Wood burners with boiler how to install

At HVAC. Our product reviews and recommendations are researched and backed by real buyers and industry experts, not dictated by our partners. Central Boiler has been manufacturing outdoor wood furnaces since Based in Greenbush, Minnesota, Central Boiler is the largest outdoor manufacturer of the outdoor furnace. However, the EPA has been heavily regulating the use of the outdoor wood-burning furnaces, making it harder to find options. Read on for more information on how outdoor wood furnaces work and a roundup of Central Boiler pricing and units.

An outdoor wood-burning furnace uses wood to create heat, known as gasification. Outdoor wood-burning furnaces are also known as hydronic heaters. According to the EPA , a hydronic heater burns wood to create heat. The heat is transferred to a liquid anti-freeze solution that is piped into the home to warm the zone.

Burning wood causes smoke and more emissions than other types of central heating fuels. Both systems require a ceiling support box when installing the system through the ceiling. A single wall pipe connects the stove to the ceiling. From the ceiling to the roof requires double or triple wall pipe. Roof flashing has to be used to shed water of the roof.

Then the chimney pipe should extend at least three feet above the peak of the roof. A cap need to be installed on the top to keep birds out of the warm chimney and sparks from leaving the chimney when burning. Purchase these parts and pieces as required.

Just plan ahead and have what is needed when installing. The route of the chimney should be thoughtfully planned out. The proper clearance to any combustible surfaces should be followed.

Selecting the location of the outdoor stove is probably the most important piece of a smooth installation. Here are the factors to consider. Since you will be burning a much larger amount of wood, place the stove near the location of your wood supply. Moving and stacking wood two or three times can be tedious and back-breaking unless it is done with a front loader. You will also be lading the stove times a day. Think this one through carefully! The supply and return water lines will need to be buried.

You do not want to cross: septic system pipes, power lines, water supply lines, or drain lines. All these should be avoided if possible or moved if necessary.

The supply and return lines will generally be connected to a heating exchanger that will be installed in your existing furnace. The furnace will then be used as an air handler. This passes cool air return over the heat exchanger providing warm air to be distributed to the home.

Make sure the location of the pathway for the supply and return water pipes has open run to the existing furnace. Some homes have existing hot water heat that the system can be connected to. This would be a more efficient system but would also require significant planning in the run of piping from the stove to the existing water pipe system. Before you install a wood burning stove, there are many things to consider.

Some of these items were touched on in the article but really need a separate line to make sure you have spent some time thinking about. These are items I have learned over time from practical experience and mistakes I have made. What is your wood supply? Do you have a long term supply of wood such as your own woods or family with a woods. The drawback and this has happened to me is it may not last forever. That woods could be sold or turned into farmland.

Make sure you have options. I did this for about three years because I found out that this furnace right here, even though very easy to access every day, required wood twice a day. It was badly placed, simply because it got in the way of a lot of my kid's activities. If we had a gatherings or parties, it was always the center point, they're always asking me what it was.

This is where I would put it and roll up the underground installation. So where I'm going with all of this? Well, this is how I came to my final position and how I finally built what I call the carriage house for the wood stove. I took the time and the money, and I dug into the hill and built a concrete foundation and a concrete wall to hold back the material and the dirt.

Then I wanted to build a carriage house look. The primary reason for the carriage house roof is that, it gives me more exposure to the southern sun, which gives me a lot more heat to help with drying the wood.

In here, I actually have a greenhouse roof, which we will go inside in a minute, and you're going see how it works. When choosing your location for your wood stove there are a few things to consider. For example, if the wood stove is going to be initiated by itself, and the air currents. By air currents I mean how the smoke is going to react to your house.

As you can see my stove doesn't smoke very much. It's properly done and taken care of, and it's a good quality stove. 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.

If we look at the last two items in the Order of Operations list above we see that the water temperature required for slab heating a basement, workshop, or snow melt area is significantly lower than what we generate from our outdoor furnace. We need to cool that water down before we send it into the slab. One way to do this is to take heat off the water in other areas before we supply the floor as laid out in the Order of Operations.

But what if those heat loads are satisfied and are not taking any, or enough, heat off the water? We need to be sure the water temperature going to these slabs is carefully controlled or several problems can result.

If we have floor heat in our workshop and our thermostat calls for heat and our pump starts feeding F. Very little, for awhile.

Concrete is heavy and it takes a long time to warm that mass up even a few degrees. The conventional thermostat may call for heat for an hour or so before the floor has warmed up and heated the room to the point where the thermostat is satisfied. Now what? The thermostat turns off and the cycle repeats itself, right? If we have been feeding F. This can cause the temperature to overshoot our thermostat set point by several degrees making the room uncomfortably hot.

Floor heat does not only warm up the air in the room but everything in the room as well. These objects, and the building structure itself, act as another heat storage mass. These objects slowly release their heat to the room as the building cools down and this can keep the temperature above the thermostat set point for another period of time. Now our thermostat calls for heat again but the floor has been off for so long that it has lost a significant amount of temperature and it will have to run for a lengthy period of time to start contributing heat to the room.

In the mean time the building continues to loose heat and may actually drop slightly below the the thermostat set point causing things to get a little cool in the room. Now the cycle repeats itself.

This is only one of the adverse effects of supplying water that is too hot to a floor. Floor coverings may also be damaged as a result of this excessive temperature. Hardwood floors can dry out, shrink, and crack. Carpets can loosen and concrete can crack. Needless to say it is very important to control the water temperature going into a floor. Can you control the temperature by just slowing the flow by closing a valve a little? The water will come out of the floor cool but it causes uneven heating across the floor.

The first part of the loop will be excessively hot and the last part of the loop may not be hot enough. Controlling the fluid flow is not nearly as effective as controlling the temperature. We need to keep the flow up to the proper rate to provide even distribution of the heat across the floor and proper conduction from the water through the pipe. There are several ways to accomplish this, two methods we will look at are using Thermostatic 3 Way Mixing Valves or Injection Mixing.

Thermostatic 3 Way Mixing Valves are basically what they sound like. 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.