Going through too much wood

[Nevinmack]

hi there - we have roughly a 2000 sq.ft house. We use a NTI 100,000 btu boiler. This is our third year of homeowners and man do we go through the wood! Instead of 8 or 9 hours of burn time, we are lucky if we get 3 or 4 hours. Few questions - how do I know when I found the right damper setting? Below the "main air vent" amither damper is hooked to the same chain, that one never opens , should it? Lastly, can I hook up a storage unit to this unit?
Thanks

 

[huffdawg]

have you done a heat loss calculation? what is a lot of wood? You could hook storage up to most boilers. drawing of your system would also help

 

[brenndatomu]

Have you taken a draft reading? If its too high all your heat is going up the chimney...assuming this is an indoor unit...

 

[velvetfoot]

I can't help, but I read the manual that was on the NTI website and I thought it was funny that it said:
"Note:
U.S. Market
Wood boiler requires
barometric damper
installed "

Do most wood boilers have or don't have baro dampers? My pellet boiler required one.

 

[peakbagger]

Yes storage would help. Many manufacturers will not sell a wood boiler without storage. Wood boilers without storage generally run through a lot of extra wood in shoulder season. The problem is that the boiler is always putting out some heat to keep the fire burning. If you aren't using it, the heat going up the chimney. Even worse, the boiler damper is closed when there is no heat demand which puts the boiler into dirty combustion, its a "smoke dragon" stinking up the neighborhood and filling your chimney and possibly the boiler passages with creosote. Put in storage and then you disconnect the boiler operation from the heat demand. Once you get used to storage, the damper rarely gets closed so most of the time the wood you are putting in is going to heat the house and the boiler is running efficiently. A guess is I reduced my wood demand by 25% once I put in the storage.

One caveat is that if you have standard slant fin style radiators and whoever installed them went cheap on feet of baseboard, you don't gain as much as if you have low temperature radiation. I am in this situation. It just means that I have to run the boiler a bit more often. Even in the coldest weather, I can usually get away with one burn a day.

By the way, it looks like a nice basic boiler design.

 

[maple1]

Looks like an ordinary water jacketted boiler?

In that case, it likely is what it is. They aren't very efficient to start with - poor heat exchange.

And talking burn times when operating a wood fired boiler isn't quite the right line of thinking. As increased burn times means increased smoldering and even more inefficiency and creosote generation. The liquid cooled fire box is vastly different than a wood stove.

My old wood/oil unit was likely quite similar. I had to stay up way later at night than I wanted to get that last load in, and get up earlier than I wanted to get the first one in. Plus I was constantly dealing with excessive coal buildup in cold weather. During the day, with a fairly empty firebox (not much coal buildup), and if I was really trying to make some heat, a load of wood would only last 3-4 hours. And leave a big pile of coals behind that didn't make enough heat.

The nature of the beast, so to speak. Boilers with tubes do better, but they also require more cleaning.

But how much wood do you burn in a winter?

EDIT: And, adding storage likely won't help out that boiler very much. I know it wouldn't have helped much if any with my old one, as it could barely put out enough heat to heat my house, let alone putting out any extra to send to storage.