Indoor air quality during winter?

[SawyerTed]

We've lived here since 1989.   It's a story and a half wood siding frame house on a basement. 

We heat with a wood fired water stove, not a "boiler" because it's not a pressurized vessel.   Boiling is bad.  The stove is in our basement and supplies a heat exchanger in our heat pump air handler.  So our wood fired heat is indirect and is forced air. 

We've battled extremely dry air and occasionally smoky conditions due to the stove.  

The last few weeks indoor humidity has been in the teens.   Outdoors the humidity has been quite low as well 20-30% at times.  

When we built the house, our original floors would dry during winter and swell during summer and eventually left 3/16" to 1/4" spaces between boards.  The flooring supplier and our HVAC company installed a whole house humidifier that lasted one season and did nothing for the floors. 

We are now running 3 large room humidifiers.   They are a recent addition and seem to be addressing the low humidity problem. 

For my Forumite colleagues (especially those in Northern climates), what are your strategies for improving indoor air quality in winter?  

[GRANITEstateMP]

Ted, air quality at my house is directly related to what I've been eating...

As for the woodstove, I have found that first I need a good draw. When we replaced the ceramic flu with a stainless steel flu, and put a different style cap on, that helped with the draw, which helped with smoke. A good seal around the door and a adjustable air inlet helps to tune the burn.  Also make sure your damper, if its a manual style, isn't free wheeling and possibly chocking off the stove. Dry wood is a must too.

As far as keeping moisture i. the air, we've got 2 cast kettles ontop of the stove, I've debated adding another.  We also have one of those magic fans with a sterling motor to help move the air.  My mom lit an insense stick things in the basement one time, that little fan moves a lot of air, you could watch the smoke move around the room in a circle!

Hope that helps.  I know in certain weather conditions the smoke tends to stay low to the ground, we don't see that much here

[SawyerTed]

The smoky stove is generally from over firing it.   Not a frequent occurrence but it does smoke things up for a little while. 

The stove has 750 gallons of treated water surrounding the fire box.  The ideal water temperature is 140 to 160 degrees.  My auto draft is set to shut off at 160.  

The other morning the outside temperature was 19 (pretty cold for us).  The stove water temperature had dropped overnight to 110 degrees.  

I filled the stove with sawmill slabs and turned on the auto draft.  It's set to 160 degrees.  When those slabs caught, the draft was overwhelmed by the draw.  So the thing started sounding like a locomotive!  Every whoosh of draft was followed by a belch of smoke.  

Um ...I won't be doing that again.   It was easily controlled by damping the stove for a half hour.   The temperature of the water jumped up pretty quickly though!

Lots of fresh air that morning because I opened a couple of doors to get a cross draft through the house.  

Of course moving the stove outside is an option and I may do that.  The convenience of having it in the basement is hard to beat.  There's been a water stove there since we built the house.  

[thecfarm]

I just had a woodstove in our basement for a few years.
But I always cracked a basement window in the winter.
We have a oil hot water heater and it was getting air from the water heater!!!!
That's why the cracked window.
I have a OWB and would hate to burn wood inside again.
All the mess is outside now.

[Ianab]

Not in the North, or even a similar climate, but our issue is HIGH humidity in Winter. Because the outside humidity can be 70-100% most of Winter, and it's not cold enough that the indoor heating drops it much, so things get "damp". The new heat pump has improved things as it does trend to dry the air a little, but we still have a D/H unit set to keep things below 70%. It only needs to kick in occasionally to maintain that. 

But yes I understand how you can get to those low humidity numbers when it's really cold AND dry outside. Ventilation doesn't help because as you warm up that outside air it's R/H will drop, and you are stuck with super dry air again. Kinda the reverse of here, ventilating with  95% R/H air, and only warming it slightly still leaves things damp. 

Really the only solution is to add water into the air, humidifier / lots of hot showers / pot of water on the wood stove etc?

[SwampDonkey]

It's a colder climate up this way and I can't have RH higher than 35% or so, the heat will drive it into the attic, and you don't want that. One sign of too much RH is sweat on the windows. I heat two stories and a basement with a well made wood furnace with duct work, I have ducts into the second floor and that floor is also insulated. 2900 square feet of floor space, 8 ft ceiling, second floor has 9 ft ceiling and goes to 14 feet in the slopes of the dormer window area. I had to accommodate the loom, if I ever put any type of draw cord attachment on top. Also, I run an air exchanger now and then when the furnace is running, so it takes in the air from outside to the furnace blower. It will even come on automatically in the colder days for 5 minutes at a time. Any days it's in the upper 20's or warmer I open windows, a free air exchanger. In real arctic cold, our air is very dry outside. I have a whole house humidifier by Esseck Air. It uses a wick. I use a couple wicks a winter, just started mine up this week. I keep it on low fan and 35% setting to maintain 30%. If it's milder, I'll step it up to 40%. The water jug it uses is 2-1/2 gallon. I'll go through a couple gallons of water a day. 30-50% is a liveable range, but much more than 30% up here is getting too high when it's real cold out. The farm house, I used to have 10-15% RH in winter, way too dry.

I have an outside entry into the basement which makes wood handling easier. The old place just had a window to toss it through. More mess and more work. Wheeling in by wheel barrow is much better. There isn't much dirt to it. I think Ray is afraid of a broom.  I'll take a broom over wading snow and cold and after work/dark journeys to the woods for firewood. A big pass on that. ;) Mine's all stored away, dry and a couple steps from the stove. 

[thecfarm]

I used a broom and wheel barrow for more then 20 years in another house.
Really the only reason I got a OWB is to burn my softwood. I even burned cedar for about 3 days straight a few weeks back. 
I burn EWP steady. I have a lot that has broke off and is dead.
As my FIL told me once, You can't burn that!!
I told him, Lets go inside where it's warm and talk about it. 
I have a lot of cedar that I can burn too, Dead fir too. Just slow to get. Most of that wood is not much more then a foot across.
I have a bog that I have to pull the cable out to get that dead wood. It's just a slow way to get wood, but I have done it.

[SwampDonkey]

Yep, I burn anything to, I'm thinning ground. All wood burns. Like you, just ignore all the firewood snobbery, we've not froze yet.    I just cut it shorter for a stove. Cut in the fall, stack in the spring, done.  

I do leave carpenter ant wood on the ground to make new soil along with the tops.