New Boiler System

Where do the tires go in?

Nice job!

In the great big door in the front! Anything less than 28" dia will slip right in without a fight.

Also having a 54" deep firebox means bridge timbers, power line poles and railroad ties don't need to be any less than 50" long to fit which saves a pile of processing work.

Doesn't sound like TCM's brother is in much of a hurry (maybe weather related).....the comment about burning tires could be a possibility, the local cement plant here at Portland burns 'chipped' tires...not sure how they're scrubbing the exhaust. My neighbor hauls 5 40' semi loads daily to the plant. Heard yesterday that gov't is pushing for the closing of all coal fired plants as the technology for clean burn too expensive, I guess tires burn cleaner than coal, I'll have to check into this.

Put a couple rubber collars on it, and you could feed it old telephone poles. Think big!

Cool....nice work....but what's all that white stuff all over the ground?

Tire ash!

Nice. Only need H Asme Stamp. Je

Have you fitted any safety devices?.

For heating the house wouldn't that be a long walk to stoke the fire. Unless there is something in those building that require heat be maintained. The lack of heat at the house being a reminder.

no details of safty device is it to be in an open vented system or closed needs to be pressure tested ,what is the total kw needed 1 kg wood equals 4 kw energy less loss by flue gasses to stop condensation, does it have combustion air control once selected temperature is reached,just wondering

"Have you fitted any safety devices?."

It's an open system so it cant build up pressure to any serious degree. The smaller 2" pipe sticking out the top is the vent tube.

Eventually it will have a digital control system with a low water level sensors and other such protection on top of the automatic draft control systems. My brother did not want any of that including the build and wants to design it himself so thats where I left it.

"For heating the house wouldn't that be a long walk to stoke the fire. Unless there is something in those building that require heat be maintained. The lack of heat at the house being a reminder."

Its around 200 - 250 feet so no by us rural folks its nothing. My system is about 350 feet from my house.

"what is the total kw needed 1 kg wood equals 4 kw energy less loss by flue gasses to stop condensation, does it have combustion air control once selected temperature is reached,just wondering"

It will have a dual draft system that blows air in through the holes on the inside of the door plus up through the base in the bottom. Again he wanted to make that himself but if it was designed as I intended it should be able to easily put out at least 500K BTU with good wood.

That said being a wood fire can't be shut off completely the control systems I design have an automated automatic high temp limit point that when reached during idle times automatically overrides one of the heating load thermostats and dumps the excess heat that way. If he is running the house off it the garage circuit would be set up as the excess heat dump point.

My brother tells me his only needs to be recharged with wood every 12 hours.

Of course he has the luxury of burning only hardwood. _{(No tires)}

Given his estimated heat loads thus should be able to run 8 - 12 hours between loads burning they typical woods we have around here.

Granted he wants to burn pallets primarily of which do not stack in al that well so he will likely have to load it up a few times in a row to get any decent volume built up in the firebox.

It's how I have to do it when I burn pallets being one good pallet is only about 1/2 to 3/4 of a cubic foot, 35 - 50 pounds of wood.

I just did the design and fabrication part. It's up to him to figure out how he wants to use and control it!

Well it's going on its second week of sitting right where I left it.

The thing was he had a fit that I did not have it done soon enough but now that it's done it's doing less than what it did in my shop!

Some weeks being self employed is just like working at a real job.

He did a light fill and heat test Sunday and found three pinholes that needed welding.

Today I bought it back home and rewelded the the bad spots. After that I filled it up with water and wood and it is presently doing the full burn and boil test!

I do have to say venting somewhere between 500 and 750K BTU's as steam in -2 F dead calm conditions with the sun going down is a pretty impressive site to watch!

Interesting secondary effect from doing the full burn and boil test last night.

This morning I went out to see how much water it lost, 6 - 8 inches, doing the hard boil test last night and saw that the whole boiler settled into the ground about 4 - 6 inches all the way around it!

I didn't put much thought into where I set it yesterday but I had it sitting almost perfectly over the trench I put in last fall for the new boiler lines going from the shop to the basement for the new house and the line to the old house.

After having had a good hot fire over it all night I melted the 6 or so inches of ice that was over the trench plus took the frost out of the ground as well causing the roughly three ton boiler to sink into the soft fill dirt in the trench!

Fortunately it opened up the trench enough that when I drained it down to move it all the water went down in the trench instead of running out all over the driveway.

Just move it over onto that other piece of property you wanted to thaw out! Two birds, one stone.

Tempting but I already hauled it back over to my brothers and we set it where it will be staying for the rest of the winter. I think he is setting it up now.

I got to say the old MF 202 tractor forklift I traded old warehouse forklift for last fall is by far the best thing I got last year! It's been the most used machine I have all winter.

It sure made this boiler build easy from start to finish.

We finally got it hooked up to his building last night! First run went extremely well.

At a 200 F boiler water temp we were warming up his building at a rate of 1/2 a degree F a minute!

Unfortunately he has no control systems so the circulator pump for the air heat exchanger and the floor heat run constantly so I expect that his building should have been between 100 - 120 F inside by this morning.

We will definitely be burying lines to his house and garage next spring. My boiler design makes way too much heat way too easily to just use it for one small building!

For another follow up it survived a full solid freeze up this weekend.

I wont say who exactly, but not me, didn't load it up for about three days while we had - 20's with wind for a few nights in a row and froze his whole building heating system solid.

That burst one pipe that we know of in the building so far but the boiler as a whole wasn't phased by getting froze solid.

BTW did you know that heat tapes only work if they are plugged in? (That's a different but sort of related anyway story)