Fin Tube Heat Dump Questions

I struggled with where to locate my fin tube based heat dump for my Solo 30. I ended up mounting it vertically on the wall next to the boiler. When power is cut to the boiler a valve opens and lets the heated water circulate by gravity up to the top of the fin tubs (3 rows parallel piped) then down through the fin tube sections to the floor and back to the return line of the boiler. It works fine.

jp

Swing fittings
a 90 and a street 90, or 2 90s and a short piece of pipe. will give you any angle you want
Or you could borrow my bender, stop by

Chris

DC, we used 1 1/4" square fin tubes in parallel on the ceiling of our shop. About 2 feet apart. The 1st fin tube is lowest rising to the next and all rising up to the last then back. Effective. Sweetheat :lol:

I'm just guessing here since fluid dynamics and thermodynamics were a long time ago. It seems that you either do a manifold at top and bottom with fin tube in parallel, or run the fin tube horizontally (like a leach field) if you want to do series in order to keep a thermosyphon going. You can make any compound angle with pipe fittings if you fiddle for a minute. I'm sure that a 45 and a street 45 will do what you want to go from vertical to a 4 pitch roof.

Something interesting came up in an Eko overheat thread a few days ago that might give Tarm owners an alternative. Eko apparently sells an overheat device that resembles a domestic coil that runs tap water through a coil in the boiler when the electricity goes out. My thought was that Tarm owners with a DHW coil in their boilers could put a normally open zone valve on their DHW coil and have it open when electricity goes out pulling water through the coil to cool the boiler. You of course would need to have the water exit your boiler room somehow. Two questions I have about it though are:

1. Would constant water going through the coil lower the temp enough in a real overheat situation? (ie 10% or whatever of the boiler output)

2. In extended power outages that is a lot of water to waste and the boiler might not even be overheating. How does the Eko system handle that?

Just curious, as it would seem to be less expensive to setup for those with DHW coils already.

DC: all are in series (all connected together) but also parallel to each other and horizontally mounted under the 2nd floor. sweetheat