Help! Installation questons

[JakeGr]

Hope some one can help! I have an Eko 40 hooked up (no storage) and running as we speak. I had someone else do the install for me because of the amount of free time I have. So anyway, back to my issue. My gas furnace keeps running anytime the house calls for heat. After looking around at pictures of other setups, their Eko feed and return are right before the existing furnace on the return side, which makes sense. Here on my system it was installed so that the feed from the Eko is hooked up to the feed from the furnace after it leaves the furnace and runs to the zones, and the eko return is connected to the existing furnace right before it enters the furnace. Is this hookup wrong and the reason the gas furnace keeps kickin on.

Another question... My thermostats are connected right to the gas furnace. When a call for heat comes in the gas furnace starts and runs until it hits the desired temp and shuts off. Can I leave this current setup but somehow connect the two furnaces with thermostat wire and make them run together? Or am I better off changing the way the Eko is connected to the system? (Feed and return on the existing boiler return side).

Hope this all makes sense.

 

[Jersey Bill]

A system diagram would go a long way to understanding what you have, But I guess there is a hot water coil from the eko on the gas furnace.
At first pass I think that you need to "lock out" the gas burner when the wood boiler is hot. The other thing to do is to turn on the blower when the wood boiler is hot.
I dont think that you should rely on the t-stats because if they are all satisfied, the wood boiler will have to shut down. When a zone calls for heat, the wood boiler will take a while to come up to temperature, so it might blow cold air. Typically air systems will cycle off and on every 5-10 minutes. This is not good for a wood boiler with no storage.

 

[solarguy]

Although you've refered to it as a furnace, your description of the piping connections leads me to believe it's a boiler.

The reason why your gas boiler is running is most gas boilers only have a high limit aquastat.
So on a call for heat your gas boiler does not know there's another heat source connected to it.

The bottom line here is you have a control problem that the local knucklehead, your installer, did not address.

The simplest thing to do would be to take the 24 volt wiring from your zone control that connects to the TT on your gas boiler control & wire it thru a single pole, double throw toggle switch. You'll need a ciculator relay to do this. Off of one side of the switch wire it back to the TT on your boiler control, the other side of the switch to the TT on the circulator relay. Connect the circulator on your Eko boiler to this relay.

The down side to doing this is you have to manually choose between wood boiler or gas boiler for your heat. Also, you'll have to be careful with your wood boiler because that circulator will not be running continously & you could go into an overheat mode.

The other question you need to address is, did the local knucklehead install a heat dump off the Eko? Sorry for being abrasive, I get very frustrated w/ people that are willing to take your money
doing tasks that they are not qualified to do.....

 

[JakeGr]

Thanks, Yes your right. My mistake, it is a boiler that I have. I figured that keeping things as is, the only option would be to run either one boiler or the other, and like you said with the wiring. Long term though, I wanted them to both run parallel, so that my wife wouldn't have to worry about "the thing outside", and she would always have heat. My next question is then, if I go and change the feed and return from the wood boiler and move it to the cold return on the gas boiler, it should work the way I had intended? the call for heat comes and the gas boiler sees the return water at 170 (hight limit set at that) and never kicks in, and just circulates it through the house and then returns it back to the wood boiler.
My knucklehead who won't be employed by me anymore did put a dump zone in. Where in NH are you?

 

[solarguy]

You do not have to change your piping to accomplish the way you want your system to operate.
You just need the right controls to make this happen.
We're located in Greenfield