Looking for comments and ideas.

[kenny chaos]

Got a 2000 square foot stone house circa 1832. In the dead of winter, it just won't hold heat! While the new oil boiler is much more efficient, it does not heat as well (less efficient?) as the old one. I firmly believe, but I'm occasionaly wrong, that it's because the old boiler was less insulated and heated the basement with lots of lost radiant heat. With the tiny new boiler, the basement is always cold.
I've done lots of reading on the Hearth forum and I'm currently seeking advice there to replace an old wood stove in the kitchen with a newer model. I hope a cold air return on about a 450cfm blower will pull the excess heat thru the house. This will probably not be enough.
Now I am considering adding a Thermo-control Model 500 (http://www.thermocontrolheating.com/standalone.htm) in the basement. It's basically a big wood stove with coils. I'm guessing it would give me lots of heat in the basement and be enough to run some heat thru the baseboards. Probably need a small heat store for possible excess heat and to use as an emergency dump thingy.
Could this wood boiler be plumbed into the oil boiler system and both of them be "on" at the same time or would the oil boiler be isolated?
Gimme your ideas and thoughts.-
Thanks for what you do-
Ken

 

[GARYL]

Hi Ken. Sounds like a nice house but pretty hard to keep warm. I used a Thermo control boiler for 25 years and it worked fine. Used about 8 cord of wood and a few hundred gallons of oil in my 1793 center hall colonial with about 4000 sqft. (includes the basement) Kept us warm for alot of years but I finally burned it out because I used almost exclusively locust which burned extremely hot. I used three 275 gallon oil tanks for open storage which I could manually put in or take out of the loop. They acted as radiators and kept the cellar about 80* which in turn kept the first floor about 70*. The oil furnace was heating the second floor pretty much.
I had to dig outside along my foundation one time and I wound up insulating the outside of it for about 30 feet. I put the three tanks on the inside of that wall lenghtwise and they also heated the 2 foot thick foundation stones which also helped to carry the heat over.
If you do something like what I did with the three tanks and use them like radiators I think it will work well for you. Good luck!
Gary