Re: What's a cord of oak cost?
Holy cow, no kidden! I really appreciate your write up but you are way over my head man, sorry!
My 35 year old Energy Mate wood furnace is about ready to make room for something newer and more efficient.
I was hoping to find something already built in (water jacket deal) or some sort of companion storage tank system ready to be plumbed up.
I did some looking a while back and remember only a couple of manufactures of such an animal. I also remember them being big $$$!
I probably save about $2500ish per winter on LP heating costs and I'd love to have that extend to hot water too, ya know.
Thanks man!
I imagine my boiler would be about 4-5 grand new. It was about 1200 bucks in the 70's. The company that made it folded before the warranty was up, but like I said, I was involved in the design and it's built like a brick sh!phouse.
Most of the wood boilers of the era were dry backed, and expansion and contraction of the unwet back broke them. If you can fine one, (Jensen, Steel King, and others) you can repair it and then convert it to a wet back boiler and it'll last a long time. It's actually pretty easy to fashion a water jacket on the back. Look up ASME stay bolt specifications and put enough of them in the large flat area.
Keep your eye open for an old Buderus boiler. They are a cast iron German boiler that is top shelf, and live forever. sometimes in the spring or summer someone will sell one for roughly scrap iron prices. If you want to make one yourself, a drum in a drum, with both wet back and front is very efficient and easy to build. Fawcett built one like that in the 70's, and they're still around.
The new outdoor boilers have a huge water capacity, making anti-freeze, especially propylene glycol safety freeze prohibitive, so they have to be either drained down or run during the cold weather or they'll freeze up and break. Additionally, they are ventilated atmospheric pressure systems, so they are constantly absorbing oxygen from the air. Boiler water chemistry has to be constantly monitored and adjusted for reasonable life of all the heating system components.
In contrast, a low pressure boiler is sealed to the outside, and has an expansion tank to compensate for increased water volume as it heats up. My 80,000 BTUH wood boiler holds only 30 gallons of water, and the whole sytem about 35. It's filled with 45% propylene glycol anti freeze, a can of boiler water treatment and water pump lube, and a can of stop leak. That's it for the last 5 years. If it has to shut down and go cold, it won't freeze. Also, it'll go from stone cold to heating the house in about 20 minutes.
