Home built - non-pressurized outdoor boiler setup - circ sizing?

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Katz

New Member
Hearth Supporter
Aug 3, 2009
2
Central western ,ill.
Brain storm building my own boiler. Just bought 110 taco pump. Ok lets build. Heat 1200 sq ft. hse 800sq ft garage. Water to air is the ideal. Will this one pump be big enough to circulate both on a 1" line? 250 gl. water jacket, round barrel type boiler, The house being 55' away and the garage45'
 
Katz said:
Brain storm building my own boiler. Just bought 110 taco pump. Ok lets build. Heat 1200 sq ft. hse 800sq ft garage. Water to air is the ideal. Will this one pump be big enough to circulate both on a 1" line? 250 gl. water jacket, round barrel type boiler, The house being 55' away and the garage45'

Have you registered w/ NASA? They like to know who is going into orbit next...

Gooserider
 
Best bet for building ones own boiler is to do it non-pressurized - ala waterstove.

If you don't know what that means and entails, you probably should not be attempting it anyway......such systems are usually outside and then use a heat exchanger to transfer to the house water or air loop. A system like this could also be inside, but even an open system has danger of overflow, etc. so some hydronic knowledge is needed.

One of our Euro friends here showed a pic of his system which is "open" and has a small tank in the attic or upstairs closet. Such a system would allow the directly heated water to flow to radiation (no heat exchanger needed).
 
Gooserider said:
Katz said:
Brain storm building my own boiler. Just bought 110 taco pump. Ok lets build. Heat 1200 sq ft. hse 800sq ft garage. Water to air is the ideal. Will this one pump be big enough to circulate both on a 1" line? 250 gl. water jacket, round barrel type boiler, The house being 55' away and the garage45'

Have you registered w/ NASA? They like to know who is going into orbit next...

Gooserider
Non pressurized system outdoor type.
 
First off, I think I'm going to use my "magic moderator buttons" to split this part of the thread off from the other project as I don't want to confuse the two.

Glad to hear you are going with a non-pressure system, that is a far less scary approach, though not always very efficient unless you start looking at a Garn style design...

The first thing that you will need to do is figure out a complete heat load analysis for your house and shop - this is ALWAYS the first thing to do when planning a boiler project. Without the heat load info, everyone is just guessing. With the info, it is possible to work out exactly what you need to do for the best results.

That said, I would also do a search on outdoor line sizing, one of the frequent problems that we see discussed w/ outdoor setups is the use of feed piping that is too small to carry the required load efficiently if at all... I suspect once you get the heat load data, you will find that 1" is way to small, and that you really ought to be using 1.5" or 2" lines. Remember, you want a line that can carry your maximum "design day" load while staying within the reccomended flow-speed range....

Gooserider
 
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