Hydronic wood stove
Some 30 years ago I help install an hydronic system in a house in northeast Texas that used a similar system but went a lot farther: We ran hi-temp PVC thru the slab and out into a coil (radiator) in a 10,000 gallon water tank. Then we hooked it up with black pipe to the fireplace by embedding it into the hi-temp (stove) cement. Added a pop off valve at a low pressure (approx 110 psi) and a pump for backup.
This allowed the water to be heated from the fireplace and due to the temperature difference it move the water thru the system (slab and water tank) by itself. The water heated the slab and the water tank. Once the water was heated your house stayed warm and you had hot water for your home.
Come spring time you turn off the stove and switch the water coil in the 10,000 gallon tank to the sun concentrator to heat the water for the house.
All of this is not hard, just a lot of money!
Kevin Bradway
Keven:
As I mentioned in the article, we designed several systems that used a storage tank. Tank water was heated from the hydronic wood stove which was then circulated later at night to circulate to the home’s floor slab after the fire was out. Most of these tanks were under 1000 gallons since they would be located in the garage, and they took about 4 hours of a really big fire to heat up. If you had a 10,000 gallon tank, it must have taken days to get the water hot, but then you would be able to heat for days without a fire once it was!
We used standard 3/4″ copper which come in 60 foot rolls for our heat exchanger and placed two coils in the tank which kept the water that circulated through the stove and coils from mixing with the water that stayed in the tank. All of our systems required two pumps and three automatic zone valves to re-direct the flows since you need three separate operating modes: stove to tank, stove to house, and tank to house. If you were able to do all this without any pumps or valves, you must have had a really good thermo-syphen effect with your hydronic stove.
Thanks for the description of your very large system.
Jeff Yago
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