Saw a fellow who I haven't seen for quite some time and the subject of wood came up, thanks to my hat that has the FHC web address on it. He happens to have a wood boiler and certainly knows a lot about wood burning. In fact, he can get almost as much heat from green popple (aspen) as he can from dry oak! This is simply amazing, especially when we know that water does not burn. Perhaps he is onto something? I also heard more than once that this boiler is made to burn green wood. It is amazing how many times I hear that from so many who heat with the OWB and they honestly believe it. I also am certain that perhaps 90% or more of them bought their wood boilers simply because of the fact that you can burn green wood. One more fact that I am certain of is that the manufacturers and sales people do a great injustice by promoting that idea. Of course I'm thought to be the crazy one for hoarding firewood...
Lol. Dennis, I know for a fact that some owb manufacturers used to tout that you needed to use green unseasoned wood to get the best efficiency. The biggest one I know that said that was central boiler. What's funny is that after the EPA came down on the whole Industry, that they don't say that anymore.
These pictures were taken with Jetstream boiler at the middle of a batch burn , burning wood that was less than 7% moisture content definitely not burning any water here ! These are Gasifier 's favorite pictures !
I'm not sticking my nose in my exhaust pipe ! People often believe whatever they need to believe and facts be dammed.
Guessing you did not waste your time trying to set him straight. I've found it best to just nod and think to yourself "your an idiot" truth be known, he has probably never had dry oak.
People have all sorts of false beliefs that become common knowledge (aside from the fact that they are completely wrong). I used to see this all the time when I was heavily into fishing. I would hear things all the time that were just flat out wrong.
I have some lathe board from a 115 y old house that is probably most likely less than 7%. I haven't stuck a MM to it yet but maybe I should now out of curiosity. Boy that stuff burns, I'm glad to get it out of the house I'm fixing up.
The middle. The woodshed is over top of the boiler room with a good cross flow through the wood. Also the woodshed is on the South East end of the attic with the summer wind from the North West so all the hot air from the attic is forced through the wood. The wood can also sit up to four months in the boiler room before being burnt. This all equals some very dry wood.
With some folks there is no sense in confusing them with facts because their minds are already made up.
The chimney guy told me the same thing. He recommends to his customers to cut a green tree and put it right in the own to get a longer burn... Glad none of his customers live next to me!
I get the same heat with aspen as with dried oak. I just burn twice as much of it. You are right Dennis no sense in confusing them with common sense and facts.
This was our first wood boiler (similar in principal to most OWB's) it burned 22 cords in its first year of operation. Things done wrong to achieve this total were firstly burning green wood and secondly plumbed it parallel with the cast iron oil boiler to take advantage of the domestic hot water coil and controls of that boiler. This proved to be a heat draw of 350,000 BTU's a day. This was our second boiler - a cast iron downdrafter. It burned 16 cords a year in the same configuration as the first boiler. Again burning green wood and being plumbed in parallel with the cast iron oil boiler helped achieve this high consumption total. When this boiler had 1000 gallons of storage added to it, its consumption dropped to 10 cords per year. When the high efficiency Jetstream replaced the Tasso, consumption dropped to 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 cords a year enough that our woodshed that could hold 10 cords allowed us to get ahead on our wood and start burning dry wood. The installation instructions that came with the first two Boilers were laid out to make the installation as easy as possible and in my opinion, they never considered efficiency. Also the need to burn dry wood was never mentioned or stressed. The Jetstream manual dedicated three pages of the manual to the burning of dry wood.
