I made a template for cutting my chimneys through the wall and drilled around from both sides. It made for nice clean holes through the block wall. One chimney will go straight into the back of the wood boiler and the other will make a turn and go to the oil biler. My tanks are ready to go in the house. I'll paint the brackets once they are welded together. Hopefully I can insulate the area they are going into Saturday and get the tanks in house Sunday. The plan is to place the top one in the house with an engine hoist.
haveissues , I see the tanks are in the garage where you have been working on them. Where are they going when you start the install?
They are going into the boiler room of the house. My garage is a couple hundred feet away and down hill so I am going to stack them once in the house.
See below. When the wood boiler is up to temp and no zones are calling for heat the tanks will be charging from top down, reverse through the tank circulator (that will be off while the wood boiler is running and only running if the heat demand is being satisfied by the tanks). The laddomat in the diagram is the loading unit. This is the plan unless I come up with something better in the next couple of weeks.
Made a cart to drive the tanks up like a trailer Drove it up the the sliding door and into the house Stacked the tanks with an engine hoist and a dose of butt pucker. Just need to send the girls away for a few hours so I can weld the tanks together but they are in!!!
looking good. may i make one suggestion: add a second port to the bottom of storage that your wood boiler can pull directly from. and i will do my best to explain why. first, i have mine plumbed similar to your diagram so i am familiar with this shortcoming. the problem is when there is a high demand for heat in the house AND and wood boiler is running at the same time. after your return water to the boiler is above the setpoint for the laddomat (mine is 140* or 150*), the water going through the wood boiler will see in increase in temperature of X* (mine is 20-25). now if there is a high demand for heat in the house, the return water after going through your zones will make it back to the boiler on the warm side. that "warm" water will eventually be above the setpoint for the laddomat and will then go straight through the wood boiler and increase again. this will then continue to build on itself and there is potentional for an overheat condition. your boiler may idle and this is less than desirable. a second port in the bottom will allow the laddomat to pull the coolest water, or maybe a mix of return water and cooler storage water. not that overheat wont happen if you have that storage zone valve closed when there is a call for heat. but most of the time the boiler is capable of producing more BTUs than the house requires so again it will idle and you are missing out on efficiency. here is a pic of the top of my tanks. bottom is similar. mine are parallel. and a shot of my tank temps showing how the bottome of storage (sensor is actually on the T) can be hotter then a portion in the middle of the tank. though this is nowhere near that overheat condition. if i am trying to raise the temp in the house i really need to be watching it. i dont set back the t-stat anymore because of this. hope this is understandable and helps more than it screws your thinking up!
Coal Reaper, Adding a second port is out of the question at this point, at least this year. This did, however, occur to me. I am using a micro controller that I am programing and will be monitoring lots of temperatures including the return temperature from the zones. I suppose I could program it so if the zones are calling for heat but the return temp is too high the zone valve controlling the storage tanks could be opened while the zones are calling for heat. Less heat would go to the zones but the system would cool down.
Or better yet use boiler exit temp. If the boiler exit temp is above 185 (or whatever) then open the storage tank zone valve for 30 seconds to cool the system down regardless of what the zones are doing.
that will certainly work as long as you are comfortable setting up all the controls. sounds like it. what are you using for micro controller? i have an x-300 from controlbyweb. not using it to its full capability yet. it does have 3 relays that can be manual, set on timers, or set point temp for any of the 8 sensors. i will be programming it to turn the fan off before storage tanks reach 200*. also, are you doing anything for diffusers? here is what i made and stratification is great. i question whether or not they are really needed, but i didnt want to have any shoulda-coulda-woulda regrets down the line.
I didn't do anything with diffusers. We'll see how it goes. I am, however, going in from bottom right of tank one, out top left of that tank and then back out the top right of the upper tank like my diagram if that makes sense. Hopefully it will force the water to travel through most of the tank. As far as controllers go, I am going to do it with an basic arduino for now but later will probably switch to this: http://www.industruino.com/ It will be very familiar to me for programing and has a watchdog timer.
Plumbing is done and system is pressurized. Surprisingly, out of the couple hundred or so joints that I sweat I only had 3 small leakers (and 1 union that I forgot to install right above my head). Hope to have the electrical done today and fire it up for the first time.
So it's been almost exactly 2 years since I picked up the boiler on the docks and we are finally heating the baseboards with wood! A new leak sprung up once it got nice and hot but other than that working as planned!!
