Indoor gassers vs. Outdoor gassers

Hello all,

I am on my 4th winter with my home built outdoor comventional boiler. Located in SE michigan, last winter I went through 32+ face cord of firewood (yes it was unusually cold as we all know, but still thats alot). House is propane forced air that I have a HX above to use existing duct work with the OWB. 1600 sq ft old farm house, moderate insulation and windows.

I am going to replace the old boiler with a gasser, even though im ultra proud of the home built job. Just too much for one person to cut 30 face cord and attempt to get it seasoned in time.

I am cconsidering an indoor boiler with storage, or get a Portage and main optimizer 250 or CB 1450 outdoor gasser.

For the indoor boilers, I keep getting drawn to the woodmaster flex fuel 30 model, or the EKO 25 model. Both would be sufficient I believe.

Do the indoor gassers require the system to be pressurized to work properly? My reason for asking is that basically every OWB is vented. Basically every indoor boiler is sealed with expansion tanks.

If I were to go with indoor boiler I would likely buy 2 brand new fuel oil tanks and insulate the piss out of them once coils were installed.

Seems like a wash for the price difference on the cost of the equipment up front, the savings would come for the indoor model with the lack of the $15 per foot underground pipe, plus the obvious efficiency gains over the outdoor boilers.

I am at the shopping around phase at this point, if I cant make my mind up on which way to go by next spring I'll likely attempt to convert my homebuilt boiler into a gasser.

Any and all thoughts are welcome, this is an amazing wealth of knowledge here. Wish I had a nickel for every hour spent reading forums here [emoji2]

Thanks
Richard

I'll have to do a search on Binfords. I was thinking of doing a "mock up" gasser without the water jacket, then if I can control the air flow enough to gasify I would build a water jacket. It would be way easier to modify without an extra tank to cut apart lol.

My wallet isn't deep enough to justify a $20,000 garn once all installed to save myself $2500 each yr in propane.

But looking at binford's build I think I know what i'm going to be doing..... I need to get a hold of that guy. Ive got the machines and time to build a gasser, id like to see how his runs. I have a feeling my welder will be getting a workout soon!

I'm thinking that about a 20x30 enclosure, with sofa,tv, fridge, card table would be about right. Nothing excessive though. HAHA. I wish

But binford you basically did, and documented what I already wanted to do. I REALLY like the P&M style fire tube HX, was debating adding such a HX to my conventional boiler, but quickly realized that the pipes would look like the rest of my firebox- 1/2" thick in creosote. So, seeing as I have a 36" Ø by 26" long piece of 3/8" wall structural steel tubing leftover from my conventional boiler build, I would say that would be about right size for a primary burn chamber. I think i'll tend to lean more towards a smaller primary chamber, with more room for water storage, but stay vented for the simplicity/security of it. I also have a bad feeling about running pex pipe at pressure. I will likely sacrifice my current boiler, remove the firebox, and plate the end to use it as water storage, should give me around 450-500 total for rough numbers.

Having never operated a gasser, do you have any issues with alot of smoke/sparks coming out of the door when loading wood? I would potentially be sacrificing one bay of a 2 car detached garage to use as my "enclosure", and with the excess space stack a decent pile of wood to be in there with it- just worried about stray sparks flying over and burning the whole operation down after I load the thing up. My current boiler is pretty bad for that, but with a 3ft diameter x 5ft deep firebox it kind of likes to go nuts when you give it that burst of fresh air (went way too big on firebox size when building that one).

How thick of steel did you use on this? I was thinking of sticking with 1/4" steel for everything, no thinner than 3/16" though. I liked the thicker metal for weldability, I welded everything on my old smoke dragon with a stick welder, only had 2 pin holes to burn back across to get good seal everywhere. I would have all sorts of extra leak opportunities building a gasser though.

Binford: On the thoughts of your Drinking hot water, I currently have a plate (I think 15) heat exchanger pre heating my water before it goes into my propane waterheater, and the only times I ever hear the propane fire is if we haven't used any hot water for 8-10+ hours. Otherwise normal use (only 2 people plus a baby live here) keeps enough water flowing through, and never has to fire the propane on an average day.

The cost to build one of these will drastically offset the INSANE cost of the underground piping, I have an attempt at homemade underground pipe currently in use and I'm pretty sure the insulationis saturated..........2-3 degrees loss over only 50 ft....... so that will be coming up when the boiler gets lifted out of there. Worked good first year, the ground was already froze so I couldn't bury it, and just left it on top of the ground. Snow would stick right to it and not melt so I know it started good, no heat loss then either. Something got it wet though.

I think all together I have about $2500 in my current boiler, so your rough cost of $4-4500 sounds spot on since there are far more controls, materials than I have. I also used every piece of old crap metal around that I could salvage and weld to, what a pain. Took way longer than it should have. Nice thing is I have many many parts that I can use for the next one off of the current one. I don't think that I can justify the debt of buying a new boiler, plus pipe, only in the name of SAVING money. Plus- I can justify the machines and tools in the shop to my wife better this way HAHA

If its ok I will likely use/copy alot of the ideas, it will most likely end up looking different until I make the water jacket, since i will have a round firebox (only because that's what I have laying around), but the principles will be the same. I will likely be private messaging you at some point once I get into things in detail.

In the mean time I have lots of things to do on SolidWorks drawing this thing up!

-Richard from SE Michigan