Indoor wood boiler plumbing
I've done a lot of reading on this forum and it has been very helpful throughout our house construction. We went with in floor radiant heat with a propane boiler using outdoor reset to control water temps. Now I'm adding a pressurized indoor wood boiler to the system and think I have a decent layout for the plumbing side of it but just wanted to make sure there's nothing I'm missing.
Here is a picture of my current setup in the mechanical room:
And here is a layout attaching indoor boiler to current system:
Comments
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That will work. What size wood boiler? You may need a buffer tank to control it on small load days.
\This drawing is similar, you have a separator on place of the buffer shown here.
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
It is a thermo control 2500, which has 170 gallons in the water jacket and a 200K output. Forgot to mention that it is located in a room off of our attached garage which is all heated but the pipe run with be roughly 100' to that mechanical room in our basement. My plan was to use 1.25" black iron pipe all the way.
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Also, do I need another auto fill/backflow prevent like I have sketched in there if I already have one circled in this picture below:
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Basically that plumbing you've shown will work — and you not only don't need another autofill, you don't want one.
Now I do see one problem: I see no dump zone for the woodburner. I may be old fashioned… well, it's not "may be", it's "I am" — but I have yet to see a woodburner which didn't run away at least once. You really do want to have a place to dump the excess heat while you scurry about calming the thing down…
Br. Jamie, osb
Building superintendent/caretaker, 7200 sq. ft. historic house museum with dependencies in New England0 -
What do you plan on doing with the pipe, placing the 2 pipe runs on sand and 1 by 1's and foaming them in the trench?
You need more storage to act as a heat dump by putting a New Horizons rectangular 490 gallon insulated tank next to the forest eater and balancing/mixing the water temperature down to 150 degrees.
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if you learn how to control the size if the fire to the changing heatloss it can work well. We need more info like the heatload of the various buildings.
If it is a gasification boiler, they like long hot runs, so you need a good load to keep them burning clean and efficient
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
Thank you. I didn't label the dump zone clearly in my sketch but it's the 20K btu radiator above the wood boiler. I've read 10% of boiler output for a dump zone is adequate and this boiler is capable of 200k. I found a used cast iron radiator that is roughly 6' long and 30" high that seems to be rated for 20-25k.
The plumbing to the dump zone and for the 100' run with be 1.5" black iron (not 1.25" like I mistakenly said in a earlier post), so I'm hoping for decent thermosiphon through the old radiator with 1.5" pipe and it being higher than the boiler although 15' away.
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So the pipe which is 1.5" black iron, will be exposed along the wall in the attached garage so everything is indoors and insulated heated rooms.
I'm going to try without storage 1st. The bottom of this boiler is 1 layer of fire brick which I'm adding more brick to and shrinking the firebox to use smaller and hopefully hotter fires by way of the fire brick.
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You should plan on filling the fire box volume half full of standard fire brick up to the flue breech. This creates a huge amount of thermal mass for you, and it radiates the heat back into the fire box and boiler walls slowly and at the same time it creates a hotter fire and much less smoke/unburned fuel lost up the chimney. I did this with my old hand fed wood and coal boiler and I will tell you it works.
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In my view, that 10% suggestion for a dump zone size is… perhaps OK if you have three things: a good pressure relief valve, a set of fireproof gloves with which to remove the fire if needed, and — most important — someone there at all times to keep an eye on the fire…
Br. Jamie, osb
Building superintendent/caretaker, 7200 sq. ft. historic house museum with dependencies in New England0 -
looks like that boiler has a means to shut down the air. If it works and the door is closed and sealed tightly, it should ramp down quickly
Leaky door gaskets cause over run most often
How to load the stove is the learning curve
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream0 -
Thank you, I may have gotten that idea from reading one of your posts. Can't remember but I did read that on here somewhere.
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Yes this boiler shuts down in 3 different scenarios- aquastat setting, power outage (damper is held open by power), and stack limit switch on chimney.
The company says the water volume is great enough that as long as the damper shuts, the water can absorb the heat without going over the danger level without a need for heat dump. This boiler is also uninsulated so it radiates a decent amount of the heat as well. That was my reasoning for only a 10% dump zone. I plan on testing a worst case scenario once I get it hooked up.
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