keeping a OWB lit in the summer

Just a guess, but if your had no problems earlier in the season with this issue, seeing as the temps have warmed up, you have a much smaller heating demand so the boiler sits and idles allot more. There is two things that will have to happen to increase the heat demand to force the boiler to open the air supply to keep it running: 1.) you have to increase the heating load or 2.) cut back on the wood. What you could try is to see how long after the fire goes out you can still pull heat from the OWB. If you can get say 8 hours, you may have to resort to starting fires once a day and run it with a small load to heat the boiler and then let if burn out much like if you had a indoor boiler with storage. The other way would be to make sure the fire gets enough air to keep it burning, but I would caution you on this as you may run into a boiler getting to hot and boiling over which is no fun at all, and its really hard on the OWB.

I have a portage & main outdoor gasification boiler what works for me is to lower the high temp to 160 and low temp to 150. With a 10 deg diff it seems to keep the fire alive,and the lower temp saves wood. Im going to try 150-140 and see how that works. Also try mixing in some soft wood.

Got to do what Bear Gillles does, throw on a wet log on the camp fire, to keep the fire burning threw the night. By the way his smokes too!!

smokingout said:

I just fired the boiler up a week ago so I'm getting a crash course in keeping it fired up. I have thought about the load as I don't have a circulation pump on the dhw yet. I have been playing with the air supply trying to give it just enough to smoldering and keep some hot coals in the bottom. Tried some green wood mixed in but it only burns when the unit is calling for heat at night which isn't every night. Thanks for the replies as I have a lot to learn.

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After reading your OP I just assumed you were trying to use the boiler mainly for DHW. But, if you're trying to do shoulder season heating in Georgia with an OWB, get ready for quite a battle. Just to give you a frame of reference, I run my indoor gasser without storage, so that puts us in the same ballpark from an operational perspective. But, my climate is quite a bit colder than yours. That being said, I still shut down my boiler completely for most of this week. Fired it up last night (28*), and will shut it down later this morning and it will be out probably for most of next week. I will probably fire it on a few more cold stretches and that will be it for the season. Heating the house will be taken care of by solar gain, good insulation, and a (very) small amount of oil to fill in the blanks. The bottom line is that wood boilers like to make a lot of heat - that's what they live for. You can make them produce just a small amount of heat via minimal loading, but once this time of the year arrives, I'm very happy to let the Sun take over . So, are you trying to eliminate using fossil fuel completely? Or, perhaps a big uninsulated house on a hill, with lots of infiltration and always chilly? Or do you just have a lot of extra wood that you're trying to get rid of ;-)

+1 for lowering and getting the setpoints closer. I don't know what the spread is on a hardy but I have good luck with 135-165 in the winter and 135-150 in the spring and fall. With dry wood I have never had a fire go out, however my system only has about 175 gallons of water. Good luck!

Heck, use solar for hot water - you will be smoking out the neighborhood to use an OWB in the spring and summer...and also, these low burns wreck havoc on the steel (create acids).....eats away the boiler or welds in no time.

+ 1 on the solar DHW, if we can do it up here it has to be more eff in Georgia, also functionable for more months of the year I would hope.

There is not a circulation pump for DHW on a Hardy. It works off you water pressure with a coil that is submerged in the water tank.
Look at the top of your blower on the rear of the unit. On the flapper that opens there should be either two small screws, one screw and a hole or two small holes with no screws. To help get a little air make sure there are no screws in the holes. It allows a little more air in to keep some coals. The trick is for less heating demand is to use smaller, drier wood if possible to keep it going. Also, when you empty the ashes, don't take them all out. Keep some in the bottom to help get it going too.
One other thing you can do is to set your water cut in/cut out temperature higher so it has more demand for wood use to keep it going.