BluBox Thermal Fan Takes Heat from Ceiling to Floor

The warmest (and most expensive) air in your home (or small business) is lazily floating around above your head looking for some way to escape.

This is especially true if you make your heat with a Single Point Source (wood burning stove, floor furnace, wall furnace, etc.) or you have high ceilings, or (who would thunk it) ceiling registers!?! (great for air conditioning, the worst for heating).

The best idea one can come up with to get the warm air from overhead down to the floor is the ceiling fan. They say that if you run the fan in reverse it will “push” the warm air off the ceiling and down the walls. Not necessarily true.

Warm air is very light while cold air is very dense. A ceiling fan will mix the air in the upper half of the room, but warm air has to have a lot of force to penetrate colder denser air. When warm air encounters cold air it bounces off like a ball against a wall. True, a ceiling fan is better than nothing . . . but there is a much better way.

California inventor Doyle Doss has developed a Thermal Fan that sucks the warm air off the ceiling and blows it out onto the cold floor. The BluBox™ Thermal Fan is a 4 inch blue cube with a 3 inch white PVC inlet and a 2 ½ inch adjustable black outlet. Inside the cube is an 80 mm 12 volt DC computer cooling fan that draws .63 watts and can be operated 24 hrs a day for a month for less than a nickel (based on .10/Kwh).

Mr. Doss explains that the fan will “vacuum” the 2 inch layer of warmest air off the ceiling and eject it onto the floor every minute in a room 15 ft by 12 ft. “It doesn’t matter how high the ceiling is, just add more pipe if your ceiling is over 10 feet. The important thing is location.” He goes on to say, “It is best to mount the fan away from the heat source, like on the opposite wall, so that the air current that is created by the heat source will flow across the ceiling, down the fan, onto the floor and be directed back toward the heat source. This not only warms the floor, but now the heater is receiving warmer air to add heat to and will cycle off sooner. You will be warmer and save money too.”

Wood burning stoves, wall furnaces, and floor furnaces all heat a room from the ceiling down. The ceiling temperatures can be very high, especially with a wood burning stove. “One must be careful with a wood burning stove in a well insulated room. The stove retains so much residual heat and now that the warm air is being “recycled” the room will retain its warmth for a long time and it is very easy for the fire to go out if you don’t keep an eye on it. It has happened to me more than once.”

Doyle Doss’s website contains a lot of helpful and interesting information about how to locate a BluBox™ Thermal Fan depending on your heat source and even a way to add heat from one room to another. One distinct advantage of Mr. Doss’ invention is that it is easily installed and easily removed so that even renters can “recycle” their heat and then just pack the fan up with the rest of their belongings when they move.

The BluBox™ Thermal Fan is manufactured by cottage industry in America, retails for $69.95, ships for “free” (continental USA, not available in Europe), and includes a 12 volt power supply and mounting hardware. What is not included is the pipe, instead Mr. Doss has designed his fan to use common light weight drain pipe that is readily available in hardware stores usually for about a dollar a foot. The fan moves approx. 35 cubic feet per minute and is only available at heatstick.com.

(Editor’s note: This article hasn’t been paid for, it was published because we want to promote home-based ideas and inventor like Mr. Doss)