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[notnim]

I am now in the second season of my homemade wood stove, and have gotten most of the bugs worked out of the stove itself. I am using it with a water to water heat exchanger for my hot water boiler for the house and another w/w heat exch. for the hot water heater. This part of the system is working good, but I am also using a home built water to air exchanger for my shop with a small blower behind it to move air across the shop floor. I used a series of 3/4" baseboard unit heaters with the aluminum fins stacked vertically to make a unit measuring 4' x 4'. I am not getting much heat from this and was just wondering what others are using for a "radiator unit". I am maintaining my water temp at the unit so I don't think that is the problem.

[beeman]

i was thinking of doing that for a coil  athough some body told me the water is moving to fast to heat up that is why the regular coils have 3/8 fin tube  i made mine from an old a/c coil  i have heard of people using car radiaters   did you make your water to water exchanger  i hope to make one soon for the gas boiler and water heater

[RSI]

Did you run them all in series or make a header? Do you have them solid or gaps between?
Do you have a picture of it?

[notnim]

I am using a 50 plate exchanger for the hot water boiler and a sidearm exchanger for the hot water tank, I found good deals on both of them on e-bay. I do have headers incorporated on the air/water exchanger that I built, and I wondered if the water may be moving to fast for the amount of tube that I have. I have thought about finding an old truck or tractor radiator which would have much smaller tubes and a lot more mass to absorb heat.

[beeman]

i was going to use old baseboard heaters for the coil ideal was to cut them down to2 foot and stack them ontop of each other to make one big coil  i was told the 3/4 is to big eather run with a header or ran 1loop like a big S  the water hase to be slowed down as in restricked to give up the heat  but i plan to try somthing like this for cooling this summer

[RSI]

How many tubes do you have? Water moving too fast is not a problem.
More likely it is mostly going through only a couple of them.

[jackel440]

I am making a temporary hanging heater in my shop ,as I am not going to get my floor hooked up right now.I am using an fork truck radiator and then formed a square transition to the squirel cage fan that I mounted to the transition.I have made a pivot bracket to hang from that will mount on the wall.I have yet to get it finished ,but it is coming along.I will share some pics when I get it p and running.

[bikeralan]

A friend has an old truck radiator with a box fan behind it and works great in his large garage/pole barn

[notnim]

You all have brought up some good points, I have 8- 3/4" baseboard units stacked vertically with about 1/2" between them. They are 40" long each, and they are connected at each end with a common header, also 3/4 in" tubing. The inlet is at the bottom and the return is at the top. I have a bleeder valve at the top return to bleed any trapped air. I am going to take some temp. readings at each section to see if in fact all the tubes are circulating water, It is very possible that some of them may be dead headed with my configuration. Thanks for the ideas on this issue and I am going to try my hand at posting some pics of my setup.

[notnim]

 What is the best way to post pictures on this site? I tried by making them an attachment but the file size is too large.

[Bull]

You can find free programs online to reduce picture size. Windows has some free ones that work very well, power toys are some programs made by microsoft look for image resizer. Google your operating system (xp, windows 7 or what ever you have) with image resizer.
I have posted them here somewhere I think.

[NewToIt]

Can a one 3/4" feed line keep an adequate flow of water to 8   3/4" runs in your heat exchanger?  I bet your are not getting enough flow to each of the lines with the exchanger.

[RSI]

Can a one 3/4" feed line keep an adequate flow of water to 8   3/4" runs in your heat exchanger?  I bet your are not getting enough flow to each of the lines with the exchanger.

If you can divide it evenly it would be fine. The problem is that 3/4" copper will flow almost as much as 1" pex so when you split it into 8 runs it might mostly be going through only a couple of them. It would probably have worked better to do it in 2 sets of 4 in series.
I would get some foam or something and pack it between them. (I am assuming you mean 1/2" between the fins and not fins lapped and fin to pipe)

You can email the pics to me and I will post them if you want.

[willieG]

pic sizing....i jsut open my photos in paint..i think paint comes with every computer lol...open in paint and resize /skew to about 25 or 30 percent that should get you small enough. or post to an online storage place  and just paste the link?

[beeman]

mabe if you run it like a big S  that way it has to go through them all befor going back to stove