hello,
I have an older hs tarm multifuel boiler. Oil burner at one end and wood, coal chamber at the other. When i aquired it the firetube baffles were in a box. I installed them in the oil fired side of the boiler, which i barely ever use. Yesterday when i did my regular cleaning i moved the baffles to the wood burning side. Now the boiler comes up to temp much quicker and the stack temp never goes above 450. It seems much more efficient ,BUT, am i going to have creosote problems, will the baffles get stuck in the tubes. Also i notice that quite a lot of smoke billows out the door when i open it. Since it is in my detached garage it does'nt bother me. I was wondering if anyone has had any experiance like this.
Mike
Sounds like you have slowed the draft on the wood side with the baffles. My guess is that would allow more heat to soak into the boiler. With the Tarm the wood side has already went around the bend so to speak. Doesn't the wood side force combustion gases through a chamber below the fire box to burn the gases and then and around the water jacket to finally get up through the vertical tubes and across to the chimney? My guess is you don't want the baffles on the wood side, only on the oil side to slow down the oil burner since it has a more direct exit path to the chimney and needs to be slowed down to soak into the surrounding water jacket.
The above is a total guess on my part!
I would contact the US importer for Tarm products and find out their recommendations. They should be the experts.
thanks for the feed back chillimau,
The tarm i have is an older one. The flue gasses exit the rear bottom and go directly up through the baffles, it is not the newer style gasification type, although it does inject air through the side into the rear of the combustion chamber to help burn some of the flue gases. It works pretty good, i only get a little smoke out the chimny at start up and almost never after that. Obviously you know quite a bit about these boilers, the educated guess was right on. This is my first wood boiler, we aquired it for free and we love it. We are still in the experimental stages. Most of the parts we have were salvaged from old junk boilers and the scrap yard. I got a 110 gal steel tank from the scap yard. I use it as a storage tank and a dump zone. I pulled some forced air hot water convectors out of a dumpster and currently run them of the wood boiler. They work great. Next season we have a lot of other improvements to make. I hope to either build or buy a 500 gal storage tank next season. I think i will continue to run a closed system and use my 110 gal tank as an expansion tank. I am also going to add a flatplate heat exchanger for domestic hw. Houseneeds .com has some good prices.
Our natural gas bill on cold months was 5 to 600 dollars and with this boiler it is only about 150 to 200 bucks. Next year i hope to make it zero. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
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