owb tip

[ktm250rider]

I load when the fan comes on and the fire is burning. Hardly any smoke that way. Ive tried to load it under idle but the box is full of smoke. Im gonna hook up a signal light to the blower so I know when its firing so I can head out to load it. Right now, I judge by the smoke output. Would also like a remote temp gauge so I would know when or for how long it has been firing. My temp gauge is on the back side of the unit becuase of the way I positioned it. Woodmaster should have an option for the control panel on the left or right.

 

[Al Smith]

All I have is just a fancy insert woodstove with a glass door.I use it because for all intents and purposes the heat,not counting the labor is free.I imagine I save about a thousand bucks a year,more or less.

You folks that have outside burners obviously spent the money because you keep the mess outside and only stoke it once or twice a day.You can heat the house,shop,water,what ever the system will handle.All OWB 's use a bunch of wood,just the nature of the beast.If you want to run the temp higher,no big deal.What's a cord or so more a year when you are already cutting about twice the amount of the rest of us are.

Now I know or have heard of people buying the wood they burn in those things.That makes about as much sense to me as carrying water in a sieve.If that were the case,why pray tell lay out all that money when the old gas,propane or oil burner does the same thing with less hastle.???

 

[windthrown]

Now I know or have heard of people buying the wood they burn in those things.That makes about as much sense to me as carrying water in a sieve.If that were the case,why pray tell lay out all that money when the old gas,propane or oil burner does the same thing with less hastle.???

Well, in our case we have no oil, propane or gas heat. It was all electric. If we had to buy wood, it would still be cheaper to burn cord wood in the OWB at say, $150 a cord for oak than to heat the house with electricity. And we only pay 10 cents a KwHr. As rates go up, the more it makes sence. We also have all the wood we could possibly burn in 3 lifetimes here. Psssst: Its grows on trees... Also this house would be impossible to heat with a fireplace or insert. There is no central heating; it was already plumbed with a hydronic floor heating system. So... the OWB was the only real choice. I also looked at using pelton wheels to drive generators on the streams, and running that to the house, but that would only supply about 1,000 watts per wheel. I also looked at wind generators, as the neighbor has them up the road from us (he is totally off-grid). Expensive that. They will never pay for themselves. He relies mainly on a diesel generator for power up there and a central fireplace for home heating. He should have gone with propane. But hey, that's him and I am me.

If I had built this place, I would have designed it around a Russian fireplace and I could burn 1/3 the wood that we do now. Impractical to retrofit it with that type of massive brick structure. We also have an EPA insert fireplace with outside air supply. But that, at best, only heats the living room, and actually uses more wood than the OWB. I have tried heating the house with that... not always the most efficient solution. I know people that bought a Greenwood wood gassifier too, and after using them, wished they had bought a Central Boiler OWB like ours. We do not have the indoor space for a non-OWB boiler like the Greenwood or Tarn. We also have solar heated water for summer months, and it pre-heats the water in winter on sunny days. The few that we get anyway. I would also have built this house with more windows facing south, with insulated shutter systems to cover them in summer and on cold winter nights. Too late for that. And I would have added a chill-chaser to the solar water heating system for house heating. I may still do that.

So yes, sometimes it makes more sence to do things outside the box, as it were. The OWB is outside with the wood, and the bugs, and the bark, and the smoke and fumes and creosote. The thing can burn up completely and the house will be fine. We add wood in the morning and again at night. It becomes a ritual. We also fell a lot of trees here anyway, and have to burn them in a slash pile or in the boiler. May as well heat the house! We also are a lot more confortable with eth OWB; we can set the house to any temp that we want. 70 is typical. 75 if we want to run around the house naked. 80 if we want to have a Christmas Hawaiian Party. Its as simple as turning the dial on the house thermostat. Convenient? Yes...

 

[Al Smith]

Well Windthrown,the subject of a Pelton undershot turbine wheel is quit a topic of conversation.Likewise is the subject of strictly electric heat,of which I might add,I have.

I have a leg up though so to speak due to the fact I have a geothermal heat pump but still burn the wood.

Mother earth news many years ago had an article of using a Pelton undershot in conjuction with a 3 phase induction motor for a hydraulic powered generator,very interesting.It would work nicely in the PNW depending on the flow of the stream.

 

[beerman6]

I load when the fan comes on and the fire is burning. Hardly any smoke that way. Ive tried to load it under idle but the box is full of smoke. Im gonna hook up a signal light to the blower so I know when its firing so I can head out to load it. Right now, I judge by the smoke output. Would also like a remote temp gauge so I would know when or for how long it has been firing. My temp gauge is on the back side of the unit becuase of the way I positioned it. Woodmaster should have an option for the control panel on the left or right.

Thats funny,as I'm reading your reply,I'm looking for a 110v pilot light I can install on my OWB...

Mine has a temp guage on the front of the stove but,I would like to have one in the house hallway as well.I havent had much luck finding one that will work.

 

[windthrown]

Mother earth news many years ago had an article of using a Pelton undershot in conjuction with a 3 phase induction motor for a hydraulic powered generator,very interesting.It would work nicely in the PNW depending on the flow of the stream.

Yah, I have looked pretty close into that. I used to post a lot on the MEN ferum, but got a lot of junk email and spam, and even people coming up here trying to sell us stuff. I have since flipped over here to AS. Here in the county I live in, there is an electric co-op, and no one has yet been able to hook up to the grid and sell excess electricity. Politics and permits, etc. I do not want to be the first. The converters and syncs and cut-off-breakers all cost too much, and the supply from the streams we have are seasonal (the ones with a good drops, or head, are anyway). People have done it farther north of here, but the pay-back is really really long term (20 years or more). A guy electrified a farm outside of McMinville I think it was, that got a lot of press. He is on grid, but said it was not worth it. Had to build dams and expand the system 3x what he originally planned to get any reasonable ROI.

The good thing is that when we have good stream flow, like now, we also need the most heat and electricity for lighting. I designed an off-grid DC system for direct heating. Simple; one pelton generator for each 1,000 watt DC heater. For storage, use a water tank to heat up. The cost was too high though, compared to free wood heat. The OWB will pay for itself in 2 more years. Storage is the issue with generators too, if you are not on grid or do not connect to it. More costs. We are on grid for electrical supply and I augment that with the solar and OWB heating systems. The electric heaters have been off for over 2 years now.

Heat pumps are rather effective here, as we have far milder weather in winter than you do. We also have several supplies of water that we could use for heating and A/C from several wells and springs. Water is what we have a lot of here. Some people sold my girlfriend and her ex-husband here a bill of goods when they built this house. It prohibitively expensive to heat conventionally with electricity. They sold her an electric boiler and a hydronic loop, and said it was the cheapest way to go. Propane would have been half the heating cost. No NG here. Could also have gone with heating oil I suppose. The solar water heater is effective, and has already paid itself off. Rather fancy unit. I was able to tap into that and the electric boiler with the OWB. It was a design challange, but it works, and works reliably. Not the most efficient, but we have gobs of cord wood along with water.

 

[windthrown]

I've been reading about Russian fireplaces for 20 years or so. I love the idea! ...but I'm in the same situation as you are as far as owning one.

A couple that we know south of here up by Crater Lake built one in their house. It is an old farm house with light insulation. They ripped out a common wall in the center of the house and cut the floor out for a 10 x 5 ft area. Then they poured a slab, and built the fireplace above it and hung the flooring joists to Simpson hangers mounted into the fireplace. The fireplace replaces the wall, basically, and radiates heat out into the house, not unlike our radiant hydronic floor loop. It has a small iron door at the lower end of one side, and they toss in a few small logs there and burn them a few times a day. Small fires, burn the wood completely, and that's it. The heat and smoke go up and back and forth through the mostly horizontal shafts in the chimney. What comes out the stack is pretty much warm air and no visible smoke. The heat is absorbed by the brick, and radiates out into the house over a long period of time. The drawback is that all the smoke settles and clings to the walls of the chimney, so you get a lot of creosote buildup. For that they have small iron doors at the ends of the horizontal shafts for cleaning. They built one in Montana and say that they went from burning 20 cords there to 8. Somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 of what the burned in a stand-alone outside air supply wood stove.

Here there is just no place to put one with the house design, unless it was an outside wall (not effective). If I get my way and we wall in the carport for a real garage here, I could build a Russian firebox in there on a concrete slab along the common house wall, and gain a lot of efficient heating for the garage and house. Though I would probably just add a radiator and squerrel cage to the boiler return line which already runs through the carport attic area and have all the heat I wanted for far less work. The OW boiler is oversized, and has a second set of stubs built into it, so we can easilly expand it.

 

[windthrown]

We still get MEN, but I don't think we have paid for it in a few years. Run-on subscription or something. They send us traveling sales types and that irks me. Had one here about a month ago. Our driveway is like 1/2 mile long, and the road in here is 10 miles from any main highway. Not easy to find this place, but they always seem to.

I found that if you post on the MEN ferum, you will get tons of spam and weird solicitations. For a long time too. I have not logged in there in over a year now. I had to delete all the info I put in their system. They seem to get information harvested from their ferum rather regularly.

As for their articles, I find them amusing. They seem to target the yuppies and wanna be homesteaders more than the ones that have actually gone out here into the boonies like we have. Solar something is in every issue, and how to build a $1,000 house is in every other issue. Nothing new there, but I flip through it every month for a laugh.

 

[Al Smith]

Mother Earth news started off real well,I subscibed to it.As time went on it became just a bunch of advertisements .What partial articles were written just had a means to steer people to purchase the planes for the projects.It turned into one of the biggest rip offs of the then 20 th century.Too bad because I really enjoyed the first few years of publication.