Hydronic Heating Wood Stove

Does anyone have experience installing a hydronic stove and system? We are getting this - http://woodstoves.net/greenwood/greenwood200.htm. Can you share some diagrams and pictures? We are looking at the perimeter of this CEB home - https://docs.google.com/a/opensourceecology.org/presentation/d/1ZfrvXvAP8u8e7hrkF55pZuakQkJRRPKJPb4K3w-2HmA/edit#slide=id.g37364b6b6_20 Thanks - Marcin. You can see more about me here - https://vimeo.com/49864277

Welcome Marcin! You come bringing gifts, I love it. I really hope someone here has experience with that one but probably be lucky if there is. That looks like a very nice machine.

This is pretty much an updated version of the legendary Carolina Water Stove that Ive become familiar with living in Boone and Western North Carolina. They went out of business long ago but not before equipping many homes in the area with indoor wood stove hydronic boilers.

I visited at least two homes that had them and the boiler box, much like that one, was beautiful, sturdy. Both systems were hooked up to solar thermal collectors, radiant floors and water heater (originally). They apparently worked very well although I suspect wood was the main fuel over solar. Most Carolina water stove systems including the one I saw are no longer operational. I think they were plagued with leaks and plumbing problems but the biggest concern to me is the wood combustion inside the home's conditioned space.

I managed to find this forum thread where one was in use as recently as 2012, and Iam sure the ones that have been maintained and fixed are still around, blasting some cheap BTUs into some questionably efficient casas. http://www.gowilkes.com/voice/view/?&msg=104555 I didnt look very hard for that so there might be more good bad ugly or wonderful.

Just saw your other link pushing the CEB machine so hope Iam not wasting too much time here.. I like your design, especially how the heat beast is in a separated room. If you go through with it, keep ALL hydronics as accessible as possible.

And since I sense you may be pushing CEB allow me some friendly chatter by saying you will certainly need all those BTUs when you have walls with such low Rvalue..

Thanks for the warm welcome. CEBs with r10 foam outside.

Marcin

Nice! I like your style sir. That should reduce the amount of wood fuel needed significantly.

One of the challenges with wood heat is that it is difficult to get an efficient burn while modulating the amount of heat output. This is why people like high thermal mass heating devices such as masonry or rocket mass heaters. With boilers like this, the best way to add thermal mass is to install an super-insulated thermal storage tank. The thank is filled with water. The boiler gets fired any time the water in the tank drops below a certain temperature. The boiler is run at full (maximum efficiency) until the tank heats up. The heating systems then use the heat from the thermal storage tank. One of the advantages to a system like this, is that heat can be drawn off the thermal storage thank for any number of uses, included domestic hot water.

Where I live, we use a Garn boiler, which is a wood fired boiler with ~2,000 gallons of integrated water thermal storage. This boiler provides all our building and domestic hot water needs. It will also be the heat source for a hot tub at some point in the future.

There are two ways to increase the thermal storage capacity of a water tank:

1. Install a bigger tank
2. Allow a larger difference in high and low temperatures. In order to do this, you need to be able to extract heat at a low temperature. Radiant floors are a good way to do this. In a well insulated building, a polished concrete floor can heat a residence with only 95 F supply water temperature. Baseboards typically require at least 140 F supply temperature. It looks like you already have this project under construction. If radiant flooring is not an option, consider using hydronic baseboard with high surface area designed for low temperature water supply. If you are able to heat your house with water at 110 F, you might only need to fire the boiler enough to heat a 2,000 gallon tank to 180 F once every four days, even in the middle of the winter, depending on where you live.

Hi Marcin, I first want to say KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! OSE IS GENIUS!
Karen has some very good points about long sustained burns, the only thing I did not see in her post was hydraulic isolation to prevent condensation in the flue when the tank is at low temps. I use Caleffi's hydrosep4 for most of my installations along with pressure controlled variable flow pumps feeding distribution manifolds with thermostatically operated controls for each room. This allows a high level of automatic control and ensures proper combustion in nearly all conditions. Caleffi has a great website chock full of info on thisCaleffi
You can PM me with any detailed questions as I work closely with a very good engineering firm that owes me some favors.

Open Source Hydronics - Final Report.

This is the product - http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Hydronic_System

Wow, wood heat in the floor feels so great - even heat. The winter was pleasant with warm feet.

If anyone has designs of excellent, simple stoves that we can build - please contact me. We like to open source blueprints and make tested machines available to the world. This stove we bought for $4600. We could make it probably for $1000 in parts, given access to open design.

Hello Marcin, me again,

I see several problems with this design, but I am hesitant to publicly criticize OSE, since I have tremendous respect for what you guys are doing.

Please send me a PM to discuss this privately or post here that you don't mind open criticism and we can work through it here.

All Blessings,
Bill

Hi Bill,

We welcome technical review at all times. Our guidelines for that are that the review is about specific design points based on an understanding of the overall design, OSE design principles, specific design goals, and project goals, and that the review is based on facts and data rather than opinions or personal attacks. Further, we do a test-driven, iterative, publish-early-and often type of approach - which means that our work is always improving, and in the open source world - a design is never really finished because open source code allows anyone to modify or improve the design at any time. So when you propose your review points, keep in mind that this is an experimental prototype which we are currently dogfooding to find out what really works and what doesn't for the user.

We welcome any input that can help everyone learn and improve the design. Please feel free to post your comments on the wiki page with the pictures so that people have a direct reference to the issues raised. Does this make sense?

Thanks,
Marcin