Well, after asking many questions in this forum and getting great feeback, I finally have a new conventional wood boiler up and running. It is a Kerr Highlander connected to my oil boiler in parallel with no storage, using 1 1/4" black iron pipe. The two furnaces are in different rooms which necessitated using over 100' of black iron pipe, cutting and manually threading over 25 different pieces of pipe-lots of work. I have had it running now for 3 weeks and finally have all the aquastats set where they should be. I am getting 8 hour burn times, loading about three times a day. I figure I am going to be using between 10-11 cord to heat my 2500 square foot house- but thats alright cause the oil furnace is never on and the house is HOT.
I have read that these boilers use a lot of wood, and the first week kinda scared me because I was filling all of the 30" deep fire box with wood. However, what I have learned is that I dont need to fill it all, to get the same burn times--I'm already filling the boiler to only about 2/3 and still getting my 8 hour burn times. I have found that filling it 100% doesn't seem to increase burn time but rather just makes the fires hotter.
Anyway,the pics of the install are attached.. Did I mention that I bought the boiler second hand, never used, still in the box and installed everything myself. I saved over $4500 over a quote I had done to buy it new and have it installed. And today, it was just WETT inspected- passed.
I have read that these boilers use a lot of wood, and the first week kinda scared me because I was filling all of the 30" deep fire box with wood. However, what I have learned is that I dont need to fill it all, to get the same burn times--I'm already filling the boiler to only about 2/3 and still getting my 8 hour burn times. I have found that filling it 100% doesn't seem to increase burn time but rather just makes the fires hotter.
Anyway,the pics of the install are attached.. Did I mention that I bought the boiler second hand, never used, still in the box and installed everything myself. I saved over $4500 over a quote I had done to buy it new and have it installed. And today, it was just WETT inspected- passed.
