My wife assembling the Legs for the hopper

The Install

I had looked at many (all?) corn furnaces online and had gotten it into my head that they were all fairly small and could be vented out a sidewall. When I drove over to Helm's Corn Heat in Milton Illinois to pick the thing up, I quickly realized it was big... real big and required a Class A triple-wall flue going out the roof. When I got home I tried to figure out a way to put the thing into the basement and run the chimney out the fuel oil furnace's brick chimney. It just wasn't going to happen. I really didn't want to remove the fuel oil furnace because I was scared the corn furnace wouldn't work as advertised and the A coil for the air conditioner is huge and it would have been difficult if not impossible to build a plenum that could accommodate the large A-coil with the height restrictions that I had to work with.

The only place I could put the dumb thing was on the back porch. We've had dreams of replacing that back porch with a bathroom and a deck. The porch doesn't really have a foundation and over the years it has sunk and is very un-level. The porch is the winter home for the area cats and I'm very allergic to cats so I try not to spend much time out there. It was at this point when I seriously considered putting the damn thing up on Ebay and giving up on the whole idea. I'll choose not to explain the difficulties I had removing the cats and my irritation with my family members and get right to the technical details.

I couldn't figure out how to get the heat from the furnace into the house. I was still in the "connect the two heat plenums together mode" and the old furnace was 35 feet away and didn't really have a plenum that I could connect to anyway. The floor joists in the house alternate between 2 X 12's and 2 X 10's and there was a cold air return that consisted of a piece of sheet metal that spanned 2 joist spaces and ended at just the right place. My Uncle Paul suggested that I run the heat from the corn furnace into the cold air return of the fuel oil furnace. I poo pooed Uncle Paul but after thinking about it a few hours later I realized that his idea made sense, so that was the plan. I still had no idea what to do about the cold air return on the corn furnace though.

I cut a slit in the hardwood floor of the porch (8" X 28") and through that slit I had to cut sideways to cut 2 large holes (8" X 14" and 8" X 6") though about 5 inches of native lumber to get into the end of the cold air return. I bent a few sawzall blades and was getting nowhere fast and in a Tim The Tool Man Taylor moment, I decided that this job required more power. So after fixing the chainsaw I brought it in and used it to cut my hole. It worked great and the look on my wife's face was priceless. The chain will probably have to be thrown away (it was pretty dull already) but I did learn that a chainsaw can cut through nails pretty well.

When they make exterior steel doors they put 2 pieces of sheet metal about 1 ½. inches apart and fill the space between with foam. Any windows in the door are cut out after the door is built. If the customer orders a full window in their door the resulting cutout piece is up to 22" X 80" and is quite useful. You can buy these panels for $3 or $4 if they've been routed out in such a way as to make it easy to join them together. There are companies in Tennessee and Kentucky that build very nice buildings out of this scrap. My Dad built 2 buildings out of this stuff and he gave me a bunch of his leftover panels. I used these panels to make the cat/dog house that you see here and the "plenum" running down the wall in this photo..