tuolumne - 28 March 2008 11:46 AM

I’m starting to grow attached to this boiler. 

Congratulations on getting your boiler up and running!  I have been following your progress for some time. I am encouraged by your results and looking forward to getting ours up and running this summer.

Don

I’m so glad it worked out. I’ve grown really attached to mine over the past heating season as well. It’s a really well-behaved boiler, at least in my current setup.

What these past days have shown me is that the Eko would perform very well, even without a storage buffer.  The only part of the situation that is awkward now is that we don’t live at the property yet.

My question is did your boiler run the whole 14 hours, or did it idle much of the time? Im not sure Iv’e ever gotten 14 hours on a FULL load of wood using my eko 60. But again, we keep our house around 70+ or it feels too cold for me. Yet again, you are way colder than we are here in Ohio…

That would be idleing most of the time I’m sure, since there would be litte demand.  I had closed cell foam put in, and that makes a mighty tight house.  Tonight will be in the teens, so tomorrow we’ll see how it did overnight.  I couldn’t fill it up, for fear of overheating.  I went over this afternoon and tied 16’ of fin tube into the supply and return with an automag zone valve.  I just left this open, so anytime the boiler pump is running the water will run through that.  If the radiant zone needs heat (I left the thermostat at 50) the main circ will pull water to it.  Still, I only left the wood up to the bottom of the door.  If the fire goes out that is better than a boil over.

Question....my gravity overheat loop is higher than the rest of the system by a few inches, including my air separator.  I put a drain coupling (little screw thingy) up there to purge out the air when I filled it, but there were still some bubbles in the system.  Will this little loop tend to capture air?  I plan to put the automag on a switch so I can use this overheat loop to heat my shop area in the basement, so it will get used from time to time.  When the main circ runs I assume this air will get purged by the main separator.  I didn’t have time to stick around and find out.

I need to let my boiler go out tonignt (Sunday morning) and won’t be able to check it until Monday morning.  If I have my zone controls off, they won’t be calling endlessly for heat so I plan to let the boiler heat through the overheat loop all night to keep the house warm.  What will the EKO do when the fire goes out?  I assume that the blower gives up after a while and the pump stops?  This must be a standard situation for a wood boiler to be in.  Now I’m glad for that silly factory extension cord, because I can flip the breaker on the peripheral heating equipment and plug the boiler into a separate circuit.

The fan shuts off if the water temp stays below a certain level for long enough. Usually that happens at the end of a cycle, but if you reload the stove without making sure that the fire takes, you can wind up with a firebox full of smoky wood and no draft. That happened to my wife once this season. I’m a little more anal about making sure that the thing is burning good before I walk away.