Storage with a non gasser aquatherm?????

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rombi

Member
Dec 17, 2007
112
Green Bay Wi
I burned a small forest feeding the indoor aquatherm again this year. Has anyone heard or tried heating a storage vessel with a non-gasser?
I know most of my heat will be going out the chimney but could it help or will I never get the old girl to heat say 500 gallons of H2O storage?
I now know the errors of my ways but for what I needed when I put this in 5 years ago (I needed to burn a large supply of suspect wood) it has worked but now my wood supply is getting to be a better quality of wood and throwing armfulls in knowing my efficiency is around 30 to 40% make me sad.
 
You most likely have a simple efficiency problem. Storage does nothing or very little to improve your top efficiency. Storage will make it MORE CONVENIENT to maintain your top efficiency for a longer time, making it easier to burn wood and possibly saving a little wood.

Look into basic wood combustion design. I've seen pics of a traditional OWB with firebrick lining that doubled the efficiency. It's counter-intuitive that insulating the fire from the water will improve the efficiency but the big losses aren't heat up the chimney, but unburned smoke up the chimney (and charcoal in the ash?). Burning smaller hotter fires will go a long way towards getting more heat out of your wood. The design principles are pretty simple, they were burning coal cleanly a century ago.
 
No brick in this one, I would like to see how they bricked it to get an idea. I would like to burn a hot fire out so the smoldering process does not exist anymore. Now it will sit idle for long times then crank back up. If I remember correctly there is 95 gallons of water in the total system that circulates non stop from the boiler to the house.
 
500 gallons of storage would probably let you burn the fire down. The coals don't smolder it's only the volatiles that smolder so you don't have to burn the fire out, just down to coals.

You could also adjust your controls so that you start with a cold boiler, run the blower and pumps on timer set to the time it takes to burn down to coals, function with the thermostat on the coals and have the whole thing shut down when the coals go out. That would cause more of a temp swing in your house that you'd have to regulate the size of your fire to accommodate.

I couldn't find the site with the conversion, but basically it separates the firebox into a lower and upper chamber with firebrick lining the lower chamber and the exhaust passing through the bare steel upper chamber. The author claimed it doubled the efficiency, from 25% to 50% IIRC.

I don't know how big your unit is, or how much heat you need, or if your Auquatherm is in the house or a shop. I've been considering using a junk unsheltered 275 as the gassification chamber for a monster boiler, or just building a firebrick step grate burner tunnel inside the beast for a more modest fire size.
 
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