Good Morning fellow board Members. I hope you are waking up to warm homes and no outfire conditions(insert carboniferous period insults or swear words that have jumped out of the swear jar here)
SO anyway;
Have any of you given though to a shell and tube scavenger to reclaim more heat? The reason I ask is simply that more heat can be reclaimed and less of the magic black rocks can be burned.
Gary Switzer built them for years for his wood and coal boilers and furnaces in many lengths as they were best installed in long basements or open shops/garages with a clear path to the chimney and thimble from the breech of the Switzer boiler or furnace.
The homeowner that bought these very long scavengers needed a chimney cap mounted draft inducer( there's that dirty "power venter" word again) and used small boiler brushes with extension rods to clean them as needed.
BUT perhaps the smaller scavenger may not even need one with the forced draft fans?????
The issues would of course be suspending or supporting the small scavenger using foot mounts of angle iron cut to the proper length and welded to the shell if it was installed in a vertical position with clean out Tee's or with pipe strap or support legs and additional plumbing and sheet metal work for the hot air furnaces if mounted on the horizontal plane.
Granted it would be one more place for fly ash to collect but with a scavenger sized for the flue pipe it might be well worth it as I remember them having a minimum of four tubes in the square cross section design in one long rectangular scavenger that was used for water or hot air service. Gary sold a lot of them before he changed to building his hybrid boilers completely in 1982.
Thoughts on Tuesday morning.
Scavenger Use
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Bad idea except for those badly designed stoves or boilers that should be avoided anyway.