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[jerkash]

It has been determined that running your pump continuous is much better for your OWF.  With that being said, everybody looses heat when running pumps continuous when nothing is pulling off of the lines.  In other words, your heat in your house is off, you are not using your hot water, etc.  If you were to install a pump on your OWF that just pumps water from the top to  the bottom or vice versa continuous and you set your other pump to run on demand, wouldn't you save a lot of heat especially people that don't have very good insulated pipe.  Any comments are appreciated

[mlappin]

My Taco Delta T could easily be set up for this by removing the jumper between the HT terminals, but I’d also need an aqua stat on the water heater as I’m using a sidearm and I also have a snow melt that would need a call for heat circuit, already running Logstor so I’m not sure the added complexity is worth the small amount of heat that would actually be saved, might have definitely been worth it with my old underground pipe.

[thompsbren]

Loosing heat is only bad if it happens in spaces that aren't heated. I've got 70' of logstor and the rest of my plumbing is in heated areas. The radiant heating from the circulating water is a cheap way to heat my house and garage. I see your point though if it were a long run in poor quality pipe.

[willieG]

I shut my old home made stove down quite often in the day time this time of year (I mean I shut the circulation pump off and leave the OWB fan on to keep the OWB up to temp) I do this just because my piping in the basement is mostly un-insulated copper and it throws a lot of heat, when the sun comes out and the outside temp gets up to 65 or so my house can get over 70  from the sun, no sense in having that added furnace heat and opening a door or window. also I have 250 feet of logstor in the ground so I figure I am also losing about 3000
 btu per hour this time of year and maybe double that in the winter
 
now if my wife used much hot water in the day I might leave it running but electricity is expensive here in the daytime so we try not to use too much.

with the price increase starting in November we will be (on average) about 23 cents per KWH

[schoppy]

Just a couple of things to keep in mind. For people not using antifreeze in their system you need to be careful about lines exposed to cold temps or not buried too deep if you aren't running the pumps continuously. For DHW users who have it heated with a plate instantly, you will have a long delay to get hot water if the pump doesn't kick on until a call for heat. Best bet to me is to insulate the pipes well and run the pumps.

[mlappin]

When I installed my Logstor last fall we hit a new tile I installed when we replaced the south foundation of the house and also hit the old clay tile that drained the  original foundation before the south addition was added.

Repaired the clay first then let it settle all winter as it was deeper the new plastic drain tile. My Logstor actually had snow on it that never melted off unless the sun was out, I also seen it with ice on it that didn’t melt for several days until the sun came out.


Long story short, spend the money on the best underground pipe you can get and heat loss will be moot.

[slimjim]

I agree 100% Marty and for those of you interested in reducing heat loss when nothing is calling inside the home I might suggest making the wood boiler loop a primary loop that constantly circulates and a secondary loop just inside the foundation to feed the building, the secondary loop only comes on with a call for heat.