Well the plumbing project is done. As a little bit of background, we use a corn fed boiler to heat the old fashion cast iron radiators in our house. As part of the boiler it has built into it a "tankless coil" domestic hot water heater built into it. Last year was our first year of heating the house with corn. This year I decided to hook up the water heater part.
We are exclusively using our corn burning boiler for our domestic hot water. It will take a bit of getting used to but it has been working fairly well. The only real problem is the uncertainess of hot water. Normally, if you have a regular hot water heater, and you have power (gas/electricity), and nobody has taken a 40 minute shower recently, you have hot water. Not the case when your hot water supply is tied to your boiler. Tonight was a case in point. The wife wanted to take a bath. Half way through filling the tub, the pumps kicked in to push water out to the radiators in the house and suddenly our unlimited supply of hot water dropped to nothing. Boiler temperature was about 90 degrees, which ain't gonna warm up the domestic water going through the coil very well. Once the boiler temperature is down it takes a while to come back up.
1 comment:
Here is a solution I used to stop the problem of running out of hot water with the corn boiler...
Number one, You should have high and low limit controls on the boiler ..If you set them to 160 degrees on the low and 180 degrees on the high with the difference set at 20 this will not let your boiler get so cold that it will not heat the domestic water ..
Number two plumb the to boilers in so the corn boiler is always circulating between the two this will give you twice the water volume and more water to heat with ..Maybe it is plumbed in a series just checking....
Number three, Circulate the water from the domestic coil to your existing water heater that way you will always have a reserve for back up ,But you must use a bronze circulator for this application.. Pull the water out from the buttom drain on the heater and back in on the top where the pop off valve is..
Works good for me thought it may help ,I'm sure there are other ways but this is what works for me thanks ....
Post a Comment