My new Boiler Guide & Database

[sgschwend]

Ask and you shall almost receive:

http://www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/conference/ei16/session5/guldberg.pdf

The author is in MA, the data is in this report, ask him to connect the data to the models tested.

 

[WoodNotOil]

Thanks Sqschwend

I will have to read it in more detail, but from the abstract it suggests their emissions are comparable to a typical wood stove. I will have to see what stove pipe height they used in their tests, as the height between the typical pipe coming out of a house and that coming out of an OWB is likely the cause of neighbor complaints. I have heard from users that it is harder to burn wet or poor quality wood with a higher pipe, because of the increased draft. I will try to find out what OWB's were tested and see if I can incorporate the data into the database. For now I will put a web link in for this article. Thanks for showing it to me.

 

[Gooserider]

Haven't read that specific report yet, (It's in the queue...) but have heard the "comparable to a wood stove" line - and the analysis I've seen is that the claim is IMHO rather deceptive on a few grounds -

1. "Conventional Woodstove" - do they mean an EPA approved stove, or do they mean a "conventionally designed" smoke dragon???

2. They don't scale - They compare based on emissions per pound of wood, but compare how many pounds of wood are involved?

3. The tests cited were run when burning dried wood of specified size and moisture content - as would be suitable for use in a stove... While we are quite aware that the stove tests don't resemble "real world" conditions very well, they are probably far closer to reality in terms of what gets burned for a wood stove than they are for an OWB. Wood size is closer, and most stove users at least try to burn somewhat dried wood - as opposed to the OWB use of large chunks of green wood... (And we won't go into all the other interesting "fuels" that OWB folks are known to run, which most stove users wouldn't dream of...)

Gooserider

 

[WoodNotOil]

Gooserider

I agree with you. It is quite a double standard to advertise that you can burn anything in these boilers without even splitting the wood and then run tests with dry split wood to measure emissions. I will have to check out the details, but if they are getting comparable emissions to a wood stove, then that is likely the case. The neighbor complaints and resulting regulations will likely eventually cause these companies to change. The worse part is that you could often get a gasifier for what these OWB units cost...

 

[WoodNotOil]

I have now implimented the option to view boiler data in the form of a table. You can view by type or brand for now. I will see what I can do about adding features later to allow you to select specific models to compare in a chart. Thanks for all the input! I really appreciate people taking the time to enter new boilers, comments, and reviews. The more content there is, the more useful it will be to people... so keep it coming!