burnclean said:
I have been a lurker on this forum for quite a while before signing up today. I don't understand the obvious BIAS here on this forum towards EKO and downdraft gasifiers. I completely disagree that just because a stove is a downdraft it is going to be more efficient. Its NOT necessarily true
![shock !!! !!!](/talk/styles/default/xenforo/smileys/shock.gif)
The efficiency of the stove depends on two factors #1) how hot you can get your firebox or secondary chamber and #2) how much heat transfer area is built into the stove. Now #1 can be argued that downdrafts are hotter, fine. BUT the bigger factor really is #2 for efficiency. You could have a clean burning downdraft stove with a crappy heat transfer area and it wouldn't be efficient at all! It will depend on the DESIGN of the heat transfer area of the stove, has nothing to really do with it being downdraft or not.
I would say the alleged bias towards downdraft gasifiers is largely because this site, since it's founding has been interested in helping it's users get the cleanest burning, most efficient setups possible, whether it be wood stoves, furnaces, or boilers... This means both the least amount of crap out the stack, and the least amount of wood in the loading door for the amount of heat produced... We feel this way for many reasons - environmental, political (it isn't nice to gas your neighbors, it gets them peeved and makes them complain to the politicians that try to ruin all of our lives) and because we want to use the least amount of fuel we can....
Of all the various boiler designs out there, the two that seem to do the best jobs of clean and efficient burning are the downdraft gassers, and the Garn style units... Garns are essentially a class by themselves, and have lots of fans. There are lots of makes of downdraft boilers, which tend to be more alike than different IMHO, and of the ones that work, I don't think there is a lot of bias towards any particular brand - EKO gets mentioned more simply because they have a big market share, including some of our mods and more active posters... OTOH, if you go through all the threads that mention EKO, a pretty good chunk are involving percieved PROBLEMS with the units - which hardly is a great reccomendation by some standards....
However I would also say that in many of the threads where we talk about system setup issues, or other parts of it, I don't see any lack of willingness to help people that don't have EKOs or even downdraft boilers of any other sort, we help lots of folks with other styles of boiler, OWB's and you name it... In many cases, it almost doesn't matter what the heat source is - unless the question relates to actual boiler operation, a hydronic system doesn't know or care HOW the heat it is trying to distribute is produced - EKO, OWB, copper coil in the BBQ, it doesn't make any difference to the rest of the system, the answer to the problem will be exactly the same....
There are some problems that we have learned from experience tend to be associated with particular classes of units, such as inadequate piping with OWB's, but in many cases it isn't a problem with the OWB, but rather the not so clueful types that sell and install them... (Note that in such cases, the primary fix suggested is to improve the pipes, NOT replace the OWB with a gasser, as a gasser would perform just as badly in the same setup)
Bottom line, I feel that the site as a whole does it's best NOT to show bias, other than wanting stuff that works. If you were able to point us at an actual boiler that makes less smoke while burning less wood for a given amount of heat, than a downdraft gasser when used in a real world situation, burning a real world mix of firewood, then I'm sure we'd join you in promoting it, especially once we had a reasonable number of users confirming that it worked....
Gooserider