add wood boiler to current electric one

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kreator33

New Member
Jan 30, 2008
2
n.b. canada
here is my situation,i live in new brunswick canada where winters are pretty cold,ihave a 35x60 16 high steel dome insulated with 2 inch styrofoam boards covered with polyfoil radiant insulation and i will probly add about an inch of spray foam(remove current insul.,spray right on the steel,and reinstall current insul.).i have in floor piping with insulation under the slab,8 lenghts of 250 feet,on manifolds all one zone.i currently have one wall thermostat and one circulator with a closed loop system runned by a 20 kw electric boiler.with glycol in my water .the boiler is activated by thermostat,and the circulator is activated by the boiler when water is hot enough.everything works well but it costs me a fortune in power bills.so i want to add a wood fired boiler,i bought that powrmatic mw100 that firelady or somethin was talkin about.(will that be enough,or not too much?)now,how the hell do i hook up both boilers together,plumbing and power?i'd like to use the wood as a main source and only have the electric one kick in when temp drops like 10 degrees celcius.like run the wood at about 20 degrees cel. and have the electric one kick in only when it drops to about 12 degree cel. just to keep it livable until i go back in the shop and start a fire.wich means the electric boiler would never start unless i spend more than a day out of the shop.do i need 2 pumps?whats the deal with mixing valves,some say a wood boiler runs at about 190 fr and the radiant floor should never be more than 120 fr ,how do i do that?also ,when the wood boiler is not running,how do i prevent the electric boiler to have to heat up all the water from the wood boiler?can i run 2 pumps with 2 separate wall thermostats,is it possible to have the water running to the pump thats not powered?or to have the system automatically isolate the other one? can i run all this without a storage tank?is there anything else i should know?i.ll try to post a pic of what i have now,and someone could check it out and tell me what to add.thanks for any info.i might think of some more questions.
 
Welcome to the forum and to the boiler room. That's a lot of questions for one post, and I'm not going to try and answer them all at once. Got a real job that makes demands on my time, for one thing ;-)

I've started putting together a summary of the main decisions and tradeoffs involved when embarking on this sort of project. It's a distillation of what I've learned on my own and from folks on the forum. It's not done, but it might help. Here's a link.
 
thanks a lot for that,i will read and learn as much as i can from it and we'll go from there.i think pretty much all i need to know will be in there. i'll give you feedback.thanks
 
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