Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. I am not sure overall the extra cost vs expected life expectancy of it would be worth it to go to stainless steel. They are made of stainless steel or black sheet metal, designed in a way that increases the path of the flue gases, increasing the heat dissipation area of your heating appliance. I have another, older one which I got off my grandmother (she had gotten new ones) and it takes replaceable batteries but it seems to be a little overly sensitive in that smoking a hookah (with really good hookah coals) would set the thing off. The advantage of an "airtight" woodstove (not really "airtight," since it needs combustion air, but not as wasteful as a fireplace) is that you can choke down the combustion air when you go to bed, and it won't suck as much warm air out of your house.
The trade-off is that your stack temperatures with a woodstove will be lower than with a fireplace when you do this, causing more/faster condensation of creosote in the flue. Here you have a heating ring main where the main hot water flows and you tee off to each property to a plate heat exchanger. The one I was given after the service I'm sure was just combustion efficiency, it was just a probe in the exhaust gas stream so it had no idea how much heat was actually being passed in to the system.
We were up there a couple years ago in September with the snow flying and had it running all day every day. I was thinking of having the front of the box able to be opened so it can easily be checked/serviced, but I'd like to have some idea of how long it might last before starting trying to build anything. Even with a short (and, in my humble opinion, somewhat dubious) flue such as you have, it would cause the flue -- or the boiler, should it get into it -- to corrode and fail remarkably quickly.
If possible, measure the stack draft, the flue gas temperature, and the Carbon Dioxide level of the flue gases at the sample points on your appliance as described in the user manual. Even better I've used no kerosene, burned only wood, which comes free to me via the woods out back and pallets picked out of dumpsters.
As far as cleaning goes, I was planning on copying the principle from the Magic Heat again, and flame cut a thick steel plate that would be slid back and forth to "scrape" any buildup off the pipes. they didn't have fire regs back then and the pipes went through oversize 50mm square holes and the roof flashing was thi through cedar shingles. Muriatic Acid is a powerful acid used by cement workers to clean concrete from tools and such, it is also added, in diluted solutions, to swimming pools to adjust the P.
After the union has been cut to length, I made a series of cuts perpendicular to the remaining marker line, spaced about 3/4" apart, around the entire perimeter of the union. The open area (gap between tanks plus 3" tubes) is about 88 square inches, versus the area of a 6" pipe which is about 28 square inches, so this should not obstruct flue gases significantly. Once the bucket was all set up good, I was able to continue laying out the inlet/outlet hole locations. All of these are lessons I sort of knew, and can ignore somewhat if I am fixing a shovel, but still have a weld that won't break but won't win any beauty contests either. Thats easy enough - an electric fan on the chimley cowel would consume, im sure, much less energy than the hot gas holds.Air pressure test at a low pressure - say 10 PSI - so I don't blow the thing to smithereens before it is finished, and use soapy water to find pinholes. It would be a lot less work installing a stand-alone stove and replacing the flue pipe, otherwise to get an "insert" to work we would have to rebuild the whole hearth.
After burning almost 30 face cord last winter I need to try something to get some more efficiency out of it. It's not so much a case of "You got what you paid for", as it is a matter of "You DIDN'T get what you DIDN'T pay for, and you're NOT going to get what you thought you were in the way of comfort". The burner kicks out lots of heat into the room and some heat to adjoining rooms, through air convection, but the rest of the house does not receive much benefit.I could put any number of ports through the heat exchanger, then cap them off on the top with another box that goes to a single larger pipe. After about 2 hours all of the Zinc coating had lifted off the steel and was floating around the top of the bucket.
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