Boiler Kettling Revisited...

[KenLockett]

Thanks everyone for the excellent feedback and ideas. Let me process all the information and give some of these items a try. I will report back with what I find.

 

[hobbyheater]

Why is the one way check valve opening and closing?

Hobbyheater, do you just live with this all the time?

It is a 1 1/4" check valve in a 1" system and does it all the time.

 

[Clarkbug]

I boosted the 15-58 circ pump speed to Hi and this made no difference. Not sure conceptually with regard to adding a buffer tank. Can you clarify Clarkbug? By the way I was using 4-6" splits last night when the pulsing was active. Not small relative to the small splits I have used in the past. I do know that adjusting the primary air and secondary air helps with regard to the intensity of the burn but was throttle back about as much as I could last evening. Unfortunately do not have anything less dry to burn at the current time. Ironic how it's usually the other way around. By the way, did you ever contact Calton Coons?

Ken,

I was just thinking that if you are boiling the water, having a buffer tank would allow you to pump a larger volume of water through the boiler independent of any call for heat from your zones. This could extend your burn cycles, but would also allow you to have a slug of cooler water to run through the boiler, and help eliminate the problem.

I did call Carlton earlier this year, but he has been booked pretty busy. I need to get ahold of him still to help me with a few things around here....

 

[kopeck]

Hello Ken,



Is 600 really within the normal range for the Solo Plus? Seems a bit high from all my reading and research on this site about various gasifiers but I suppose higher than normal temps make sense with given your fuel.

I can't even believe I am going to suggest this, BUT.....have you considered raising the MC of your wood? Should be a whole lot easier than going in the other direction, I would think.

Man, I feel like I just violated some kind of Boiler Room code of ethics.

Noah

My Solo Innova will run at 600 when the tubes need to be cleaned. After a good cleaning it runs around 450.

I've never seen the 300 deg stack temps some guy talk about. I often wondered if that was a function where people are measuring their temps (ie how close to the boiler) or what their using to grab those temps (stick on thermometer or a probe type).

In my case my probe type thermometer is mounted pretty close to the outlet on my boiler.

K

 

[Bob Rohr]

This is a great explination of cavatation Bob! As I was working on the house (sheetrock) today I was thinking about this thread, I was thinking scale or something on the water side slowing heat transfer. I know it is almost an imposibility in a good closed loop system with no makeup water requirements, but it did come up in the thought process.

I like to keep my pressure up in the 20s in a hot system for the extra boil-protection.

TS

Yes, if the system has taken on a lot of fresh fill water, especially hard fill water... I had a cast iron boiler on a customers home that would perculate every few years. I delimed it twice with Hercules Sizzle, a strong boiler cleaner acid. An acid product is the only way to clean hard water deposits. The soap based hydronic cleaners will not touch scale build up.

Turns out this home had a few slow leaks in the slab radiant somewhere. I finally put a water meter on the fill valve to determine the cause of the scale build up. This was a first for me, on a closed loop hydronic system.

I have cleaned enough copper tube domestic boilers to know the symptom of a scale build up. Copper tube boilers let you know right away when they scale, the larger the BTU, the more they howl

Cast iron or steel boilers do not have the same flame to HX intensity of a fin tube design boiler, so the noise is not as easy to detect or pin down. Piping will carry noise throughout the system, it can be hard and frustrating to pinpoint the exact cause of the noise.