bjwme said:
i recently had a new yorker wc-90 wood boiler added on to my oil burning system. my plumber said that he had to put in a barometric damper because it is now code. he also said that he never used to put one on wood boilers that he installed until it was code. my question os do i really need it? i have some creosote build up around the damper and i think it is lowering my flue temps. should i take it out or maybe temporarily seal it off so that i could still be in appliance if i ever got inspected? what do you guys think? i think it might be causing some of the creosote build up in my stove pipe. thanks
bryan
The topic of barometric dampers on solid fuel appliances and codes regarding any of these seem to have generated more mythology and conspiracy theories than anything that I can recall since the ads in the late 1970s that said that for a mere $100 that you mailed to someone for something you could bolt under your car's hood, you could pee in your car's gas filler, and drive 1000 miles, but that the car and oil companies had cooked up a plot to prevent anyone from realizing this :0
I beat my head against this more than a little after hearing a dozen arguments and deciding that I would not sleep well until I really got to the bottom of something that let me draw my own, comfortable conclusions
wish I could spend some time to do a "sticky" on these topics, but I am busy being way behind on my own install while juggling the rest o'life.... so here's the quick and dirty
basically, as long as your flue draws, and the barometric damper is really set up right in relation to the specifications of the manufacturer of your appliance (and just because someone for hire put it in does not mean that that's the case) there is nothing, overall, inherently bad about it
the role of a barometric damper is to make sure that the fire does not go up the chimney too fast (before you extract maximum feasible energy) under atmospheric conditions (which vary tremendously depending upon a huge array iof many entirely ndependent variables of what is going on inside and outside a structure) when the chimney is "pulling hard"-- but to also make sure that the fire still goes up the chimney at a reasonable and reliable rate when the outdoor and indoor conditions cause the chimney to draw less well.
no commies or bureacrats were involved, as best I can tell, in noticing that such automatic regulation of chiimney draft was a good thing for efficiency and safety
it was considered a bad and even dangerous thing, though, on old very-low tech coal and wood devices that were so poorly regulated (on air and fuel inputs) that they might overrun the chimney and "Spill" combustion nyproducts out a barometric damper
but modern appliances are not that crude
and in any event, no matter what anyone does on including or skipping a barometric damper, you should invest in a _really_ good Carbon Monoxide detector -- because even without a barometric damper, if something goes haywire, you don't want to find out by waking up with a severe headache, just barely in time, in a house full of smoke from a back-drafting chimney ( I found that out the hard way once, some years back,on a system that had no barometric damper
the absence, at the time, of a barometric damper on my old wood hot air furnace did not cause the problem, but having one in place would not have made it worse, and might have been less likley to cause it than my old manual butterfly stack damper that suddenly "met" a huge change of outdoor atmospheric pressure, due to a chance in weather, while I was asleep )
