Heating with Oil, Wood, and storage

[joecool85]

Why? You married to that Oil Co. or something?

If they don't want to keep your business why not just tell them that you'll be happy to take it somewhere else? (One of the nice things about oil co's is that there are lots of them, and they tend to be pretty competitive - unlike our natural gas or electric company where you have ONE vendor to get service from, whether you like them or not...)

Unless the oil co in question wants to pick up the tab for installing a fully redundant system, I certainly wouldn't let them force me into such a setup... I'm willing to bet they are hoping to price you out of doing the WB install so they can keep selling you oil...

Actually your setup does look pretty much like a standard install - it isn't often that we would suggest someone do duplicate HX's, as generally it is far better to save the extra expense, and instead set things up so that you get flow in both directions through the same HX...

Gooserider

We don't want to lose our contract because over the past 18 months we have paid $340 for the plan and they have done $2400 in parts and labor. Our old oil boiler was installed by an incompetent plumber. The other nice thing about keeping it separate is that if you got a random leak somewhere, only one system would bleed down and you'd still have heat on the other. Also, if one system is down for maintenance you still have heat. I like redundancy in important systems (as a webmaster, I frequently have 4 backups of various versions of each site I am working on). It wouldn't be a fully redundant system either. The system we have now won't change and the new one will just be two K120 kickspace heaters, putting out a combined 21,000btu. One in the kitchen, one in the living room. Wood will run that for the first year (till I am happy the old 1978 boiler is in good shape), then the oil will run that and wood will be plumbed to current system.

 

[WoodNotOil]

You should look at a Primary/Secondary piping arrangement. That would make each boiler and the tank each on their own isolated secondary loop. That may satisfy you oil company and provide a lot of flexibility. If you do it that way, check out the way I plumbed my tank to allow pumping in either direction. It is an inexpensive solution and would work well on the tank loop in a P/S piping scheme.

 

[joecool85]

You should look at a Primary/Secondary piping arrangement. That would make each boiler and the tank each on their own isolated secondary loop. That may satisfy you oil company and provide a lot of flexibility. If you do it that way, check out the way I plumbed my tank to allow pumping in either direction. It is an inexpensive solution and would work well on the tank loop in a P/S piping scheme.

If it is tied in at all the oil company won't do the service contract. They also won't do a contract on a wood/oil combo unit. At first that bothered me, but now I'm liking the idea of two separate systems.

 

[WoodNotOil]

You should look at a Primary/Secondary piping arrangement. That would make each boiler and the tank each on their own isolated secondary loop. That may satisfy you oil company and provide a lot of flexibility. If you do it that way, check out the way I plumbed my tank to allow pumping in either direction. It is an inexpensive solution and would work well on the tank loop in a P/S piping scheme.

If it is tied in at all the oil company won't do the service contract. They also won't do a contract on a wood/oil combo unit. At first that bothered me, but now I'm liking the idea of two separate systems.

That would mean having duplicate heating zones? That just seems like a waste of time, money, and space... What exactly do you mean by two separate systems?

 

[joecool85]

That would mean having duplicate heating zones? That just seems like a waste of time, money, and space... What exactly do you mean by two separate systems?

The current system has two zones of baseboard heat, one upstairs, one downstairs. The "new" system that will be tied to the wood, will have one zone that consists of two kickspace heaters (rated at 10,500 btu/hr each at 180F - enough to heat our entire house until it gets below 5F or so) and a 30 gallon dhw tank with a sidearm (preheating water before it goes through the oil boilers dhw coil). So you see, it isn't two complete systems.

After a year or so if the 1978 Memco has proven it is worth keeping, we will re-plumb so that it has thermal storage (where the dhw will come from as well as opposed to preheating then going through the oil boiler) and it will run the "regular" two baseboard zones and the oil furnace will only be hooked up to the two kickspace heaters. The oil will be shut off during much of the year and used only as backup for 4-5 months out of the year. It won't use hardly any oil because it will no longer have a low limit set on it (no more dhw coil, no more low limit) and will run at 180F only when the kickspace heaters are calling for heat. They will only call for heat when the house gets down to around 60F. The rest of the time the wood and storage will take care of the load.

Clear as mud?