Outdoor Wood Furnace Info
All-Purpose OWF Discussions => General Outdoor Furnace Discussion => Topic started by: aarmga on March 06, 2017, 11:15:48 PM
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What's everybody's Honest opinion on the wear and tear to the fire drum by letting the fire go out completely and cooling the fire drum to outside temperature and relighting it on the weekends. Seeing as metal expands and contracts especially with the amount of heat we add initially at startup, does this cause premature wear? I guess I am thinking of it as the same as a gasoline engine. Running it for a long period of time and keeping it at temperature causes less wear on the engine then letting it warm and cool off by taking it on short trips and letting it cool off
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I would think that if you re-lit the fire and just added a little wood at a time to bring the temp up slow it wouldn't matter. But that's just my opinion.
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Figured I'd have more responses than this! Thanks f150.
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An engine isn't really an accurate comparison to a wood boiler. The engine needs time for the oil to lube everything. A wood furnace should be designed to expand and contract with the heat.
Only thing I could see about letting it set cool is if you had a mild steel unit a d let moisture collect in it and rot it out.
A lot of boilers are run with storage where they run full bore and burn the whole load of wood, then shutdown for quite a while. Works fine.
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But from an efficiency standpoint running steady with no shutdown would be ideal. A hot furnace burns cleanest .
Furnaces usually leak from rust from condensation, pinholes (lack of treatment,sludge buildup) or stress cracking (poor design or wrong material).
At least that's what I've seen.