Oil furnace with pellet insert

[Luvmesomesamples]

So stupid question but I am still trying to figure out the best way to complement my oil boiler with radiators and my harman pellet insert. Since I am cheap I have been using primarily the pellet insert and then turning oil on when I couldn't take my wife complaining. Aprox 2 hours per day maybe? Note my oil thermostat is in the same room as my pellet insert. what I have found recently when it's been really cold is that off I set my oil at 64 my pellet stove heats to about 66 but when I set oil at 72 my insert heats to like 73. I am pretty sure the oil furnace is not running anymore than when I set it at the lower temp except to initially get it to that temp. Does the recirculating air being hotter really make that big of a difference or is the oil furnace just running more and I am not noticing? Thoughts? Btw my house is like 3500 sqft and the stove is located in a 800 sqft room. I am willing to relocate the oil stat, but does anyone have any secrets to best utilize these heat sources? Thanks!

 

[RKS130]

So stupid question but I am still trying to figure out the best way to complement my oil boiler with radiators and my harman pellet insert. Since I am cheap I have been using primarily the pellet insert and then turning oil on when I couldn't take my wife complaining. Aprox 2 hours per day maybe? Note my oil thermostat is in the same room as my pellet insert. what I have found recently when it's been really cold is that off I set my oil at 64 my pellet stove heats to about 66 but when I set oil at 72 my insert heats to like 73. I am pretty sure the oil furnace is not running anymore than when I set it at the lower temp except to initially get it to that temp. Does the recirculating air being hotter really make that big of a difference or is the oil furnace just running more and I am not noticing? Thoughts? Btw my house is like 3500 sqft and the stove is located in a 800 sqft room. I am willing to relocate the oil stat, but does anyone have any secrets to best utilize these heat sources? Thanks!

When temps are under 20 degrees for more than a couple of days I too have to burn some oil to bring the far reaches of the house up to temp. We have an oil fired steam boiler and a Harman free standing. I, in effect, eliminate the thermostat all together. As a rule I have the heat turned off completely, although the burner fires for DHW. When I do want steam, I simply see what the temp is showing on the thermostat, turn on the heat, and make the set point about 3 or 4 degrees higher than the room temp. I then let the oil burner run for 30 to 45 minutes before switching the heat off manually when I am ready. Of course with my beautiful old cast iron steam radiators there is plenty of heat for quite some time thereafter. When we are in the single digits I do this at about 5 in the morning and again about 9:30 at night. We are pretty toasty.

 

[wsar10]

We do this aswell,
We run our pellet stove all the time, and just turn the boiler on in the morning (while getting ready for work) 6-6:45AM. My main reason for this is just to keep pipes well above freezing throughout the whole house and crawl space under half of the house. The T-stat room will be 70* I simply turn T-stat to 80-85 and shut it down manually after the upstairs radiators are warm. I also am fortunate enough to have cast iron radiators that stay warm forever. I think my boiler works allot less even when it is running, due to the radiators sinking heat from the pellet stove, therefore when the circulators kick on the water is not COLD that is being pumped from the downstairs radiators and returned to the boiler for heating.
Currently our heat pump is down.....that's a whole different conversation.........