House filling with wood gas

Hey Smoked Turkey,

Try the "Search" on the lower left side of the Boiler Room main page. "EKO door gasket" should get you to lots of older posts on the new EKO gaskets. I remember pictures and a bit of discussion on installing them.

You do have CO detectors in your house, right?

Good luck,
Noah

Smoked Turkey said:

So, Im well into my 2nd month with my EKO 40. I'm getting much better burns and less smoking out of the door. I achieve this by letting it burn open for 20 to 30 minutes after adding any wood before shutting it down. So I've pretty much solved the smoking problem but now my house gets filled up with some kind of invisible wood gas even when its been burning great for hours. Is it a draft issue? Perhaps my stairwell is competing with the chimney for draft, but its definitely not an issue of having a "too tight" house. i even leave my basement door open to make sure there is plenty of outside air in the basement. So should I try to seal off my stairwell?

I suggested to Zenon that it could be a faulty door seal. After swearing up and down that i am crazy and I don't know what I'm talking about he sent me a new door seal for free. :|? After the receiving the new seal I noted that it is completely different from my existing one. Its a big, thick silicon coated rope. Apparently an upgrade. This is looking suspiciously like a known issue. So now the process begins of pulling teeth to get Zenon to give me some idea how to replace this door seal since even the local gassification gurus have never heard of it.

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Take a look at the Wood Gun web site ( Alternateheatingsystems.com ). Although the Wood Gun does not pressurize the wood chamber and instead uses draft induction (puts the boiler under a vacuum so that any leaking seal is sucking air in instead of blowing out smoke), they use a silicone rope door seal and have a nice set of pictures to show how it's replaced.

By the way.....I wouldn't trust my families lives to any furnace / boiler or device. We have 3 CO detectors and 3 smoke detectors. Change batteries, and watch your chimney / pipes for any build up. Smoke can creep into a house by simply blowing over an attic vent, window or door opening on a windy day and be pulled in by the vacuum of the draft on the whole house.

I hope the new gasket works for you. There have been owners on here that moved their EKO outdoors to get away from the smoke/fumes, not what you wanted to hear I'm sure. The tank could stay in the house. Many members wouldn't have their boiler in the house anyways, Randy BTW, I haven't heard of anyone who tried to convert to induced draft

Smoked Turkey said:

Thanks for the post. I, too have hard wired CO/smoke detectors. Actually I will stop using the boiler tomorrow until i get this issue resolved. So far I haven't been able to locate the pics you spoke of but i'm still perusing the webstite.

It says "Convert-a-furnace" on your post. Is there any way to convert my EKO-40 to pull air rather than push it?

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The convert-a-furnace was a wood burning forced air furnace I used for 17 years. I got it used for $200. I believe they were made in the 70's and 80's. Never in 17 years did I have to clean the chimney. Probably because it was venting a lot of heat up the stack.

As for converting an EKO, here's a $195 fix.....http://www.newhorizonstore.com/Products/99-draft-booster-8.aspx. You may want to get the speed control to prevent having to much air causing other problems.

Are you using sectional pipe on the exhaust side of the furnace? Since these induced draft boilers force air through it can leak out the pipe and not just the furnace, even if stove pipe cement is used on the joints (I know first hand). It will get worse as your chimney gets plugged up. SS seamless pipe is recommended.

I'll look for the pages with photos of the Wood Gun maintenance manual that details how to replace the silicone gasket.

I'd recommend adding the fan, changing the pipe if it's sectional type, cleaning the chimney a few times each year and changing the seals to the silicone type.

Smoked Turkey said:

Ok, I have never heard of seamless pipe, where so you get it? Its starting to boggle my mind how many "fixes" I'm having to perform on a brand new boiler. I'm starting to lean toward walling it off as the cheapest option and just let a piece of crap be a piece of crap.

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Walling it off still leaves a leaking system in your house. This might be a good back up in the event of a failure in some other area, but I wouldn't want to trust my life to it.

Single wall SS pipe can be made to fit your needs including any Y's / T's for cleaning without having to disassemble the whole thing. That's an advantage. Many sheet metal fabrication shops will do this. A 12 ga SS pipe will last as long and probably longer than your boiler. Far better than 24 ga black carbon steel pipe.

As far as the boiler fixes go the Wood Gun starts out $1000-$1500 more than an EKO, so adding a $195 fan still has you with less overall cost. A seamless pipe will work for any induced draft system when you have leaky sectional pipes. When this happened to me I added a temporary fix of an 8" "containment pipe" over my 6" exhaust pipe and pulled the air from between them back into my boiler through the 5" air supply pipe on the Wood Gun. In our case it works for 95% of the gases in the pipe. I'm having a seamless welded SS pipe fabricated with flanged Y's to eliminate leaky pipes. It should be installed soon.

The gaskets should be high temp silicone for the best seal.

The silicone door seal will help for sure. I replaced the one on my 3 yr old EKO 40 with one about a month ago. The old one had compressed so much and I couldn't tighten door anymore because the bolts where hitting the tin work. The door handle was pointed straight door and in danger of popping due to being maxed out. The silicone one definitely seals tight and doesn't seem to compress as much. Can't believe they still sell them with the old type. Actual cost on the new type is probably $20 if that.

Are you sure you are not getting "huffing & puffing"? Usually caused by burning very dry wood with really small pieces. Whenever I get this the pole has a distinct odor kind of like roasted almonds or something similar. First year I put too many scrap 2x4's in there at one time that caused it. I don't burn any scrap wood in there anymore. It happened once this year becaused the Fd60 and Fb30 settings were too low. Boiler didn't get back to temp fast enough before it went into FUEL timeout. This was probably due to me not having a hot bed of coals when I loaded it up with wood that was not the dryest. At any rate, when i restarted the fan, the whole load was dryed and full of wood gas and had to "huff & puff" it away before things settled down. You need to check these Fd60 & Fb30 settings because I don't think the factory defaults are proper. Fd60 is defaulted to 60 min and the time the boiler tries to reach the set point of your dial. Fb30 is defaulted to 30 min and is the time the boiler has to reach the set point after it has went into idle and cooled by the amount of hysterisis (about 10 degrees on mine below the set point). If it fails to reach set point on either of these you will see the FUEL timeout message. The 30 min setting on the Fb30 caused my huffing and puffing episode this year and I have since set them both to 2hr. Only downside is the fan runs and extra 90 min when it runs out of wood.

Also, explain what you said in your intial post. "That you let it burn open for 20-30" after adding wood before shutting it down." I hope you don't mean that you let it run with bypass and lower down open with a full load of wood for 20-30 minutes and then close lower door, bypass, and start up the fan. That would pretty much get the entire load burning from top to bottom and generate too much wood gas at once causing the huffing and puffing. Now on my 3rd year I think I finally have it figured out. I put 2 or 3 very small splits (I split everything now) in first and get them roaring with the lower door and bypass open. These are usually ~3" rounds split in half and dry. I let these go for 20" or so and there is no need to worry about overheating since it is not enough wood to do that. 20" works out great to haul in some wood from the pile, sweep the floor, clean the ashes, etc. At this point, the 3 pieces are red hot and make a nice bed to give instant gassification even with less than ideal wood. I swing the lower door shut but don't latch, open upper and load straight from the wagon quickly and neatly in probably about 60 seconds. Usually don't get any smoke in the face because everything was burning red hot, the chimney is hot, so it all goes up there rather than in my face. Once it is stuffed full I close the upper, latch the lower completely, and start the fan. If I have any wetter wood (hopefully not an issue next winter) it goes on the top half of the load. This will always give me instant gassification sometimes so hot I really have to be careful opening the lower door. Work the turbulator handle back and forth and dozen times or so and I'm done. This is from a cold or near cold start. If you can reload with an inch of hot coals then the 20" is not necessary. Sorry to go into this much detail, but based on your initial comment I wanted everything to be clear as far as my experiences (for what that's worth!).

One last thing, since you are using storage you probably have the fan at 100%. Since my storage is not plumbed in yet, I only run my fan at 50% which seems to give me longer burn times. The "huffing & puffing" is easier to work through or may not even occur as often when the fan is at 100% because of course you are burning off the woodgas faster than it can build up. You may want to toggle thru the settings on your controller and post them here for others to view. Like I mentioned earlier, I don't believe the default settings are right on a few of those. P144 is the pump start temperature preset to 144*. I found my EKO works much better at 165 with Ph4 (hysterisis) set at 5. Basically keeps the boiler hotter. My set point is 183* but with storage that could probably be higher. I found that mine will "coast" up to 188 in idle if the house is satisfied. Also, I think others have used high temp silicone to see their joints on the stove pipe. If my boiler was in the house I would do the same. The SS custom fit stuff someone mentioned above sounds like the real deal but probably pricey.

huskers said:

.... Also, I think others have used high temp silicone to see their joints on the stove pipe. If my boiler was in the house I would do the same. The SS custom fit stuff someone mentioned above sounds like the real deal but probably pricey.

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I'll pass along the price when I find out. Be cautious of using silicone. If you do make sure you use the 600* rated type rated for chimney sealant, not just some 400* RTV.

Smoked Turkey said:

Huskers,

.... The problem is that it will tend smoke out the top door once i close the bypass. Even when it doesn't smoke at this stage, I will still get the fumes leaking from time to time. (Actually it has been getting worse. More gas and more frequent.) ......

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If it's getting worse your chimney is probably getting more and more plugged up as time goes on. Same thing happened to me. I would suggest checking / cleaning.

" i even leave my basement door open to make sure there is plenty of outside air in the basement. So should I try to seal off my stairwell?" Could you be pulling in smoke from outside along with air?? Did you close the door and see what happened? Also, as been mentioned, go over your chimney carefully. Be safe.
Ed

I you can actuall see smoke coming out the top door then it's definitely not sealing up very well at all. Take the door off, lay on a work bench, and change out the gasket. This might solve all your problems. I wouldn't try anything else until you do this.