huffdawg said:
While putting up some sheetrock in the boiler room today I could smell a musky odour coming from my water drain that I installed for the boiler. Then I got an Idea why not use this as a air intake for the boiler? It just drains into a drainage ditch in front of my house . (Its not sewer).
Does anyone have any reasons why not to do this?
Huff
No reason other than the smell it could bring along from the ditch. When the fire is burning it will pull air from somewhere. Usually leaks around doors or overhead doors provide a portion of that.
With super insulated tight construction you can pull all the O2 from a room and smother a fire or worse cause a backdraft where combustion air is being pulled down the vent pipe. Along with the byproducts of combustion like CO. I learned from CO experts this is a main cause of CO poisoning and deaths. It's the reason I am so determined to see CO detectors installed on every fuel burnin g appliances, especially wood burners! Be safe with you installations.
Some or the woodstoves built years back had the ability to pipe combustion air right into them. Keep in mind how MUCH air you need to support combustion, it ends up being a large pipe or opening.
The NFPA and Fuel Gas Codebooks have tables for sizing combustion air, they did scale them back a number of years ago for cold climate conditions. Years ago we were required to provide 1 square inch per 2000 BTU input, both high and low in the room. So 100 square inches for a 200,000 BTU/hr input appliance. Some of the air provided was for combustion, some for dilution air for the divertor hoods to draw properly. Two 10"X10" grills are like leaving a window open regardless if the boiler was firing or not!
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