Happy thanksgiving y'all, one thing I am thankful for is having reliable heat during the coldest of days. Spending a year in Virginia we have already encountered temperatures in the single digits. During this time our heater cannot keep up and we find ourselves quite cold on the most extreme of winter nights. A solution to this is to use an alternative heating system, which makes our conventional heaters redundant and only needed if the wood furnace had trouble. As long as you keep feeding it wood, cleaning it out and keeping it powered you will get heat. There is a fan inside that runs off the main house power that stokes the flame once in awhile and runs full time when calling for more heat.
Using burning wood to heat 420 gallons of water, it circulates through three buildings on my homestead to keep them warm. Water temperatures are around 185F (85C) and used to add heat into home and also warms the water heaters for the shower and sink.
It took months of preparation to get the wood furnace online, it all started with building the foundation and running the hot water lines.
Here we have a 120V mains power coming in along with 2 water lines, we add one more later for my workshop.
Another part of this project was getting the homes ready for wood heat. The plumbing needs to be redone on the water heater for this to work.
The heat for the homes comes from a radiator that is installed in the air handler. 185F (85C) water flows through this copper heat exchange and will heat the air quite nicely.
PEX is used for all the lines ran, this is coiled but alot of straight pipes were used as well.
Normally the water heater is operated using electrical heaters or a gas heater system. We bypass this and only use the water heater to hold water.
With the right plumbing installed now the water is heated by the wood furnace setup.
I do the trenching for the workshop. Using my skid steer and its attachment I make quick work and get it done in about 1.5 hours.
The furnace arrives on a hoist, it weighs about 2000 pounds empty and about 5000 pounds full of water.
It gets set down on the foundation and then the wiring can begin.
Opening up the side panel we can see the water line connections. All of this ties into the lines ran into the ground which go into the homes and workshop to keep them warm.
Many of the lines are ran inside the wall, it took quite a bit of work getting them all through, including cutting out some dry wall in one area to get access.
Soon when I finish off my basement all of this will be hidden. Here is the trunk line going in to the side of the main house holding the two PEX lines for water.
At the air handler there is a series tubes that a pump valve controls. When a thermostat calls for heat it opens and lets hot water flow through the heat exchanger heating up the air.
Its all very complex and I am glad I hired someone to do this work. I am just watching him set it up.
With the water heater all plumbed up its soon time to fill the lines with water.
We start a small fire in the furnace once 420 gallons is added, this takes about an hour.
With the unit taking most of a day to get up to temp the plumbing can all be connected in the mean time.
A water sample is taken, required by the maker of the wood furnace to warranty it.
With the smoke stack installed I can see how big this thing is.
We bring over dirt to level the area, as the next step is getting a carport installed over the furnace.. Not the smoke stack but the main unit, so when it rains its not so bad loading firewood.
A few hours of work and its mostly leveled, we will check it again after a good rain and add more if needed.
Now I have two thermostats, one controls the conventional AC and heat. The other one on the right controls just the wood furnace.
Outside there is a display on the wood furnace that tells me its current state, the water temperature and fire box efficiency. It is tied into my homes wifi so I can access its state online and know when I need to add more wood.
The byproduct the furnace produces is ash, we can use this on our fields. Soon I will test my outdoor soil and see if its needed. But great to have if so.
With the workshop lines trenched and installed I cover up the area.
Inside the workshop we can see the two heaters, they are powered by a fan that blows air through. My small solar array can power one of them if need be. But they also passively add heat into the building even when the fans are not running as the water is always flowing.
Going to be really careful around them, last thing I want to do hit them.
We can see where the PEX lines are coming into the building. The insulation was moved to the side for the hole.
Finishing off the workshop these will be covered, but for now we can see all the water lines in the workshop.
I set up a thermometer in the workshop, we got a freezing cold day and it stayed close to 60F throughout the night. So looks like the heat is helping. Would probably be 10 degrees colder without them.
Having a constant wood supply has been working out. We chopped up many truck loads before the furnace arrived. But going forward we will need to spend time finding trees and making more fire wood from them now.
Chopping wood is optional for the wood furnace, we mostly cut to size and throw them in.
Since we have a forest road trees are constantly falling during storms, so I think we will have a steady supply of wood just from fallen trees. But if not we plan on cutting down softwood pines on the property as they are not really wanted.
But for now we should have enough to get us a month or two. Just hauling it over once a week or so. They are still drying out under the barn, but soon we will have more green wood to let season while we use this.
Glad to have this on my property, now we wait for some really cold days. We have been using it already and it works great. We will be extra thankful when it gets so cold our old heaters would not work but we know this will keep us warm.
The Firestar app:
This wood furnace has electronics on it that allows remote monitoring of the unit. I can go to their website and upon setting up. I can keep an eye on the water temperature and get alerts when the temp gets too low or the fire goes completely out.
The reaction chamber can also be monitored, this helps to tell when I need to clean the ash out of the boiler once in awhile.
Charts can be viewed showing the cycles of this unit, this is a 24h but I can view shorter and longer timeframes as well.
Setting up alerts I can get emails or texts when certain things happen.
Timestamps in the history also help me know what is going on across the day.
Long term we shall see how this works out, but after a few weeks of use I am very happy with it. Now I just need to give it a constant source of firewood.
I loved this post and read every detail. Something I am very interested and experienced in. A neighbor in PA back in the 80's had one of those outdoor stoves. Burned coal and wood. I was a teenager when my father added an airtight wood stove to the oil furnace unit we had. The stove was in my basement bedroom. So privacy was gone. But my room was the warmest one. And the pathway for the 🪵 wood rack. So always a mess to clean up.
We still burn wood here in North FLA this time of the year. We only have a fireplace and campsite.
But here is me this morning at 9 am playing lumberjack games. Cleaning up the carnage from the logging crew and hurricane.
Oh cool, wow what a life.... we had an oil furnace at my foremans house. Thing leaked into the ground and contaminated the area. Luckily Virginia paid to clean it all up and I only had to pay a few hundred and they paid the rest. I hear most people had those back in the day, but glad now I have a wood burning system so I do not need to worry about diesel.
Hah best of luck cleaning up after the hurricane. I am sure we will have many more downed trees to clear in our future too.
Nice setup - a lot of work, but that should do you quite nicely!!!
Yep many months of prep work to get this all setup.. but it is indeed working well.
That if that is perfect friend, because the truth is that the cold hits very hard, here we are on the contrary, the heat has us crazy, we have had days with 45 degrees of temperature, it's crazy even sleeping you seem to be fresh out of a pool, totally bathed in sweat.
Damn man hope it cools off for y'all.
Sleeping while sweating is the worst.
Horrible, impossible to get to sleep, and we experience this at least three or four days a week, to tell you that taking a shower in the middle of the night is no problem at all with the cold, the water comes out hot, the subway pipes get too hot in these parts.
As far as I am concerned anything underground is preferable to aerial.
Hah yes, until you forget where you buried them and hit them with something digging.
How are you dear friend @solominer good afternoon
In the way you are preparing and equipping your farm, you don't envy any city house.
The good thing is that you have the equipment and the right people to install the entire wood-burning boiler, and best of all, you can control it remotely through the manufacturer's website.
Excellent investment, this year there will be no cold days in your home
Congratulations on the update you are making on the farm.
have a great afternoon
Doing good bud, thanks.. hope you are too.
Yeah sure is, should be a good resource for many years to come I hope.
Nice preparation. Cold won't near your home with this kind of setup
Hehe yep, I am ready to battle winter.. just not sure about the ice and snow part.
I have not looked at one of those outdoor boilers in over ten years. It looks like they really got the technology dialed in with them now.
When anyone asks me what the best heating method for a house (or building) is I always point them towards those kinds of setups.
Oh cool, yeah the Firestar controller is pretty cool. The guy that installed mine has one too but his has a manual gauge on it.
Nice, good to know I am on the right track. After we got a very cold day last year I called my HVAC guy and asked him what I can do to deal with this better.. He said the wood furnace solution is the way to go and my adventure started there.
Yeah the setup is pretty intricate but once they are up and running they take very little maintenance.
I am really unsure about burning things like pine in them due to creosote buildup. Some models deal with it better than others. It might be worth asking the technician about it to find out.
The really awesome thing about those units is just how efficient they are. Once you get it up and running for the day you can put in a tiny load of dense wood (like black locust) and it will burn for 8-10 hours without needing to be fed again.
Mostly it seems just cleaning out the ash is the main thing that needs to be done on a regular basis. Yeah he said we can burn pine and even green wood if we want. It burns better with seasoned hardwood but it can handle just about whatever timber you throw at it. At least that is what my installer told me.
Ah yeah black locust would be superior but handling it is such a pain in the ass with all its thorns.
That is awesome that it can burn a variety of wood types!
Once black locust is no longer a juvenile tree it loses its thorns and some strains of it have very few thorns to start with.
If you think those are thorny check out the Honey locust tree that just gets thornier with age!
Nice One
yeah man
It’s rather amazing how much you have accomplished!!
Wrapping up on a year living here indeed we have got a lot done. Many more projects are in progress and will post about them soon.
What‘s the effect of the ash in the fields?
Calcium is the most abundant element in wood ash and gives ash properties similar to agricultural lime. Ash is also a good source of potassium, phosphorus, and magnesium.
You calculate such things or just go by a rule of thumb?
Yes you can do soil tests to dial it all in and there are rough suggestions for pounds per acre.
wow, great setup done by you.... now you can bit cold ... 😜
Hah yep, we are ready now.. bring it on.
Good post
thank you
That's great, man! You've done something incredible. This is a really reliable heating method. It's great that you can control the temperature through the app. I hope you can keep it up! All you need is more wood.
Thanks man, yeah I hope it will be. Actually I can only monitor it through the app, we control the heat at the thermostats.
I think between my foreman we should be able to collect enough soon. I have many acres here of just woods. And since I have made a forest road through it trees are constantly falling on the road, so its a constant source of new firewood.
This is great and I have never seen something like this before. You store a lot of wooden and is it easily available there?
Yeah it is pretty cool, I just learned about it in the last year.
We have a barn that we stack wood in, so yeah lots of space for it.
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outstanding work!
thanks man
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