Thermacoil for baseboard heat

Hello everybody,
Have a question for you guys. So I have a hitzer 50-93 installed in the basement and currently heat my entire house with it. I have an idea and am wondering if anybody has attempted it. I also have a hot water baseboard oil fired boiler. I am thinking about trying to pipe in a thermacoil on the back of my stove and connecting in series to my boiler. Disconnect the oil burner and igniter but leave existing controls in place to work with the circulator pump and existing thermastat. Already has everything you need safety valve make up water expansion tank. My only concern is overheating or possibly under heating. I'm not sure how much these coils put out, but I'd like to utilize my baseboard heat. Anybody attempt this. All I see is for domestic hw. Is recovery time too long? Any experience would be appreciated. Thanks

welcome aboard...!!

... and I hope you're sitting down!!

(go easy on him guys...)

Howudoin2427 wrote:Hello everybody,
Have a question for you guys. So I have a hitzer 50-93 installed in the basement and currently heat my entire house with it.

....sshh quit while you're ahead, I'm learning. All kidding aside, welcome. I'm not qualified to answer your question, stay warm!

Rigar wrote:welcome aboard...!!

... and I hope you're sitting down!!

(go easy on him guys...)

lol....hey you need us new guys!

Howudoin2427 wrote: I am thinking about trying to pipe in a thermacoil on the back of my stove and connecting in series to my boiler.

Rigar wrote:(go easy on him guys...)

As easy as I can..... It won't work. Coils outside the stove just don't pick up enough heat to even begin to do the job..... even if a coil were inside the stove it's not worth the effort. They do make coils that go inside a stove that will heat domestic hot water, but that's another project. Heating or pre-heating a tank of water once a day is a long way from heating living space constantly.

So.... start saving your pennies for a coal fired boiler. Then you can do what you are proposing.

good mornin'

The short answer is "that dog won't hunt" won't even get in the truck! What Freddie says- -- sell your stove, get a stoker boiler, hook in series or parallel, you will never look back .Happy-------happy--------happy. Its so easy its stupid! There is tons of good used stuff out there.

Regards

Waldo (liberal moonbat) ask smitty

Freddy is correct. Can it be done? Yes... Would you get the results your looking for? Chance are more than excellent that you will not. The coils are just too small for what you want to do. Now if you wanted to heat some domestic water for once a day showers a coil like that will help. However, it comes with it's own unique set of problems and installation costs.

Best advise is don't try to get a device to do something it was not designed for. That is where you take a trip through the mud pond and get bogged down and it gets messy.

Rev. Larry

Probably won't work for baseboard heating, you need volume and it would probably circulate to fast and cool too fast to be feasable. but possible supplement your hot water tank for domestic hot water.

There are some designs on here using finned baseboard pipes on the stove to transfer some heat to the coils.
Heres a good design one of the members came up with for domestic hot water.

Making a external DHW Coil

I have this exact setup, Howudoin2427, only I used 2 large coils in series. I wish I had bought them from Thermocoil (I won't mention the crooks I bought mine from since you already made the correct choice) - you made an EXCELLENT choice there. I hooked mine up that way for the exact reasons you want to. It just makes sense to me - why buy 2 of everything you already have?

Now .. there's too many variables to say it will work ... or it will not work. If I run a low fire on a cold day, even 2 coils won't produce enough heat for my 13' x 13' TV room with cathedral ceilings, and crap windows with poor insulation around them - never mind enough for DHW too. But, if I crank the stove up, once all the coal is burning bright, I'm amazed at how much heat they'll pick up. For example, when we had single digit temps and I was struggling to maintain 63° in the house, I turned the TV room t-stat down to 65° from 70° ... and once the fire was bright and burning I still had 190° boiler water. For this house that's downright amazing. Measuring temp with the infared, I had 160° water going in, and 240° water coming out. It doesn't always pick up that much heat, but when the stove's cranked up it sure does.

Now on the control aspect of it. Took me a while to learn the tricks. In that process, I melted my foam pipe insulation with 270°+ boiler temps. You have to pay attention to the weather forecast and adjust accordingly, especially if your not going to be home all day. I have to fiddle with it depending on outside ambient and how much load is on the DHW. Some days when the boiler water starts heading over 230°, I'll crank the indirect boiler (for DHW) up to 150° to draw all that heat out of the boiler into the indirect tank for storage. Then I'll turn the stove down a 1/4 to a half turn to keep it in check. Requires a watchful eye. You have to think about power outages too - that can cause a major problem if your not home to deal with it.

EDIT: that circulator pictured is not needed. I plumbed it in because I didn't want to drain everything again and go through the trouble installing it if I needed it ... but it turned out since the stove is so close to the boiler, it circulates by convection no problem. I just had to manually open the check valve so hot water enters the boiler in reverse through the output, and cold water falls to the bottom and comes out the boiler drain and back into the coils completing the circuit.

A pic from a warm day:


Coils - these particular ones pictured here have since rotted away to nothing, requiring a battle with manufacturer over a warranty they REFUSED to honor:


The setup - water IN:


Coil #1 connection to coil #2:


Water OUT connection, with melted insulation :