wood fireplace as additional boiler?

[dieseltron]

first off this is for my house and not my garage. I figured there are some knowledgeable people on here that may have experience with such a set up.

I will be installing a wood burning fireplace this summer and would like to ad a heat exchanger to tie in with my existing boiler heat system to more evenly distribute the heat. Has anyone tried something like this? I would assume it would require a additional expansion tank for the heat exchanger but would it require its own pump? Also the main boiler is in the basement and the fireplace will be on the first floor if that matters for air purging or anything like that.

 

[jimp]

http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/fireplace-water-heater-zmaz78ndzraw.aspx

I remembered reading about a fireplace hot water heater when I was young, the internet is a wonderfull place.

 

[James-W]

How do you keep the water from boiling if you use a fireplace to heat the water?

 

[Lippyp]

When we moved in here one of the two woodstoves has a back boiler and was tied into the hot water tank, it had a pump to circulate the water through the boiler and a coil in the hot water tank with a simple switch in the utility room. As it was an open system with a header tank that took care of expansion. If you ran the fire too hot it did boil the tank, hence when we came to change the heating system the tank was half full of limescale as we live in a hard water area. We disconnected and drained the system as we went over to a mains pressure gas boiler with an inbuilt fast recovery hot water tank. I think the previous owners kept this fire lit and running low most of the time in winter, they burnt all sorts of **** in it from mdf to plastic coated chipboard so it would have given them cheap heat. Our new system didn't have a second coil so it couldn't be connected to the fire but it is way more efficient than the old gas boiler anyway.

Pretty much everyone I know with wood heated water has had issues with it boiling at some time, if the wind is in the wrong direction or if you use the wrong wood and so on.

My woodstove in the garage has a back boiler in it and when it moves to its final location in the workshop end I am contemplating a home brewed heating system to the other part as I have a radiator that I saved when we redid the bathroom, just needs some pipework, a header tank and probably a small 12V pump, apparently auxiliary heating pumps from a Mercedes are good for this as they circulate the water fairly slowly.

 

[DonPowers]

My brother bought a house with a wood burning furnace, that had a hot water coil conversion. The insurance company made him remove the wood boiler, prior to issuing him a policy, because the boiler didn't have a UL rating.

Just make sure the heat exchanger has a UL rating.

 

[Jackfre]

http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/fireplace-water-heater-zmaz78ndzraw.aspx

I remembered reading about a fireplace hot water heater when I was young, the internet is a wonderfull place.

It was likely the Holly Hydro Heater. Nice product. i installed a bunch of them.