Indoor Wood Boiler Idea?

[SandRidgeMill]

Hey guys, looking for any advice on an idea I have been dreaming up.

Currently I am running an OWB to heat my shop’s radiant floor heat. I have burned about 14 face cord this year which is a little above average for around here considering the mild winter we have had. I am looking to heat the house with the boiler as well. All in all I will be heating around 4000 sqft.

The problem is, I know the boiler is too small to heat both. My “master plan” is to tear the boiler apart (outer shelter), get the boiler down to the bare bones to turn it into an indoor wood boiler.

I want to install the boiler in my shop uninsulated. My thoughts are that it will heat the shop enough just from heat radiating off it, connect my line to the house, and hopefully burn the same amount of wood that i use to heat one building that i would to heat two.

I am looking for any thoughts on this idea, maybe some things I havent thought about or some head scratchers.

Side note: boiler used to heat just the house with about 10 face cord, which is very little for around here. The lines to the house are still in the ground an would be very easy to hook back up.


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[J D]

You can only get the heat out that the boiler is capable of delivering... If you remove the insulation it will heat the area around it but will lower it's rated output equivalently. If it is capable of enough heat you would also have to balance the amount of insulation so the shop gets the right amount of heat. If you really think it has the capacity to heat both areas I'd put it in fully wrapped & remove the insulation a bit at a time until you find the right balance

 

[rancher2]

Before doing anything I would run your plan past your insurance company. When I was boiler shopping eleven years ago I thought about putting a OWB in my cold storage pole shed and heat my shop and house with it. I would be inside out of the wind to load it. Insurance company said the building couldn't be insured or anything in the building because the OWB aren't listed for indoor usage. I went with a Garn that is listed to be indoors and heat my shop and house with it.

 

[SandRidgeMill]

Thanks for the info guys. I will attempt to keep some insulations on. I am not sure how much it around it right now but I dont believe it is very much.

I will definitely be talking to the insurance company first. As far as the Garn; what size did you end up going with and how have you liked it? Also, do you do batch burns or run it 24/7?


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[rancher2]

I have the WS2000 model. The Garn's are set up to batch burn. We its subzero cold and I am heating the shop I have to batch burn three loads a day and that takes nine hours of burn time. The Garn has used more wood than was figured off our propane usage from before. It was pretty good until year nine and I had to spend three grand on a factory weld that failed. As I am writing this I am shut down pumping the rest of the water out of it to get inside and see what has happen this time as I have another leak in a different location. Second leak started almost two years to the day later form the first one. So I am not real happy with the Garn. When you have thirty grand in a system you hope it going to last longer that nine years before the leaks start. I wish I would bought a Switzer instead.

 

[CUCV]

I run my wood boiler thru my oil boiler setup, so when it runs out of wood the oil boiler takes over automatically. This allows us to go away for the weekend or on vacation without a second thought. I heating over 7000 sq ft between my home and shop and technically my boiler was really only sized for 4000 sq ft. The shop is setup as a zone off the house even though it is 300 ft away. The wood boiler loves to run hard and heat the large load, it's not a huge fan of idling when I was only heating the 3000 sq ft home. On the very infrequent super cold days the oil boiler kicks in to help out. It's hard to even tell the oil gauge has moved over the coarse of the winter. I prefer the ability to control the temperature rather than guessing how much insulation to have on the boiler.