Seton W100 Boiler coal/ash and burn time issues

do have any more pipe? if not can you add some cheap pipe to the top to see if you can draw more when draft is open and less when is shut? have you tried any dry wood?

Beans, I have currently 24'+ of 6" SS insulated stack. I don't think low draft is an issue. In fact I had pretty high draft readings and have recently installed a damper. The draft changes noticably as I open and close the damper. Turns out that if I close the damper too much she will not build enough heat to close the inlet and idle. In the beginning of the season I thought I might not have enough draft because of the 6" flue. So I added a 4' section to the top and things improved.

when i started playing with the draft on mine and added a damper i could get the draft to .04 - .05 w 18' of 8" pipe. the boiler wouldnt come to temp fast like it did w/o the damper. so i told fred this and he advised that i add more pipe. so i did and it worked still leaving the draft at .04 - .05 . the stove recovers faster. what kind of load do you have against the boiler?

Beans, Mine won't come up to temp with that low draft reading. Big difference, I think, is that I have a 6" flue. The same draft reading will not produce the same volume of air through the stove.
I do have a sizable load, maybe more than I thought. Seems to work better though with the damper, not as much ash. Somewhere, someone had posted a comment about alot of ash built up in the exhaust, almost choking off the draft. I had a similar situation where the ash was in the exhaust pipe to where it was restricted to about half. She was still breathing though, better of course when I cleaned it.

if it is easy to do id try a piece of cheap pipe in the top, i know the theory, but it helped me. how wet is your wood? are you using to much btu drying the wood? do you have access to dry pine logs? those really work good. thats all my father inlaw uses and gets 12 hours out of it, and has cleaned his out once this year.

Beans, more pipe on top of my stack is not an option. My wood for the most part has been seasoned, not green, I did burn some green wood straight off the stump, no problem. But I don't make a habit of it. Seasoned hard wood only. She seems to rip through any really dry wood I put to her in no time. As for dry pine, I don't think it would last nearly as long or produce the amount of BTU's as would hard wood.

is your first floor a concrete slab? how many zones do have? ive read that red pine has more btu per pound than oak. ive also read that oak has the most btu. i can go 8 hours on a cold day with white pine heating 3650 square foot house, 1350 square foot basement, 700 square foot garage and a hot tub. all radiant. id try some dry pine.when the oak i have was real green it would build up coals. id ask fred if you need more draft with a smaller chimney. im sure hes seen this before.

http://hearth.com/econtent/index.php/articles/heating_value_wood

I have a lot of Oak and Pine and there's no comparison. Check this link.

Beans, I have conventional baseboard, I have radiant in one part of the house and the garage. I have 60year old house, part has no foundation(brrrr). I have new addition, I have large insulated garage. My boiler is out at the garage 80' from the house. My system is all over the map. Is your boiler in your basement? If so, that makes a HUGE difference where heating the house is concerned.

my boiler is 250 feet from my house. and for the pine to oak per pound btu's ive read in a beckett boiler instruction book that red pine had a higher btu output per weight. so i dont know who to beleive. all i know is i get pine pulp for free and it works real well. seton boilers were designed around soft wood.

Looking at btu values can be confusing when comparing different sources. One thing to keep in mind that will help to clarify them is that there is a difference between BTU's per weight of wood and BTU's per volume... All wood has about the same amount of BTU's per POUND of wood, with only minor variations, some of which put the pitchy softwoods higher. However the density of the woods varies a lot, as in how many pounds of wood will fit in a given volume, with oak being among the denser woods. If you look at the weights for a cord of a given wood type, you will see a huge difference, and the more pounds per volume the more BTU's.

As I recall, seasoned oak is around 2800lbs / cord, while pine is around 2000 lbs cord - both have the same BTU's per pound, thus you would be getting more potential BTU's out of oak simply because it's heavier wood. Given the same size firebox, you will be able to stuff more potential BTU's into the box with oak than with pine since the critical value is BTU's per volume.

Gooserider

I'll take the mystery outa' it for ya . . . I'll trade you all my pine/hemlock/apsen pound for pound for your oak. In Upstate NY we can turn a full load of pine into about an hour of heat . . . as long as no one takes a shower during that hour. People who use that stupid cliche 'A pound of pine gives as much heat as a pound of oak' obviously have either never burned oak or can't get any for the foreseeable future.

Actually a pound of pine WILL give as much heat as a pound of oak, the trouble is you will only be able to FIT half as many pounds of pine into your firebox at a time as you would with oak. Further, I'd suspect that since pine burns much faster, it might put out more heat during it's peak combustion times than the heat exchangers in the boiler can handle, so you'd have more heat going up the stack instead of getting absorbed and sent into your house... I have no direct experience, but I suspect that one would need to change the way the boiler was setup in terms of air supplies and so forth in order to optimally burn pine instead of oak and vice versa...

Gooserider