Our friend is trying to figure out a way to install a coil (or something that will work) into their wood furnace in their basement to heat their water also. has anyone done this ? How should they go about it? It is a Sam Daniels D161 Wood Furnace if that helps. Thank you very much!

-- Traci Laing (SandTLaing@aol.com), October 27, 2000

Answers

you can take copper tubing, and wrap it around the chimney, as long as the tank is higher than the tubing

-- STAN (sopal@net-port.com), October 27, 2000.

We did this with our wood/coal stove in the basement. You cut holes in the side of the stove and fit in a bent pipe. The pipe is inside the stove and connected to copper pipe which runs to the hot water heater. We put safety valves on the copper pipe, because it gets VERY hot and several times the valves let go with steam. We got the pipe from the stove manufacturer so I would check with a stove dealer near you. Mary

-- Mary Fraley (kmfraley@orwell.net), October 27, 2000.

Funny you should mention this, last week I asked a question that related directly to yours. The answers and discussion should be in the archives.

If you are welding together your own stove its probably best to put a tube-type heater inside the firebox, the water gets considerably hotter and you get a lot more of it, enough in fact to run a baseboard hot water heating system for other rooms in the house. I got the idea for one Im using from tube boilers used to run steam engines.

If you are using an existing stove its probably easiest to wrap a copper pipe around a 5 foot section of your flue pipe, on mine I considered braising it to the pipe but decided against it since steel and copper expand at very different rates and would most likely cause a crack in one or the other. I also ran into galvanic corrosion problems where the steel pipe touched the copper tubeing, I discovered that puting a layer of heat transfer compound between the two fixed that. Dont use the type used between computer processors and heat sinks though, I discovered (the hard way) that the high temps made it run like hot wax (grumble), there is a grade that doesnt run and its fairly easy to find at Radio Shack.

Hope this helps a bit.

Dave

-- Dave (Ak) (Daveh@ecosse.net), October 28, 2000.

There is a Stainless Steel water jacket available from Lehman's for wood cook stoves that goes in the firebox.

I have wrapped 3/4" copper around a stove pipe and then sleeved over it with a larger diameter length of pipe, I think you could also encase soft copper pipe in refractory cament and use the same way but whatever, you need to store the water, (as in a WH or seperate tank) and it has to circulate through the system and blow off is necessary too as previously stated.

-- Hendo (OR) (redgate@echoweb.net), October 28, 2000.