Playing with fire

[tom in maine]

We are working on a simple pellet boiler that is passive. No pumps, augers, or fans.
It would gravity feed into the burner and dump all the heat into a tank.
The concept would work best with smaller houses or homes with small heat loads.
Obviously, it is a batch fed unit that has to burn out the load put into it, but that keeps it simple and hopefully, inexpensive.

A lot of work has been done on this, this is just our spin.
Here is a video of our first trial which was made of sheet metal and worked pretty well.

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The full boiler is in the works and should be in my hands in a week or two. It is similar to the stick wood unit that we did a couple years ago.

 

[Tdiguy]

I am really curious as to how this turns out. I would think without a blower that fire will have a lot of smoke to it.

 

[goosegunner]

Tom, what ever happened to the small boiler that you were making?

If I remember right it was a stainless steel, top load. Did you ever get those approved for sale?

gg

 

[tom in maine]

We have not yet done anything with the stick wood boiler.
Been testing it for two winters now. Am using the heat exchanger design for the pellet unit.
The test unit will be steel but the final design will be all stainless and will be tied to our tanks as part of a package.

It costs a lot to get these units certified for sale in the US. We might offer the components as a kit. (My lawyer is cringing!)

 

[Tdiguy]

The problem selling it as a kit would be that you do narrow your market down even more. Even if it is very easy to assemble and any fool can do it some people would be hesitant and i doubt many insurance companies would be ok with such a thing. Maybe sell it to Canada until the costs for testing are less of an issue? Course i say that but i have no idea what testing standards are in Canada.