Outdoor Wood Furnace Info
All-Purpose OWF Discussions => General Outdoor Furnace Discussion => Topic started by: bill birks on February 09, 2018, 06:56:11 AM
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good or bad things about them-btu / water temp loss
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I love them, I have two in my basement. Great for drying off wet coats, etc. Take up some floor space though.
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Cast-iron radiators bring back good old memories for me I remember going to great grandma's house and I would sit on top of the radiator It was the warmest seat in the house I have some that I tore out of a school we were remodeling I'm thinking about installing one in the house just for nostalgia
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If I come across one,I would heat my garage with it !
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I have 3 bedrooms and a full bath upstairs. One cast iron heater in one bedroom and one in the hallway. It is toasty. Had them downstairs but most had leaks because the house had sat empty over 2 winters before I bought it. cast irons heat better than all my baseboard heaters put together. They get hot and stay hot.
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Interestingly, just did a job with repurposed cast iron rads, customer got them sandblasted and painted. Homerunned 1/2" pex back to a grundfos 15-58, purged each loop out, and it's heating great on low speed. Love those big beasts.
Fished 1/2" pex 20' through a crawl space about 12-18" tall then under a huge beam using a conduit and fish tape. Would have never run a duct or copper. Fun.
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Interestingly, just did a job with repurposed cast iron rads, customer got them sandblasted and painted. Homerunned 1/2" pex back to a grundfos 15-58, purged each loop out, and it's heating great on low speed. Love those big beasts.
Fished 1/2" pex 20' through a crawl space about 12-18" tall then under a huge beam using a conduit and fish tape. Would have never run a duct or copper. Fun.
I saw someone else say they used 1/2" for a CI rad also. Do they really operate with that low of flow? What happens if a guy runs bigger pipe? I'm kind of doing a rustic thing in finishing my basement with copper bar rails and light fixtures, barnwood wainscot, etc and was thinking about tossing a couple small rads into the mix instead of screwing with my already insufficient ductwork. Just seems like a single loop of 1/2" is underkill for what those buggers are capable of, but I've honestly never dealt with the residential type rads
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thanks for info - just talked to old friend that's has a small heatmor stove -plumed to old farm house- has 1 3ft rad in each room no problems keeping it 70 - no blowers running he said fiils stove once aday - looking for rads - i guess it best to pressure test before inst
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Interestingly, just did a job with repurposed cast iron rads, customer got them sandblasted and painted. Homerunned 1/2" pex back to a grundfos 15-58, purged each loop out, and it's heating great on low speed. Love those big beasts.
Fished 1/2" pex 20' through a crawl space about 12-18" tall then under a huge beam using a conduit and fish tape. Would have never run a duct or copper. Fun.
I saw someone else say they used 1/2" for a CI rad also. Do they really operate with that low of flow? What happens if a guy runs bigger pipe? I'm kind of doing a rustic thing in finishing my basement with copper bar rails and light fixtures, barnwood wainscot, etc and was thinking about tossing a couple small rads into the mix instead of screwing with my already insufficient ductwork. Just seems like a single loop of 1/2" is underkill for what those buggers are capable of, but I've honestly never dealt with the residential type rads
These were hooked up with a dedicated loop to every radiator. A supply and return manifold like floor heat. Each rad gets about 1 gpm full temp water. A series loop would have to be more like 1" and it wouldn't balance well.
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thanks for info - just talked to old friend that's has a small heatmor stove -plumed to old farm house- has 1 3ft rad in each room no problems keeping it 70 - no blowers running he said fiils stove once aday - looking for rads - i guess it best to pressure test before inst
Keep an eye on Craigslist. Sometimes you can get them for free if you tote them out of someone's house.
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I have some slant fins I was going to throw in a few corners of my basement, but there are a bunch of cast radiators on CL in my area. good refurbished ones at that. maybe ill just have to go that route :thumbup:
So your saying the best way to run these is with a dedicated line to each running off a manifold?
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I read about the advantages of piping CI rads with dedicated home run loops while reading on The Wall or maybe Hearth. Made sense to me.
The advantage over a series loop like copper baseboard is each rad heats up at the same time (no lag on the last rad- high mass) same temp water, each has its own valve to throttle or shut off flow, and in mild weather you can turn the pump speed way down and use significantly less electricity without unbalncing the heat distribution.
Smaller rads can even use 3/8" pex, it's more like fishing Romex, but I've stuck with 1/2" cause it's cheap.
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Yoder- I understand the parallel piping, and wouldn't pipe even baseboard in series for the reasons you mentioned. My plan with either 2 or 3 rads was a single 15-58 pulling from the main boiler loop with 1" PEX and splitting into 2 or 3, 3/4" branches to the rads (like radiant), with balancing valves on each rad, returning to a common header back to the main loop. I have no experience residentially with these but commercially everything I've touched gets a dedicated 3/4" or 1" line to each unit. So seeing 1/2" PEX seems like the flow would be quite low and have a very low return temp, possibly not taking full advantage of the rad either? Just thinking out loud but it seems to me that bigger pipe would mean hotter heat and higher return temps
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Would depend on the size of the cast radiator, I've measured some we had and on the charts they ranged in output from 5,000 -10,000 btu's / hr. At a 20 Delta t that puts flow rates at .5 to 1 gpm needed per radiator. 1/2" pex territory to me? A really big rad might perform better with 3/4" but it would be a pretty big one.
My thoughts anyway.
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I suppose that's a very valid point! I didn't realize the Delta would stay that tight with such low flow. Nevermind, thanks for the info!
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Some pictures fishing pipe. Had to push the pipe out to a crawl space vent then tape to a fish tape and pull back to a part of the crawl space we could get to.
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Some pictures fishing pipe. Had to push the pipe out to a crawl space vent then tape to a fish tape and pull back to a part of the crawl space we could get to.
A lot of stuff about fishing here. I would be more interested if there were a pic of a big walleye on the other end instead of a tight crawl space.
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Some pictures fishing pipe. Had to push the pipe out to a crawl space vent then tape to a fish tape and pull back to a part of the crawl space we could get to.
A lot of stuff about fishing here. I would be more interested if there were a pic of a big walleye on the other end instead of a tight crawl space.
:post: :thumbup:
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;D
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Um…why all that work if you can have short sleeves on in February?
21 here now with a low of 11 by morning.
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Yeah, crazy weather, it's all over the place. Wait til next week.. :)
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Cast iron all the way , wouldn't have it any other way. We recently purchased an 1850 farm house 2000 sq ft. that was being heated with 2 space heaters. House has never been insulated and has the original windows. We are planning on keeping the interior pretty much all original but didn't really want the big radiators we had in the last house. I was able to buy enough cast iron base board on CL to do the entire house for $300. It looks like it was always here. They get hot and stay hot. I used long pieces of 6" tall in the bigger rooms and 9"shorter pieces in the smaller rooms. I have 2 3/4" pex loops with 1/2" supply and return lines with monoflow tees. Most of the 1/2" runs are under 4'. There was a little lag in getting everything warmed up in the beginning but now I am getting pretty even heat in all the base board (checking with my hand) been meaning to put the infrared on them and see how much I am loosing at the last part of the bigger loop. I also put valves on a few of the supply ends in case I ever wanted to dampen them down if some rooms were getting too much heat.