Outdoor Wood Furnace Info
All-Purpose OWF Discussions => General Outdoor Furnace Discussion => Topic started by: slimjim on June 19, 2014, 04:22:09 AM
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Here's a few shots of our project and what we woke up to! The land mass off in the distance is the mainland about 15 minutes travel with a powerboat or Ferry ride, a shot of the house from the front, house has no heat at all except wood stoves, homeowners froze their butts off last winter! We will be installing 1500 feet of 1/2 inch radiant with Ultra Fin under the main house that is a very tight crawlspace as well as some homemade towel racks in the bathrooms and a couple of cast iron rads in the upstairs bedrooms. OH I almost forgot the hot water, It will consist of 6 heat zones as well as a stub out for a future Gas wall hung boiler on the primary loop, all of it must fit into the utility room that allows me just 26 inches in width and just over 6 feet in height, it promises to be an interesting project, Oh again I almost forgot there is more, A future greenhouse loop will come off the boiler as well, see 2 stubbs of Logstor on right, beside my service trailer, I will get a better shot of the trailer after we clean it up a bit, what a mess!
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My buddy and co- worker deep in thought, just out of bed
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Slimjim, With a view like that, how did you get any work done? No doubt you suffered through it. ;D Looks like a nice place to live. Roger
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It's a totally different mentality out here, nobody registers their cars, almost all services are done by residents of the Island, the barge transportation for my truck and service trailer is about $300 each direction so you can see the year round residents are quite self reliant. Beautiful but Quite Expensive!
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Slim that is a beautiful place, I would live there in a heart beat. I bet that expensive to live is an understatement though !!!!!
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One country store on the Island and everything has to come over on the barge, most folks use their own boat and go to the mainland to save$
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Wonder if they get socked for a higher electricity rate? Must have a underground cable coming from somewhere?
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Next Island over has a massive oil fired generation plant that they cannot afford to run, Imagine that, you don't suppose that was subsidized by our wonderful and thoughtful state legislators?
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Slim, what are you installing for a boiler. Very nice country.
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They are waiting for the new 250, I'll post some pics of the manifolds tomorrow, 8 radiant loops and 3 conventional heat loops for homemade bath towel warmers and cast iron rads, we will be here into the first of next week
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Hey Coolidge I just thought of something, I'm looking for a wiry guy that can wiggle into tight areas on his back to run the radiant loops, how about 2 days paid vacation on beautiful Chebeague Island Maine, FREE BEER after hours!!!!!!!
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How about beer before? I would love to Slim, but I am booked out for the next three weeks and I have to work weekends. Shure does sound like fun.
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So far it has been fun, today we start low crawling in the dirt crawlspace, I'll need lots of adult beverages as well as a shower tonight.
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Gonna use a compacted rock base for the 250 to sit on or mixing the cement on site?
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Stone and then cement pad, may even put a small plate exchanger and anti freeze the loop for snow melt in the pad, not sure on that.
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Oh I would, on the snow melt that is. Takes more wood but the convenience of having a dry sidewalk or pad is well worth it. Also been told the cement will last longer if your not dumping salt on it all the time.
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Hey slim take a step back and look that is the way life used to be be for big government looks like you can still live like that
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The homeowners said they never had a cop until a couple years ago,now they have a resident sheriff, she was well accepted until she started handing out seat belt tickets, she doesn't do that any more!
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I have received a few requests for pics of the install here, first is the heat exchanger and then the manifold for radiant loops, we had to build our own manifold as commercial units with this many loops would take up far to much space, the 1 1/4 is the primary loop from the plate exchanger, the bottom of the primary is all radiant, we are using Ultra Fin, the top will be cast iron rads and home made towel racks in the baths
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Looks real nice slim. I can only hope mine looks half as nice as that
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Thanks sceptre, Imagination, planning and patience is all it really takes, as you have probably noticed, I LIKE COPPER!
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I definitely does a nicer job
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I tried to post some pics of the side arm heater that I built to fit the water tank on site, it is 41 inches long and has 20 feet of 14 gauge wire wrapped around the 3/4 inch pipe to increase the heat transfer surface area perhaps one of our math wizards could help with the #'s, I have tried and it always makes my head hurt, the forum says my file is to big, if anybody wishes to see it PM me your E-Mail and I'll send pics
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Not a lot of room to stretch out and relax under the house where we are putting in the Ultra Fin radiant
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Great pictures SlimJim. :thumbup:
Have you used the Ultra Fin radiant product before this particular job? How is the customer feedback on Ultra Fin's performance in keeping the floor and home warm?
What does he Ultra-Fin produc cost (generally) and how many are needed per unit area?
I am very interested in this product as many of the other radiant floor heating options require stripping to the subfloor and are quite expensive.
Thank you for all of your information! 8)
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I have used it a few times and all are very impressed, this house had no heat other than electric baseboard and 1 soapstone wood stove, they froze their butts off last winter! I like it because it heats the entire bay not just the surface contacted by the staple up, you can run 185 degree water through it without damaging the floor for that reason, Ultra Fin looks for a plate every 2 feet, I usually add more around the perimeter of the building especially on the cold side of the house as we did here, 3 zones with 8 loops
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I have used it a few times and all are very impressed, this house had no heat other than electric baseboard and 1 soapstone wood stove, they froze their butts off last winter! I like it because it heats the entire bay not just the surface contacted by the staple up, you can run 185 degree water through it without damaging the floor for that reason, Ultra Fin looks for a plate every 2 feet, I usually add more around the perimeter of the building especially on the cold side of the house as we did here, 3 zones with 8 loops
Thanks slim. Do you run that hot of a temperature (185°F) if the home was heated exclusively with radiant floor heat?
My question lies around my paricular design where I will be using radiant floor in conjunction with my forced air system. I know I have not sketched up a layout yet (but I will) but when used in conjunction with a forced air system (vents are also located in the same area that will receive some radiant via Ultra-Fins), I can (should?) run lower temperature through the loops?
thanks for any information as I really appreciate the education from professional installers like yourself. :thumbup:
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No need to change the temps.
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No need to change the temps.
Thank you Slim. :)
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Nice pictures of the ultra fin. Are you going to install insulation to the bottom sides of the floor joists yet?
I wish I knew about the ultra fin before I remodeled our bedroom. On the first floor, not a crawl space to speak of so I would have drilled the floor joists and had the radiant in place before installing the sub floor.
Was just wondering if it will still work in a tight crawl space with no insulation attached to the bottom of the floor joists.
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Yes we are using bubble wrap to insulate the bays, fiberglass is better but some of the joists are only 2X6 construction and there would not be enough air space within the bay for it to properly function, the homeowner has insulated the exterior walls to below grade with 2 inch foam and is not concerned about loosing a bit of heat down there to protect his piping, besides I don't care how nice the view is it blows from under the house and I really would not like to spend my day under there unrolling and stapling up fiberglass.
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Yes we are using bubble wrap to insulate the bays, fiberglass is better but some of the joists are only 2X6 construction and there would not be enough air space within the bay for it to properly function...
More questions: .... bubblewrap to insulate the joist bays....when you insulate each of the floor joist bays contianing the UltraFins, does the bubble wrap just close the open side of the joist or does it also line the inside of the sides of the vertical portions of each floor joist?
My home has 2" x 10" and 2" x 12" floor joists and I am wondering if it would be beneficial to line each floor joist with a radiant barrier :-\ , install the pex tubing and Ultra Fins :thumbup: , and "enclose" the between joist voids with 1" or 2" foam board with radiant barrier aluminum foil . My idea is to keep as much heat as possible in the enclosed airspace and only heating the subflooring (and not the floor joists themselves). Feedback is appreciated! 8)
Am I over-thinking this? Is it "worth" using radiant barrier lining on the joists and foam board enclosing pieces?
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I think you are over thinking it Mr. Snood. I need to remodel the office next, it's right next to the bedroom. Most likely will be the same as the bedroom, remove all the old true 2" x 10" floor joists that are on 24" centers with treated 2x12's on 16 inch centers. I did have the helps kids out and had em shovel a bunch of dirt out of the bedroom before installing the new joists but I'm pretty sure I didn't have em shovel enough out to actually crawl under there. I think part of the office and bedroom were originally much smaller then they enclosed a 8 foot porch. Had two footers on the south wall and two sill boards when we repaired the foundation. The footers were just stacked rocks with some mortar dumped over em. The floor had it's own sill board and the wall sat on another.
Anyways back on track, I think you need just enough insulation to create a dead airspace.
If you have room to work easiest would be 4x8 sheets of 1 inch foam board and use the nails with the plastic washers already on em.
When we redid the foundation we placed 2 inches of foam board outside from 3 foot up. I also had em did around the inside of the foundation and we placed 1" board around the inside of the foundation then refilled. I'm wondering if I can just do the drill the joist method in the office and not close off the under sides of the joists? Rest of that crawl space is tight. Two sides are very well insulated and the other two sides butt up against the field stone walls in the basement. On the other hand this isn't a true crawlspace to speak off, no way under it except cut a hole in the floor. So if a joint would start to leak....
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mlappin you are spot on, the idea is the dead air space, no need to insulate the sides of the joist Slopster as I said before, fiberglass is preferred but bubble wrap works fine. We did a garage addition for a friend/ boiler customer about 5 years ago, it was a tire bay and 4 wheeler addition with a gym upstairs, the wife wanted the gym warm and Dave wanted a bit of heat in the tire bay so we never put anything under the plates in the floor joists of the gym and they both love it
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OK so Dan and I are back on the Island to finish the job, we had an uneventful trip other than popping a $165 dollar trailer tire while turning hard to get both trailers onto the deck of the barge, we will be setting the pads and boiler today and hopefully heating the water and most of the house tonight, as you can probably imagine Joe and Barb are pretty happy to have us back to finish the job, we would have been here long before now but I had no boiler to install, it's going to be very busy from this point out!
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So, how is the install going?
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So far so good, fired the 250 last night to heat the domestic hot water only so far, Dan will be connecting most of the radiant today while I wire the mess, I'll try to get some pics later.
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So we got 3 of the 4 radiant loops running last night as well as hot water, I just went in to use the bathroom and the house is warm and hot water will take your skin off if you aren't careful, low temp of 39 degrees F last night here on the Island. Now the work starts, we still need to add an additional radiant loop in the back sun porch and 3 zones of baseboard upstairs, it's an old 3 season home, running the pex upstairs will be a real challenge, we also after running the extra radiant loop will need to install all the bubble wrap under the floor joists as the wind is blowing right through the dirt crawlspace, the 250 is running great with less than desirable wood.