Gravity hot water, CI rads and wood boiler

Mike T., Swampeast MO

Sounds fun. Challenge will be finding a boiler with high water content and large tappings.

While I believe the old "snow men" can burn any solid fuel, I also believe they were geared to coal. Wood will likely produce a comparatively huge volume of ash thus tending to burn out the fire grate prematurely--that's if you could find one with intact grates... I've seen a number of those boilers but I've yet to see an intact draft regulator. I'd truly expect efficiency to by abysmal with attendance level(regulating the draft, adding fuel and removing ash) very high. All this is <I>extremely</I> difficult regulation of room temperature--BIG difference between logs and a bed of coal making draft regulation comparitively difficult with the wood.

From the anecdotes I can find on the web, people only used wood in their gravity systems as a last resort.

S Ebels

Neat customer

I just met with a customer this afternoon that wants me to design and install a gravity hot water system using cast iron rads and a wood fired boiler. YEEHAAAAA!

Only problem is I don't know of a wood boiler that will fill the bill. He wants to do this totally non-electric so that eliminates most of the wood boilers that I know of.

Anyone have any ideas or a source of supply for such a thing?

Unknown

I have a snowman (pancake boiler) in my basement, I've saved it.

Find an old one of those, and you're all set.

I built a gravity radiator system with TRVs on a HS Tarm woodburner once, it works great.

There's that electric combustion blower, though....

Noel

Unknown

No coal where I'm from.

In fact, I'm still using my grandpa Morse's kitchen range. It's got grates, as does my snowman.

They're still out there.

Noel

Robert O'Brien

VanWert

The old VanWert HF-120 in the photo below would do the job nicely. No blowers, aquastat draft control... I still have my OCF-90 as a backup in my cellar. Unfortunately VanWert went out of business years ago.

http://forums.invision.net/Attachment.cfm?The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.jpg&amp;CFApp=2&amp;Attachment_ID=24216