[HN Gopher] Heating Water with Fire (2019)
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Heating Water with Fire (2019)
Author : ciconia
Score : 91 points
Date : 2021-04-19 08:19 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.homewoodstoves.co.nz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.homewoodstoves.co.nz)
| Darmody wrote:
| I discovered their channel a couple weeks ago on Youtube and it's
| the best thing I've seen in a while.
|
| In a video they show their home setup and how the stove is used
| as a stove, oven, heater and water heater. I wish I could have
| one of those.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Can you please share the URL or the channel's name?
| throwaway3b03 wrote:
| I assume it's this one:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/HomewoodStoves/videos
| tomrandle wrote:
| I've recently moved to a house with a wood burner / back boiler
| and I can't wait to replace it. It's made me appreciate what a
| huge upgrade natural gas boilers were. I spend a minimum of 15
| mins a day chopping kindling, fetching wood, starting and feeding
| the fire. It's not cheap and it's not warm! It's been fun and
| makes you appreciate your consumption more but the novelty only
| goes so far!
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| I also heat with wood, but quite like the occasional breaks
| from the computer through the day, and sometimes cooking on the
| wood stove. Here, the obvious alternative is a heat pump rather
| than a natural gas boiler, and I suspect the total cost of wood
| heating is a bit lower than with a heat pump.
| xupybd wrote:
| I grew up with a wood fire. I love the sound and feel of the
| fire, but I'm done cutting wood. First you have to buy the
| wood. A truck load of wood in the driveway means hours of
| stacking wood and cleaning up. Then to start the fire you need
| kindling. If I get home at 7pm after a long day of work I don't
| want to have do this just to start heating the house.
| [deleted]
| zdragnar wrote:
| I love the boiler we have, but it is an old pre-gassification
| boiler amd simply is too inefficient. New boilers are way more
| expensive than is worth it, so we have switched entirely to
| high efficiency indoor wood and pellet stoves.
|
| I miss the smell of the oak from the old boiler, but not the
| smoke or absurd amount of wood we were going through.
| jandrese wrote:
| This seems neat, but I only run my stove for roughly 3 months out
| of the year. It seems like a lot of effort and expense for
| something that seems to make sense only in the winter. I guess
| these are more popular in colder climates with short summers?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I only run my stove for roughly 3 months out of the year
|
| Do you not use your stove for cooking as well? I guess most
| people with a wood-burning stove us it as an oven, a hob, a
| toaster, things like that, which they want to use during summer
| as well.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The people I know with wood-burning stoves also have modern
| electric or natural gas ranges for their daily cooking. Their
| stoves are primarily for heat, with cooking as an added
| bonus. But those stoves are more like a metal box with a
| chimney, not the large cooking-oriented stoves in the
| article.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| These wood-burning ranges are not uncommon in the UK
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=wood+burning+aga&safe=activ
| e...
| jandrese wrote:
| Nope, mine is configured purely for home heating.
|
| But even then I don't leave my oven on 24/7. This article
| runs under the assumption that your heat source is constantly
| running. In fact he advocates for large tanks that take a
| long time to warm up in most cases because of the assumption
| that your stove is always burning.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > But even then I don't leave my oven on 24/7. This article
| runs under the assumption that your heat source is
| constantly running.
|
| Yeah that's the way many of these combined heater / oven
| things work - the oven is literally on all the time.
| Starting it up can take a full day.
| jandrese wrote:
| That seems rather inefficient, especially in the summer.
| I also thought the lossy boilover system seemed less than
| ideal, but I guess if it takes all day to get the heat
| going you don't have good alternatives.
|
| Maybe the small tank system would make sense for a
| bachelor who is ok with taking a shower only at night
| after cooking dinner. Maybe supplanted with a solar
| thermal setup to keep the water at an elevated
| temperature and only topped off with the stove?
|
| I have to admit I thought to myself a few times while
| reading the article: "Is this better than a solar array
| and electric water heater?" I guess it has fewer failure
| points, although a solar panel failure doesn't flood your
| basement. If you are running a wood stove from trees you
| chop down on your own land this could be very low cost
| over the long term I guess. Solar is still fairly
| expensive, especially if you add battery storage, but it
| has been falling sharply in the past few years and the
| price for these systems is basically fixed. At the end of
| the day it's a decent chunk of custom plumbing and a
| specially designed appliance. Traditionally that
| combination would be fairly expensive and I wouldn't be
| surprised if the price has been increasing slowly as the
| plumbers who know how to do this retire and the wetback
| stoves become even more specialty equipment.
| mindslight wrote:
| Why are they only considering the atmosphere for expansion/relief
| (and consequently multiple heat exchangers)? Why not a standard
| hydronic heating expansion tank with a pressure/temperature
| relief valve? Do these systems boil over often enough to make
| that impractical?
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's historical. Older homes here were set up
| to use gravity to provide the water pressure, so the obvious
| thing to handle boiling over (which, yes, could be quite
| frequent) was to run a pipe through the roof with just a bit
| more head elevation than the supply.
|
| My home for instance was built in the 1950s, and in the attic
| has a copper "header tank" which has an overflow/vent to
| outside and a float valve to maintain a set water level in it.
| That would've supplied one or two heat exchangers in the
| wood/coal fires, and cold water at the same pressure.
|
| Now, the header tank is out of the circuit, the original fires
| were removed decades ago in a remodel (their water heating
| functionality replaced with a "low pressure" electric hot water
| cylinder which still vents through that same pipe), and we're
| now connected with city water. The current situation is like
| many homes of similar vintage and has a couple issues: the cold
| water is substantially higher pressure than the hot, and we now
| have an Ajax valve which occasionally needs to be checked on in
| case it's leaking through and pumping electrically-heated water
| out on to the roof.
| jpollock wrote:
| In the UK, there's an aspirational kitchen stove brand - AGA,
| which are intended to run 24/7.
|
| I understand it takes a fair bit of experimentation to learn how
| to cook on one. :)
|
| https://www.agaliving.com/products/aga-cast-iron-cookers
| waltwalther wrote:
| I grew up with a big cook woodstove/oven in our kitchen. It
| helped heat the house, and my mother cooked on the stovetop and
| baked in the oven multiple times per day. Even in the summer. We
| had a regular electric stove that was added shortly before/after
| I was born, but she still used the woodstove.
|
| It was a big cast iron contraption, with what I remember as white
| powder-coated sides and trim, and she knew how to get the
| temperature just right for whatever she was cooking.
|
| I remember walking downstairs on cold winter mornings to the
| smell of ham, eggs, and biscuits, all prepared on that thing.
|
| One more thing I remember. It was positioned about three feet
| from the wall. There was enough room to walk behind it (if you
| ducked under the pipe), and our dog used love napping there.
| mdoms wrote:
| Wetback systems are very common in NZ. I built a home recently
| and decided not to go with a wetback system because I decided
| there would be little overlap between times when I use hot water
| and times when I would use the fireplace. Now since covid I am
| working from home permanently I kind of regret that choice.
| abraae wrote:
| Same. We Built a new house a few years ago and I really wanted
| a wetback, having had one in a previous house
|
| I was talked out of it by the fireplace guys and the plumbing
| guys. Now I regret it every time I light the fire.
|
| The main problem is that wetbacks fall into a gray area, they
| are mainly plumbing, but plumbers are more used to dealing with
| standard components and materials. Architects are usually not
| familiar with them so don't push for them.
| DickingAround wrote:
| I found this helpful in describing a bit about how to build such
| a system. As someone that operates solar, it's become quite clear
| that solar gives very little energy in the winter and water
| heating is a huge part of winter power use. So if you're going
| off grid, this seems like a critical part. Now if we just had
| some better tech around turning felled trees into a furnace
| without so much human effort....
| eliaspro wrote:
| We're using 2 Paradigma water-based vacuum tube solar panels
| and pull even during the coldest winter days around 20kWh of
| thermal energy for hot water/heating out of them - even with
| just passive/diffused sunlight. Only on really dark/cloudy days
| it might just get us 1-3kWh. As fallback we still use natural
| gas, the wood burner which is also integrated in the hot water
| circuit is out of service since several years, as I just
| couldn't run it anymore with a good conscience knowing the
| extreme pollution those cause and the fact that burning wood is
| possibly the worst thing CO2-wise one could do given the
| current state of affairs.
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| > burning wood is possibly the worst thing CO2-wise one could
| do given the current state of affairs.
|
| I'm curious about this. Around here the carbon from the wood
| (less emissions from a relatively small amount of petrol to
| cut and transport it) would've been taken out of the
| atmosphere in the last 20-ish years, where the natural gas
| carbon is in the millions of years (and additionally a much
| longer supply chain). I understand that smoke particles are
| not great in the short term, but assume we're talking about
| modern equipment.
| eliaspro wrote:
| This is one of the greatest achievements of the Biomass
| industry - marketing wood as "renewable" and "carbon
| neutral".
|
| First and foremost - at a time, when every bit of CO2 not
| emitted counts, we should be happy about CO2 being fixated
| in trees - once it's released, it doesn't matter whether
| the it is coming from jet engines or wood - the effect on
| climate change is the same. Furthermore, burning wood is
| quite inefficient in terms of mass/energy gain - even worse
| than coal.
|
| But besides that, there are a lot of systematic effects
| which make wood a non-neutral source of energy and making
| use of it as energy source comes with a lot of issues. Even
| if wood would be completely neutral, it would still be
| negative due to the energy required to harvest, process and
| transport it.
|
| Trees don't only sequestrate carbon in wood, but also in
| the forest soil through their roots. Decaying wood is
| processed by microorganisms and mycelium in the soil, so
| it's not only about the tree itself capturing CO2, but also
| about it being part of a more complex sequestration system
| which is disturbed by removing the tree.
|
| Cutting down single trees from an otherwise intact forest
| as part of a "sustainable forestry" strategy is actually
| often quite problematic, as the sudden exposure to sun &
| weather leads to decreased survival rates of fresh growth,
| but also soil erosion and thereby CO2 release - not even
| taking the damage of harvesting machinery etc. into
| account.
|
| Those "wounded" forests decrease the Earth's Albedo which
| also adds to climate change.
|
| Last but not least are forests not simply something that
| can be "renewed" by replanting trees, but are extremly
| complex ecosystems which might take millenia to build up.
|
| Right now, we're cutting down massive amounts of old growth
| around the world which can never be properly restored -
| we're far from managing wood like a crop on designated
| "farms".
|
| With technologies available like Passivhaus construction,
| heatpumps, solar and/or geothermal energy, there's zero
| reason to add to our systemic issues by using wood as an
| energy source.
|
| When it comes to particle and toxic emissions, there isn't
| a single non-industrial wood burner that would only come
| close to the emissions of a gas or oil furnace (not saying
| they're good, as they're using fossil fuels). The best even
| modern filters will get you is still worse by factor of
| ~400-500 compared to oil.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| People aren't cutting down live trees to burn in their
| wood stoves.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Wood is a renewable and carbon neutral energy source.
|
| OP is right that it's dirty as hell, by modern standards.
| rmah wrote:
| Burning wood is only carbon neutral if you plant and grow
| trees to replace the ones you burnt. It surprises many
| people just how many trees need to be grown to heat a
| single home for a year.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Is that true? Firewood comes from downed/dead trees
| (unless a tree is felled for some other reason). I
| thought the same amount of carbon was released whether a
| dead tree rotted on the ground or was burned for heating.
| JshWright wrote:
| Burning wood is certainly polluting, but CO2 is not the
| concern. The CO2 released by burning the wood was already
| part of the global CO2 "budget". As wood is burned, releasing
| CO2, more wood is grown, capturing it again. Wood burning,
| from a CO2 perspective, is effectively neutral, and far from
| "the worst thing".
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(page generated 2021-04-20 23:01 UTC)