazingly...

My wife and I recently moved from the center of the universe (Toronto) to the tiny sleepy hollow of New Castle Creek, New-Brunswick.. We bought a fixer upper 80 year old house dirt cheap and fell in love with the place over the internet... buying it without even seeing it first hand! Dont get me wrong, we have had to really kick and punch in the darkness before we saw daylight and we have had to change our lives and lifestyles severely but it's all worth it...

We pitched the old oil furnace almost immediately and installed a cabinet style wood stove... One day I thought about all that heat we don't use and what could I do with it if I could capture it... I knew that water takes a lot longer to cool off than air... so why not heat some water in an old 2nd hand radiator on the stove and pipe it to another 2 floors directly above in the cold 2nd floor washroom?

I knew a little about thermodynamics, or at least I knew that heat rises. Keeping that in mind, I sized the supply and return pipes accordingly and the hot water rose to the top of the system, when I was filling it, immediately... The hotter water wants to rise and the colder wants to sink.... it circulates surprisingly well... FREE!

It worked so well I installed another system with the upper radiator and a fan pointed directly at my wifes lazy boy.... she loves it!

I have some pictures of it on my new phone I got for Christmas and if I can figure out how to upload them I will send one to ya if you'd like...

We also made a homemade air exchanger from the old oil furnace blower and plenum duct work.... a rain collector from an old 10 foot diameter satellite dish to accommodate our low recovery hand dug well...

There's more too no doubt, but I just wanted to see if anyone else was interested in such a thing...

Feel free to write back eh...

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Tags: diy heating system, heating and plumbing, under floor heating, diy home heating