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[sryen]

We recently installed a 360 btu heat exchanger on our 18 x 36 inground pool..   It has been running for at least 10 hours and has not even increase our temp. 1 degree...  I was so excited to get it hooked up and ready to use, and now feeling very disappointed.  My husband did the job, is there something we could be missing?  An important factor in making it heat up our pool?   Please tell me we didnt waste our money on this project!  Thanks for your help! 

[RSI]

Do you have good flow through both sides?
What temperature is the boiler running at and how much is it running?

[slimjim]

It's going to take time, you don't want to heat up to fast or it will destroy the liner or plastic piping. Check to see that the water is warmer coming out of the heat exchanger on the pool side than it is going in. don't rush it, cover the pool in the evening to hold the heat you gained during the day. You should see about 2-5 degrees per day temp increase. Cut some wood heating a pool requires lots of BTU's, don't be surprised if you burn more wood heating the pool than you did heating your home AND shop.

[muffin]

We recently installed a 360 btu heat exchanger on our 18 x 36 inground pool..   It has been running for at least 10 hours and has not even increase our temp. 1 degree...  I was so excited to get it hooked up and ready to use, and now feeling very disappointed.  My husband did the job, is there something we could be missing?  An important factor in making it heat up our pool?   Please tell me we didnt waste our money on this project!  Thanks for your help!

OK, I happen to have the same sized pool.  360 btu?  Something very wrong with that number.  Mine is 60K Btu which is pretty undersized for a pool, but mine is indoors and it works great.  For example, assume your pool looses about 1 degree a day.  Your pool should hold about 25K gallons if it deep end like mine.  At 8.34 lbs per gallon, that's ~210,000 lbs.  A BTU is simply the heat required to raise 1 lb of water 1 degree; so you would need 210k BTU/day.  My pool uses 200-300K BTUs/day for instance.

If you truly have a 360 BTU exchanger... it will do nothing.  If you meant 360K BTU, it must be huge!

I assume you have check both sides of the exchanger (boiler inputs) and they are HOT.

FYI, fun fact, assuming some efficiencies, that's about 1/2 cord per month.

[RSI]

360K BTU is a standard size pool heat exchanger. (A few feet or pex in the water would give you 360 btu)
The charts for pool heat exchangers are usually for raising the temperature 1 degree per hour.

360K btu will be a huge load and just the wood usage should tell if it is working. If nothing really happened and the boiler is up to temp, it is either plumbed wrong not flowing properly.

[muffin]

360K BTUs seems really huge.  I would think it would cool the boiler down in a couple minuets and it would not be able to provide that output.  So, assuming you have under temp protection, it would just cycle on and off anyways.  Aren't most furnaces under 250K BTU rated?  Seems like, for the furnace, you would be better off with a longer pool heat cycle, lower boiler demand.  Even at 360K BTUs, still take almost and hour per day.

I like mine at 60K BTUs.  Puts minimal load on the boiler and there is still plenty of time to keep the pool up.  I run the pump for about 9 hrs a day, it usually heats for about 4-6hrs in there somewhere.

[RSI]

Yeah, you need a good sized boiler to keep up to that.
In most cases it is best to size the heat exchanger a little over what the boiler can put out and put a bypass on the boiler size and adjust it so the boiler doesn't idle a lot. The wood boiler is least efficient going in and out of idle so you don't want to set it up to constantly do it.
Also, an aquastat to turn the pump off under 150° or a thermostatic mixing valve should also be used to protect the boiler and make sure it doesn't run too cold.

If no bypass is used, I would go with a smaller heat exchanger than what the boiler can put out so it can keep up. Most BTU ratings on OWBs are the max peak and not continuous till the wood is gone.

[Scott7m]

Yea t360k btu exchanger is not a huge one at all...  Move seen them well over 1 million

But, something ism likely messed up..  Taylor's aren't very efficient anyway, Sooo it's hard telling until we get more info