Wood boiler installation instructions

A valve with three ports, Hot, Cold, and Mix. Most valves are adjustable from 80 to F. The Hot port is teed into your primary loop coming from your outdoor furnace. The Mix port goes to your floor heat pump and then to your supply manifold feeding the floor. The return manifold from the floor gets teed back into the primary loop down stream of the first tee. The Cold port on the valve gets teed in-between the return manifold and the tee going back into the primary loop.

These valves work excellent for basements, garages, and smaller workshops as they are designed for fairly low flow. Once you need more than 4 or 5 gpm you should look at injection mixing.

Injection Mixing is a technique that works beautifully for any system from a house to an industrial building. The basic costs tend to be higher for this type of system but there are many added benefits. The primary loop is circulated by the pump at the outdoor furnace and the injection loop is teed into it.

The floor heat loop is circulated by a second pump. The injection pump pulls high temperature water off the primary loop and blends it into the floor heat loop. The injection pump is controlled by an injection mixing controller which speeds up or slows down the pump to maintain the desired water temperature in the floor heat loop. When the room thermostat calls for heat it activates the injection controller.

In the illustration you see the controller sensor on the pipe downstream of the floor heat pump. There is also a sensor on the primary loop pipe just before the first injection tee. The controller is programmed to supply either a constant water temperature to the floor loop or an Outdoor Reset temperature which changes depending on the outdoor air temperature. Most controller manufacturers allow you to use a standard wet rotor circulating pump up to a certain horse power as the injection pump.

This is very handy as they are often the same pumps used in the rest of the system. If your floor heat loop is circulating at 9 gpm your injection pump would need to provide 3 gpm at to F.. The injection pump pushes the 3 gpm of high temperature water into the floor loop and displaces 3 gpm of cold return water back in the primary loop. This cold water gets mixed with the high temperature water in the primary loop and is pumped back to the outdoor furnace to be reheated.

The primary loop must be circulating at a flow rate high enough that you have an acceptable water temperature returning to your outdoor furnace. In order to determine the size of the outdoor furnace, supply piping, and pump, a heat loss calculation should be done for each building to be serviced.

To be precise, these calculations should be done by trained technicians, but for rough calculations, a simplified method is shown here. To start you need to know some basic information about your building and climate conditions.

This number can usually be found by obtaining local weather data for your area on the internet. Gary would like to install an outdoor furnace to heat his house, attached car garage, and work shop. He needs to know the heat load of his buildings in order to decide what size of furnace to purchase. Starting with the Work Shop:. The walls are insulated to an R value and the ceiling to R He heats the shop with radiant floor heat and has insulated under the slab to an R-5 value.

He has double pane windows rated at approximately R-2 and his doors are about R Gary lives near Minneapolis, MN.

Formula is:. Slab temperature for a shop like this should be about 77 F at outdoor design temperatures. Water table levels and soil types can change the floor heat loss dramatically. In this case we will assume Gary has a water table at roughly 8 ft below the floor and has heavy clay soil.

If the level were to be much lower and soil type gravel or sand, divide the Q value by 2 for your Total Floor Heat Loss. His shop may exchange about half of its air volume every hour. To calculate how much heat he is loosing through infiltration we use this formula:.

This calculation changes dramatically based on how the area is heated. If his shop is heated with a radiator and fan unit heater the figures would change considerably. We would loose less heat from the floor but considerably more heat from the walls, ceiling, and overhead door due to the high air temperatures in the upper part of the building.

In that case, if the thermostat was set for 65 F the ceiling temperature in this shop could be 75 to 85 F. Properly sized piping and pumps are necessary to supply adequate heat to a building. Once you have completed your building heat loss calculation you can size the pipe and pump to supply the heat.

There are a couple pieces of information necessary to do this with success. You will need:. Gary needs to run pipe underground from his outdoor furnace to the shop to supply the heat. Gary is going to be using insulated Kitec piping to accomplish this task and has acquired this pressure drop chart showing the flow specifications for the pipe. Typically between 20 and 40 F. Gary is targeting a 30 F. Delta T for this circuit which is acceptable for both the outdoor furnace as well as the radiant floor heating system in his shop.

Gary needs 4. When selecting the size of pipe it is important not to go too small or, in some cases, too big. It is best to target between 2 and 4 feet per second velocity for these primary lines feeding a building.

If your velocity is too high it causes excessive friction between the water and the pipe which also increases the size of pump required to deliver the amount of water you need.

This higher friction can, in some extreme cases, cause the pipe to erode and wear out. If the pipe is too big your water velocity drops and you may have trouble getting the air out of the system on start up as the water will be moving too slow to purge the air.

This would still work but it may be a little tough to flush the air out. We need to know the total amount of head or pressure drop this whole loop will create in order to size a pump. In order to obtain this unit of measure, take your psi and multiply it by 2. Gary has 2. Now we know what size of pipe we are using and how much water we need to carry so we can start the process of sizing the pump.

We need a pump that can produce 4. Now the chart above shows several models of pumps but many of the smaller ones are not designed for this application. We will look at the models and We need to plot the point on the chart where our flow rate intersects our pressure drop in feet of head.

On the bottom of the chart is gpm so draw a line straight up from approximately 4 gpm. Now from the left side draw a line horizontally from roughly 6. Where your two lines intersect is your pump target. In order for the pump to be able to satisfy your demand your pump target point must be under the line shown as the pump curve. If we look at the curve of a pump it can make up to about 11 feet of head at zero flow, and it can move up to 23 gpm at zero head. We need only 4 gpm at 6. We could also use the and have the potential to overcome more head if necessary.

When choosing a pump you want to be big enough, but not too big. As the flow rate increases so does the pressure drop feet of head and so here we may actually get 6 or 7 gpm through the loop which only means that our water will come back warmer to the outdoor furnace.

One other thing to keep in mind here is how high you need to lift the water in the piping loop. If your piping goes higher than the water level in the outdoor furnace you need to add one foot of head for every foot your pipe is higher than the water level in the furnace.

This is only needed for filling the system as once the pipe is full the weight of the water in the pipe going down offsets the extra push needed to lift the water up. A common misconception is that if your piping goes higher than the expansion vent on your outdoor furnace the water will run out of the top of your expansion vent.

This can happen, but is very easy to prevent. If our pump is sized properly we should be able to close the valve on the return line and, with the pump running, open the manual air vent and purge any air that has collected there. If the air vent was then opened air would suck into the vent and allow the water to run back into the furnace.

If the furnace was right full, the water would push out of the expansion vent on the furnace. Allowing your outdoor furnace to heat your domestic hot water is just one more way of cutting back on your energy costs. These components often pay for themselves faster than any other part of the heating system.

Brazed plate, or shell and coil, heat exchangers are compact, safe, and offer very high heat transfer rates. There are a few things to consider before incorporating one of these units into your domestic water circuit. If you are using any other type of antifreeze automotive or ethylene based glycol's or any type of additives that may be harmful for human consumption you need to make some changes. Although heat exchangers are designed to keep your heating fluid and your domestic water separate, a leak is still possible.

As unlikely as it is, especially when using an outdoor furnace in an open system, a leak could cause your heating fluid to mix with your domestic water. If you are using the wrong fluid this can cause harm to humans or animals that consume this domestic water. Now connect the Pex pipe. Simply push the pipe all the way in until it seats.

The Pex pipe is shown attached here, and the job is complete! Boiler hookup for baseboard and radiant heat with plate exchanger. Write to Ted at:. Heat Exchanger Prices. Modine style Hanging Heat Exchangers.

Unit Heaters - Hanging Heat Exchangers with fan. Air Handler. Tube and Shell Heat Exchangers. Insulated Underground Boiler Pex Pipe. SharkBite style Pex Pipe fittings. Water Circulation Pumps.

Wiring a Water Circulation Pump. Installing a Water Circulation Pump. Outdoor Boiler Hookup Kits. Wood Boiler Installation Instructions. Underground Pre-Insulated Pex Pipe. Outdoor wood stoves don't smoke more than an indoor wood stove. A few of the commonly asked questions I receive are, "How much power should I bring from my house to the woodshed?

And how many water lines? And what should I put in the trench before I actually put my stove down? I also run two zones of water lines to my house that is about 3, square feet. This was done not because I wanted to run two zones of water lines to heat the whole house because I can't do that with just two sets of water lines. I wanted to do this because I also have a water pool that I've set up and I heat with my wood furnace.

Also, I wanted to be able to heat my garage. I have a nice three car garage, where I keep all my tools, cars, and my toys. Now I have more heat than I would ever need, and that's the reason I ran two zones of water lines. With that apart of your thought processes, what will you want out here?

Identifying your preference when you're digging that trench will help you only have to dig it once. So the wood shed, as you can see, has a nice greenhouse roof, and it provides a nice lighting. Believe it or not, the unit doesn't provide too much heat. This building ends up being around 55, 60 degrees, so it's not all that cold. What I will do is I'll first come over here and I'll hit this timer switch so it turns on for 5, 10, 20 minutes and then it turns off.

When I open the unit some smoke will come out but it will also make it tolerable. So I'm not breathing in all the smoke. So I'm going to turn that off. As I previously mentioned, I wanted plenty of lights in the greenhouse. Above you can see I have my light switches that have lights in outside the buildings. I did this so when the kids are playing in the summer or fall, I actually have lights outside. I also added in lights inside the greenhouse to provide more ambient light along with plug outlets and everything else.

This way, if I'm working in here I can have outlets to use. The shed also serves a variety of different purposes. One of them being I store a lot of my tools in here. In the image below you can see a picture of my old military generator that I use if the electricity goes out. This ensures that I have plenty of power to run my whole house if necessary.

In my case, I thought two years was an ample amount of wood. Hindsight twenty-twenty if I were to do this again, I would probably change it to a years supply of wood for the wood boiler. Potentially a little bit more depending on how bad the winter is. Now there will come a point where we will need to remove the ash from the wood boiler. I remove the ash by opening the door, in the image above, and I take a garden shovel and empty the ash into bucket of my backhoe.

Then I let it sit in the backhoe bucket for a couple of days, and then I dump it into my gardens. The charcoal and the ash is fantastic for the soil. It's a great thing to put into your garden. If you're burning any material with nails and stuff like that, try not to put that in your garden because that will your gardens soil.

When I put the stove in I talked about the design of having one main beam going across the whole building here. So I can take out this wall easily, with just cutting some simple nails, and then I can just slide this thing out, which will allow me to take this whole furnace out through here. And I actually put the furnace in before the roof was in, but before the front was in.

So this was just the foundation. In my case, which I don't recommend, is I didn't pour concrete, but I put solid concrete blocks and then put the floor this way. As you can see here, the amount of ash, and dust, and things that fall onto it, it's a constant clean up battle.

However, if you left it dirt or wood chips, there is really no cleaning to do. It is important to be careful when you get this much debris on the ground as you're throwing logs in charcoal and red hot will come out and land in the area. And you can actually see some of them where I actually will step on them and put them out.

This debris here is compressible which means you can start a fire. Please be careful about what you do to make your area clean so that if sparks do come out, you do not create a fire. One of the other things that I found very beneficial when installing an outdoor wood furnace, depending on how many pups you have, put an external light switch on the back of the furnace where you can turn the pump on and off. When installing your furnace, keep in mind the direction of the winds during heating months.

Try to place the furnace in an area where smoke will not be a problem for yourself or your surrounding neighbors. Also, keep in mind that you will want an easy access to your furnace to feed and stock wood. Under normal conditions, four cement blocks are all that is required to support the furnace.

Blocks should be at least 6 inches wide, 10 inches long, and 4 inches thick. Under very soft conditions larger concrete blocks may be needed. For model the pad should be no less than 5 feet wide, 6 feet long, and 4 to 6 inches thick.

For the model , no less than 6 feet wide, 7 feet long, and 4 to 6 inches thick. Always use a non-combustible base. Remember to always call before you dig!!! The trench should be 24 inches deep and 6 to 12 inches wide. It can be dug with a shovel or a backhoe. Place all the dirt to one side of the trench to allow room for working on the other side.

Place the electric supply in the bottom of the trench and cover with dirt. Remember to always follow state and local codes. The remaining 18 inches of the open trench is where the water lines are placed. Use a one-inch water line with a minimum rating of psi at degrees , such as a pex line , and ensure that your water line insulation has a minimum R-value of eight in order to maintain adequate heating efficiency. If you use poor insulation for your underground insulation you will burn a lot more wood.

This is not the place to cut corners on cost as it will have you incurring more costs in the long term! All the material to do this comes in a kit FK Locate one of the black rubber gaskets, and placing it between the pump and the mounted flange, bolt the pump to the flange.

Make sure the arrow on the pump is indicating the proper direction of the water flow pointing down.