Got some ideas

[my_nanc]

Just want to start with, wow lots of excellent information here.
I have some ideas here with heating my home want to see what everyone thinks, any input is greatly respected.
I live in central Manitoba, Canada. Up here it can get as cold as -45c and as hot as +38c, to deal with these temps my house is what we call a r2000 home I just had built a year ago. Some features include, air exchange of 1.3, r27.5 walls, r50 attic, raised heal trusses on the rafters, tripple pane doubble low e, argon filled windows, all pvc. ect..... I am currently heating my home with a 20kw norton furnace and a free standing regency wood stove. We are doing away with the wood stove due to the conflict with our hrv, when the hrv (greentec) goes into defrost it depresurizes our house causing a back draft on our wood stove.
We are now installing a 3 ton hydron module geothermal unit, (410HO38) With the desuperheater I am giong to heat my hot water as well I was thinking of designing a heater core (similar to a vehicles) to insert in my cold air return duct to the HRV, hoping to heat the air entering the unit, thus having more warm air entering the house.
I just want some way to stop my HRV from icing up from the cold air entering the unit.

[my_nanc]

anybody got any answers...

[firecontrol]

If you haven't already taken the wood stove out..... a way to avoid the downdrafting would be to install a http://www.skuttle.com/216.html . This will allow air to come into the home during the HRV defrost and keep the home from going into a negative pressure situation.

As for the frosting up of the HRV..... that's going to happen when you bring cold enough air in across a heat exchanger at the same time you're passing humid air across the other side. This is what they do by design and function. You have two options.... either heat the air coming in or the air going out.... either way you're going to spend a lot of money on energy doing this. With the Skuttle installed the fact that it's frosting up should become a non-issue.