ducting hot air to room above

[Iceni]

We have a very efficient Villager log-burner which heats our winter salon and our bedroom will be directly above this. I have read that you can put grills into the ceiling to duct the hot air into the room/rooms above. Does anyone know what type of grills we should use please?

The ceiling is plasterboard with sound insulation and then floorboards above but we are happy to make holes in the ceiling if this will allow us to run our central heating (oil) at frost free in the coldest months when we will decamp from the open barn area into somewhere more cosy. The Villager is capable of heating more than this space (40 sq m) and we also cook on it, my second Villager and I have to say that apart from the glass not being that easy to keep clean it looks and is fantastic.

[Ianhaycox]

We have got a couple of wood burners with metal flexible ducting to pipe the hot air around the house. The ducting and grills etc are easily available. See fireplace renovation for an example. Scroll down a little to view the pipework.

On the plus side the fire does distribute lots of hot air around the house, ofen we need to close the vent in the target room because it can get too hot.

On the down side, the noise travels down the pipe. One wood burner is near the TV on the ground floor and feeds hot air to the third floor bedroom, BUT, you can hear the TV in the bedroom! The tubes also carry dust along with the hot air.

Overall I would say it is a good system especially if distant rooms need heating.

[Iceni]

Thanks for this Ian, unfortunately we cannot do this as the chimney is not underneath the room we want to heat and the fire is also a cooker in the winter so we cannot hide the pipe. There is an article in the last issue of LF (a diy diary) where they just used grills to take the heat upstairs to the rooms above. The rising heat did the work itself. I suppose that just putting grills into the ceiling would get the heat to the room above. I just wondered if there was any specific product out there.

I loved the pictures of the renovation, we have a series of ours and it is great when we take people into the unrenovated part of the barn and then bring them into our living quarters, they cannot comprehend that this was once a simple barn.