Will your heat keep up?

[r.man]

Sam, I have thought about adding a tank in the basement, my only concern is that with the extra volume my recovery time for a cold start is going to be longer. I did consider putting in a bypass valve and now that I have managed to scrounge a few electric valves I may try it. A little tricky when you think about it because the reserve tank has to draw heat when available and give heat when needed but not be attached while the furnace is labouring but able to keep up.

[SwampDonkey]

Forced air Fawcett, 125 year old farm house, 10 foot ceilings, -10 F this morning outside, 88 degrees in here. No going out in cold wind and snow. I must be in a dream. :D

[WmFritz]

Forced air Fawcett, 125 year old farm house, 10 foot ceilings, -10 F this morning outside, 88 degrees in here. No going out in cold wind and snow. I must be in a dream. :D

Holy Cow SD!!!    88° ?  You must be running round the house all day necked  :D

[beenthere]

If I were to fill my stove and then take the wood and put it in my friends Heatmor it would cover the floor and you could put three times that amount in it

So the only problem then is you need to fill it more often with wood?
Will your heat keep up then?

[beenthere]

I must be in a dream

SD
That is not a dream, that is a night mare. 

[sam-tip]

Sam, I have thought about adding a tank in the basement, my only concern is that with the extra volume my recovery time for a cold start is going to be longer. I did consider putting in a bypass valve and now that I have managed to scrounge a few electric valves I may try it. A little tricky when you think about it because the reserve tank has to draw heat when available and give heat when needed but not be attached while the furnace is labouring but able to keep up.

How about using a 10, 20, 30, or 50 plate heat exchanger to isolate the reserve.  Just use a taco pump to circulate the reserve tank through the plate heat exchanger.  If you don't want the reserve tank on just turn off the circulating pump. Or bypass the plate heat exchanger.

I turn the Taco pumps off during heating season start up.  Then turn one loop on at time.  I have three loops.  Shop, garage and house.

[JSNH]

R.Man there are a few no cost tricks to get by on those days.

I have hot water baseboards and zoned every bedroom. So during the day those rooms are cold. The living roon is kept warn during the day.
That keeps the heat where I need it when I need it.

It sounds like you have forced air find a way to block off unneeded spaces and direct the heat where you need it.

Curtians closed at night it really reduced the heat loss.

Never run the clothes dryer on a day that cold. You are just pulling in the cold air.

Cook something in the oven for dinner it adds heat to the house.

Save some of your best wood the really dense dry stuff for the -40 nights.

I am sure you are doing some of these things already with out even thinking.

Good luck keep warm.

[delgra]

r.man, I'am living in Combermere now for 40 years and I did not know stoves were made here! Can you expand on the stove a bit?
Thanks
Bob

[SwampDonkey]

I didn't consider it as a nightmare. All I felt was nice and warm. Dry heat is different than sop'n wet humid heat.

[thecfarm]

Swampdonkey you must be one of them that keeps his wood in his basement? You always like to say you never are cold feeding your stove,so you must have it in the basement or in the bedroom.  :D I had to go out in the cold to bring the wood into the house. I use to throw a little into the basement. I built about a 4 foot box around a basement window to throw wood into. That worked real good.I have 2 wood stoves in my house still. I like to go out in the cold and fill my OWB. If you never had a OWB,don't knock it until you try it. You just might like it.   ;)  I would not want the wood inside my house again. My OWB is just about the best thing I ever brought.

[petefrom bearswamp]

2005 classic 4436, 3200 sq ft house 19 yrs old.
Usually stoke 2x a day with 10 pieces.
For the last two days have been doing 15 pieces.
House temp from 72 to 73 F.
Am going to try an anecdotal study on temps at the OWB boiler jacket, into my plate exchanger out of same and inside oil boiler jacket temp.
Not scientific but will satisfy my curiosity.

[r.man]

Bob the stoves were marketed by Pine Tree stoves. The fellow that gave me the one I am using is bringing me the owners manual tomorrow. Pete what I have been wondering for years is the weight of wood going into each of these stoves. Everyone says so many pieces and then they will classify it as small, medium or big but everything is relative. I call a 100 lb a big piece of wood but not everyone does. Weight and species with outside temp and square footage would provide a lot of insight into stove efficiency. I might tackle this if I had dry wood and an easy way to weigh multiple pieces so it didn't take up much time. I think some of the retired guys out there should give this a shot to inspire the rest of us.

[r.man]

Oh and JSNH, I do all of those things and a few more on cold days. Next year I want a bigger firebox and an indoor backup that could be used to augment if it goes to -40. I have a line on an indoor wood furnace that is locally known as a good design. Interesting fact, 78 yrs ago Ontario logged its coldest recorded temp at -58.3 degrees F.

[SwampDonkey]

Takes me 3 days in the spring to store 7.5 cord away in the basement and 1.5 in the shop. Way ahead of the game. Done, no fishing for wood in the winter, no ice and snow on it and no facing that blast of cold fishing for it. Nice, warm and dry. Dry wood, so better heat value by volume. ;D I always figured if I had a serious injury and if I could at least crawl and was confined to the house I wouldn't worry about freezing to death. If it was any worst, I wouldn't worry about it either, just dig me a hole. :D

[r.man]

Swamp I am trying to reform and do my wood like that but I haven't managed it yet. One year I did have a tandem load cut, split and covered in the back yard by fall. I backslid this year, way back. The stove I have has to have small wood but every other stove I have had could take long, large blocks. I started cutting my wood reasonably small so that anyone could load it in case I got sick or hurt. I have a couple of friends that could load big wood if needed but many people can come in if the wood is normal size. I also shifted my woodpile closer to the stove this year. A bit more convenient. The farthest wood is an easy toss for a big block to land in front of the stove.

[martyinmi]

We've had around zero temps at night all week and single digits during the day. I've been filling mine about 2/3rds full(it only holds 11 cu. ft when it's totally empty) every 12 hours, give or take an hour either way. I have a two wheeled 8 cu. ft. wheel barrel that I heap as full as I can that will last me 1 and 1/2 days in this weather. We keep both stories of our house at least 72* all the time. My OWB cycles a lot, but the fact that it does cycle tells me that it still has plenty more to give should Mother Nature decide to throw more cold our way.
My place is about 1800 sq. ft. and poorly insulated.

[r.man]

Bob, I got the original owners manual for my stove today. Bought in 98, with the firebox warrantied for 10 yrs. That might have been what put them out of business. A friend gave me one of the original Dahl style stoves and I liked it but it finally became unfixable 3 yrs later. It originally was leak free for 3 yrs and then had to be repaired almost every yr after. My friend had enough after about 8 yrs and gave it to me. The one I have now is the newer style and lasted about 9 yrs before the tank developed a large leak. The company was gone by then so a different friend gave me it. It was marketed as " Outhouse Wood Stove " from " Pine Tree Wood Heat, a division of Hinterland Handcrafts Limited ". Hinterland operated in Bancroft or Birds Creek I think. Both went under at the same time.

[yellowrosefarm]

I hope I never see -40. Got down to 10 here which is plenty cold for us. I have a Shaver 250 for a small 100 year old 2 story cape cod farmhouse and a 24x32 garage. I'm filling it about every 12 hours and it has no trouble keeping the house at 72 and the garage at 60. Even cycled the draft fan off before I went to bed on the 10 degree night.  I don't think it would have done that last year before I put the larger 75cfm blower fan and homemade draft control on it. I would have done that right off if I had realized what a big difference it would make.

[John Mc]

Sam, I have thought about adding a tank in the basement, my only concern is that with the extra volume my recovery time for a cold start is going to be longer. I did consider putting in a bypass valve and now that I have managed to scrounge a few electric valves I may try it. A little tricky when you think about it because the reserve tank has to draw heat when available and give heat when needed but not be attached while the furnace is labouring but able to keep up.

I haven't quite thought this all the way through yet, but I'm wondering if there is a way to solve this with a mixing valve, or something similar.  The output of the valve would flow to your heat load (i.e. to your house).  The "cold" water input to the mixing valve would be your storage tank.  The hot water input would be direct from your boiler.  With the mixing valve set properly, it would pull as much water
from the storage tank as it could, mixing in enough boiler water to bring what was headed to your house up to the desired temp.

As far as heating up the storage tank, I'm sure there are controls out there that will let you set a priority -- for example "send no heat to my storage tank unless the output temp to my house heating loops are at least X˚."   I believe I've seen this on a commercial-scale wood chip boiler in a nursing home. They have very large capacity tanks for domestic hot water (showers, baths, sinks, laundry).  Their priority is heating the building.  Under most circumstances, the boiler can handle both, but when the loads get really high (very cold out, or every zone wants heat at once), they have the ability to tell the domestic hot water to "wait a minute while we heat up poor old Mabel's room before we send you any heat". 

The nursing home system was controlled by a Programmable Logic Controller (a PLC - basically a small computer), but I've got to believe someone has already solved the problem you describe with some sort of control system for residential applications.

John Mc

[woodmills1]

I have thought about an extra tank to add volume to my system, as my heat monster can get behind.  I have been using nearly a quarter of a cord a day for the last week, dry pine, standing dead ash and green ash mixed.  If I sleep too long the water temp drops and it is hard to get the water temp back as the house sucks much of the heat as the stove plays catch up

If I added an extra tank it might be enough to give me an hour or two before the temp falls too much


I would just plumb it inline with, a bypass and 4 shut off valves.
on start up close the valves to the tank and open the bypass.
once temp is reached close the bypass and open the tank

[r.man]

Woodmills, I sometimes have trouble getting my tank temp up and therefore my house temp and I have successfully used a strategy that shouldn't work but does. I turn my house fan off for an hour or so to let the tank temp rise. In the long term this should not make any difference in overall temp but it does. My house will not increase unless the tank temp is over a certain amount ( this value varies with the outside temp ) and the tank temp won't rise with the house taking away heat. Typical catch 22. If I turn the house fan off the tank gains and the house drops but the house then seems to recover faster so in the long run I am better off. I have tried for hours sometimes to raise the house temp and it just sits there, turn off the fan, wait an hour or a couple of degrees loss and then turn the fan back on. Seems to work, don't know why.

[John Mc]

r.man -

I don't know what kind of system you have, but I wonder if once the temperature drops, you are pulling too much heat out of the combustion area to get an efficient burn (a colder fire wastes a lot of BTUs as unburned gasses go up the chimney).  Maybe turning off the house fan reduces the load enough to allow combustion temperatures to get up into the normal range, and once it's burning efficiently, the system can keep up OK?

Just a thought.  It's the only thing I can think of to account for the effect you describe, especially if it's a lasting effect, and not a case of you just slowly puling the heat in the tank back down again after you start the fan.

[woodmills1]

yes that trick works fine
If I wake up late and feel a chill in the house, the first thing I do is turn off the furnace fan, and yes the stove temp recovers much quicker

I have an oversized heat exchanger in the furnace and I think my heat monster house can pull heat faster than a new fire can build water temp.  once the water temp is up the house will recover

sunshine also helps

my system is very poor in design

much of the heat I make is lost to the miles of uninsulated duct work with very few returns

If I do burn oil, nearly half of my house will not get above 60.
at least with wood, even with the less than zero of the last week, I get to 66 67

[woodmills1]

water can hold a lot of heat, and thus it takes a lot of heat to raise its temperature

Back when I taught I used to boil water in a dixie paper cup using a bunsen burner

[stumper]

Sorry, it has been a long time since my thermodynamics class but I fail to see how a tank will help a boiler keep up with cold temps.  A boiler will store heat and prolong both burn times and and the idle times.  However, the issue of will it keep up is a BTU per hour issue.  Once the heat demand exceed the available heat out put of the boiler then the boiler will not keep up, holding more BTU's in a tank will not change that.