my little project (newbie)

So here is some history and my new project.
I bought a Harman cw 30 last summer to try and heat my house from an uninsulated daylight basement with two garage doors...needless to say this has proved to be much more difficult than I had planned.
Last winter I bought 3 tons of coal and burned 2.5 tons and my first floor of my cape cod was ok at best...2nd floor was cold..
I disconnected my return air from my air handler and built a box on the return and tried to capture the hot air blowing out of the stove and ran the air handler on all The time...this was more even throughout the house...but still not warm....so I built a tempory wall and pushed the air up the steps via a fan..
So this brings me to my project this winter...
The house originally had a boiler running to hydronic baseboards. He decided to put in a air handler and a heat pump to add AC to the house. Leaving the baseboards in place but cutting out everything in the basement.
So I decided to reconnect all the baseboards and had a ptank made to sit on the stove...bought a pump and all the accessories to hook up and circulate heated water up into the house and hopefully heat the house.
PIC1 first try...water only came up to 90 degrees. Not near enough to heat a house

PIC2 took off the side covers and added loops on the side and base board pipe with fins on the back to captureu more heat...water is now at 100 degrees...but still not enough!!!

PIC 3 Indirect fired hot water heater that preheats water coming from the well before It goes Into the regular hot water heater

Any input would be welcome!!!!

Please remember I am a Newbie to posting to forums so uploading pics might take several attempts

I have to be honest here, You would gain so much more efficiency and heat by installing a stove on the first floor with a couple old style grates in the upstairs floor (it worked for 200 years and our ancestors were very smart) LOL.

If the stove MUST be in the basement you might do better to gain some radiant value by insulating, cutting a vent/grate in the floor directly above the stove, etc. I know everyone loves the literature on this model, but i assure you that its impossible to have a wood stove design function efficiently with coal (people can say what they want and spec sheets can be printed with efficiency ratings and BTU outputs and this argument could go on forever but i will keep saying the same thing... wood and coal require different grates, different shapes, different design, different airflow and to think both can be done equally well in one stove is a myth).

Ive never had the opportunity to test this unit but it must burn through coal like crazy looking at the depth of coal bed vs surface area? does this burn through the night no problem? do you have to bank up coal against the rear into an uneven bed in order to get a long enough burn? why is this design not made anymore?

Please understand I hope im way off base and hope someone with more smarts then me can think of some magic to get this working better for you, but it appears you have gone through alot of good efforts here to make this work and im just giving the suggestion that it might be better at some point for you to try a new tach. wishing you the best new year ever and some more warmth too

dcrane your going to bring a new light to this board, welcome! I look forward to tapping into some of that knowledge.

Unfortunately the stove does have to be in the basement...orginally I wanted to cut holes in the floor but it is directly below the kids bedrooms at the end of the house and would be entirely 2 hot I'm afraid.

Usually fill it every 12 hrs with 3/4 to 1 five gallon bucket of nut coal...

While I applaud your workmanship and effort, I must tell you that it is very difficult to heat any amount of water with a radiant stove. I don't think you will be able to get the baseboard system any warmer than what you are getting right now unless you put a coil directly in the firebox...and even then it probably will not meet your expectations.

Rob R. wrote:While I applaud your workmanship and effort, I must tell you that it is very difficult to heat any amount of water with a radiant stove. I don't think you will be able to get the baseboard system any warmer than what you are getting right now unless you put a coil directly in the firebox...and even then it probably will not meet your expectations.

I agree with Rob.. Nice effort, but my opinion is that there just isn't going to be enough heat transfer this way. It looks to me like you are trying to simulate a boiler, but you have the water outside of the stove instead of inside. The efficiency of the heat transfer isn't gonna prove reasonable. If the stove can't go upstairs then why not sell the stove and put in a hand fired boiler? You have the rest of the hydronics in place in the house, most of the work is already done.. That makes the best sense to me

gyminit5 wrote:Indirect fired hot water heater that preheats water coming from the well before It goes Into the regular hot water heater

. Very good! I cut my electric bill substantially with internal DHW coils and a preheat tank.

You have to get the heat upstairs. Right now the block wall in your basement is sucking the heat out into the ground. You could try to make a heat jacket around the stove and duct the hot air to the upstairs but in the end you may be asking your stove to do something that you just can not make it do. You may need a different kind of coal stove, furnace or boiler.

Rob R. wrote:While I applaud your workmanship and effort, I must tell you that it is very difficult to heat any amount of water with a radiant stove. I don't think you will be able to get the baseboard system any warmer than what you are getting right now unless you put a coil directly in the firebox...and even then it probably will not meet your expectations.

Thanks...it has just been a project for fun and to see what I can do without drilling thru the stove...the water is always running thru so there is no chance of overheating...at 100 degrees of water,and the temp here the other nite was 29 I woke up to the temp only dropping from 68 to 65 in the house the next morning...and I just have a block house with sididng and whatever insulation they put inside which I'm sure isn't much.

Besides that this was just a learning experience for me....I had never sweated a joint before this...I'm not planning on staying here real long so if it don't work any better its no big deal

dcrane wrote:
If the stove MUST be in the basement you might do better to gain some radiant value by insulating, cutting a vent/grate in the floor directly above the stove, etc. I know everyone loves the literature on this model, but i assure you that its impossible to have a wood stove design function efficiently with coal (people can say what they want and spec sheets can be printed with efficiency ratings and BTU outputs and this argument could go on forever but i will keep saying the same thing... wood and coal require different grates, different shapes, different design, different airflow and to think both can be done equally well in one stove is a myth).

Ive never had the opportunity to test this unit but it must burn through coal like crazy looking at the depth of coal bed vs surface area? does this burn through the night no problem? do you have to bank up coal against the rear into an uneven bed in order to get a long enough burn? why is this design not made anymore?

Please understand I hope im way off base and hope someone with more smarts then me can think of some magic to get this working better for you, but it appears you have gone through alot of good efforts here to make this work and im just giving the suggestion that it might be better at some point for you to try a new tach. wishing you the best new year ever and some more warmth too

As far as the specifics of the stove and how good the design is I have know idea other than I know it burns wood and coal great for me pumps out tons of heat and I never have to fill it more than 12 hrs to 20 hrs depending on how high I have It running