New Toy for Huffdawg!

[Fred61]

Part of the reason I'm playing with fan control is to lower the velocity of the flue gasses through the HX tubes and maybe capture an occasional BTU that might have escaped otherwise.

Do any of us really know what the CFM of these blowers is, especially after most of us have fiddled with the speed. I lowered the speed on mine for that reason and to reduce bridging. I also thought I could reduce wear and tear on the ceramics. I think I'm down to less than 50 percent right now. I suspect the flow accelerates appreciably at the nozzle during combustion and the addition of secondary air. We all know what the flame looks like on a propane torch looks like when we block off the secondary air.

 

[rkusek]

Huff and Nofo,
Have you guys thought of doing the mod someone posted here last year? Removing the "claptrap" turb setup on the EKO and using log chain instead. Not only does it make cleaning easy but allows better heat transfer to the water tubes. It's on my list to do. Wondering if anyone else has tried it.

 

[huffdawg]

Yup I have the chain all made up. I wanted to monitor flue temps before and after . Will be installing them soon. I'll be able to tell the difference by the numbers.

 

[Nofossil]

My EKO is old enough so it predates the fancy Orlan turbulators. I have a set of static ones that I had made up. I just pull them by hand when I clean the HX tubes (twice a year). I also have the old controller that doesn't allow any adjustments - that's one of the reasons that I turned it off and now control everything with my Vesta/NFCS. Not only that, I have the flat floor in the primary chamber.

Shouldn't have started down this path - now I feel bad for myself :-(

 

[mr.fixit]

I took the claptrap out last season and have been using the chains.
After reading some of Heatermans post on these new pellet boilers,and how they auto clean the HX tubes on a regular basis,made me think that I should clean my tubes more often. And they burn a more refined fuel than plain old firewood(pellet boilers).
So this season I have been cleaning them weekly,along with cleaning the ash out of the bottom.It only takes about a half hour although it is a dirty job.
There always is a layer of ash in the tubes even after only a week with perfect wood.
Between the weekly cleaning and the maintaining of the nozzle opening size,this thing has never operated better.I am getting into some nice dry wood also.

 

[Nofossil]

I know this is off-topic - my apologies in advance. Of course, this thread has already veered off into the weeds and back several times already.

Mr. Fixit - is it my imagination, or are cabinetmakers WAY over-represented in the woodburning community? I have a ton of cabinet shops as customers - it's almost freaky. Must be the combination of mechanical skill and love of wood......

 

[mr.fixit]

I know this is off-topic - my apologies in advance. Of course, this thread has already veered off into the weeds and back several times already.

Mr. Fixit - is it my imagination, or are cabinetmakers WAY over-represented in the woodburning community? I have a ton of cabinet shops as customers - it's almost freaky. Must be the combination of mechanical skill and love of wood......

Yea that and we just need a way to get some good use out of all the wood scraps.
The other day I stuffed a whole garbage bag of sawdust in the boiler over top of a couple pieces of oak to see how it would burn.
Other than the bag breaking trying to get it in,it burned smoke free,and lasted surprisingly long.
Now I need to figure out a way to package it easily in something that will fit in the boiler door.

 

[Fred61]

After I reported the "claptrap" removal if I remember correctly, Huffdawg appeared to be quite interested so I had assumed that it had been implemented by now. I'm not sure if the chain turbulators are any better than the originals but in just a few minutes I can remove the top and reach down with a hook and pull out the chains. Run the brush down the tubes and replace the chains after slamming them down on a rock outside the basement door. Much easier than unscrewing the side panel and removing all the "claptrap". If anyone has to activate the turb lever to remove build-up, there is something wrong with the way they are burning or they haven't cleaned the tubes in 3 years.

I don't even get my hands dirty now. Vinyl gloves! Bought a couple packages of gloves and keep them on the rack next to the boiler. They must have been overstock from some other planet. One package had 15 gloves and the other had 25. Had to buy two packages to get an even number.

 

[huffdawg]

Thats right Fred , I went out and bought some chains quite a while back, but I was planning on getting a Vesta or NoFo controller at the time and I held off on the install as I wanted to see the difference between the two methods . Prolly pop them in tomorrow . I've noticed im getting up to 700+ on stack temp. Spent a lot of time running around town today looking for a tube brush ... no luck.

What size brush are you using Fred?

 

[huffdawg]

Took me quite some time to get my first rule working. The rule was good but it took me a while to figure out that relay #4 had to correspond with the discrete output #4 . At least that's what I think was the issue . I could tell from physically looking inside the relay box that 4 was closing and not 3. so I switched the conductors to #4 relay and the circ. started pumping. Tested by changing the setpoint numbers a few times. Now i'm going to shut down this damn computer and have a wobbley pop.

 

[Fred61]

What size brush are you using Fred?

wobbley pop.

This may tell you how determined a Vermonter can be.......I actually don't remember what size brush I got but at the time I wasn't able to find the size I needed so I purchased one a little larger. I wasn't able to stuff it down the tubes so I ground it down with my bench grinder. Picture that!

Wobbley pop = fermented fluid?

 

[huffdawg]

The Golden Turbs!

 

[Nofossil]

I bought a brush from Torrington Brush, I think.

 

[Fred61]

I welded a large 3" ring on the end which they rest on and are easy to snag with a hook when removing.

EDIT... I think I used larger chain. What size are those?

 

[huffdawg]

3/8

 

[huffdawg]

I welded the link sideways onto the next ring

 

[Fred61]

That's what I used. They appeared small to me when comparing them to the turbs in the photo.

 

[huffdawg]

Nice! Good to see a screen capture. Have you played with datalogging? If you go to the 'Logs' tab and click on any date, you'll get a spreadsheet of all the temps, inputs, outputs, and variables for the day in one minute increments. You can use Excel (or OpenOffice) to make pretty graphs to see what happened.

NoFo I'm not seeing any dates under the logs tab. just a row of numbers that when you click on them they show some sort of testing you were doing when configuring contoller?

Huff

 

[Nofossil]

Huff, I'll take this one over on the Vesta forum. You should see a series of files with four digit file names - 1121.log is the log for November 21, for instance. Clicking on it should give you a download that you can open with Excel (or your favorite alternative spreadsheet). If that's not happening then I'll post an update.