Has anyone tried OWB with extra water storage??

[hottubbrad]

I am torn between WG and OWB. I like the fact that with OWB, I can throw any length of unsplit wood into it.
Less splitting and stacking.

Would an OWB fire go out with 500 gals indoor water storage (for example) due to the longer times between heat demands.

Any thoughts or recommendations??

 

[Nofossil]

To paraphrase the old engineering maxim:

'Cost, Convenience, Efficiency - pick any two."

The convenience of burning almost anything and having a long interval between loads comes at the expense of efficiency. There's no silver bullet out there that I'm aware of.

Using storage would allow the boiler to run flat out for several hours. Then, you'd have to let it go out for a while until the storage was depleted. More efficient, but less convenient.

 

[pdboilermaker]

Why would you want to store the heating energy of the wood in water rather than in the wood

 

[sdrobertson]

After using a CB 6048 (400 gallons) and watching others around using smaller OWB (under 200 gallons) it seems that 400 to 500 gallons is just about right for total water storage. With this amount you have enough BTU's to cover larger amounts of draw down. For example, a friend has a WoodMaster with 175 gallons and it handled his house just fine. Now he has added a mobile home to the system and during cold weather it had a harder time catching up so he is adding 300 gallons so the system will have more available BTU's when needed when both systems call for heat.
Note: This is just an observation with no scientific data to rely on.

 

[Nofossil]

Why would you want to store the heating energy of the wood in water rather than in the wood

Because you can get dramatically better efficiency burning hot rather than idling. 'Storing energy in the wood' means burning it much more slowly, usually by idling a lot. Storage allows you to have short clean hot efficient burns, and then live off the stored heat for a while. A lot of storage systems are indoors, so heat that's lost from storage is not truly lost.

I suspect that storage can improve the performance of any wood burning boiler system with the possible exception of pellet boilers. If you're not particularly concerned with getting a clean and efficient burn, then storage probably doesn't make much sense. Storage is much more common with gasifiers because the efficiency boost can be really significant, and gasifier owners tend to be more focused on the clean and efficient aspects of wood burning.