ds basement 4 turned into...

A boiler? I have tossed around the idea of heating with water. I have seen stainless ran inside of these. I would be hoping to make the heat in my home more uniform, and use less coal. Thoughts? Pros/cons?

Hmmm, takes a wee bit more than stainless to make a boiler.

DS didn't make that set-up an option...wonder why?
Give them a call and see what their thoughts are, maybe.

maybe a coil for your Domestic Hot water, but you need volume for a boiler and be able to maintain the temps. just circulating it won't do it.

Maybe someone with more experience will be able to chime in, but my guess is that you'd probably be better off to get a bona-fide coal boiler. DS makes coal fired boilers. I'm sure their prices are just as reasonable as their stoves are.

Ya, I do know that I would need volume.... 1" stainless tubing, and approximatly 8 lineal feet of it within the fire chamber.... cmon guys!!! info? Thoughts?

Others have had varying levels of success at providing DHW via this method, but you are free to see if you can be the first to make it work for heating an entire home. More important than whether it will or won't work would be designing it so you don't do harm to yourself or others in the process, factoring in such critical things as what might happen to pressures in a power outage, etc...

My advice would be to get a coal boiler designed and tested for the task at hand.

I guess it would depend on how much heat you're trying to extract. If you wanted to circulate some water up to a radiator in a bedroom, that may work, but I don't think you'd be able to transfer enough BTUs out of the stove with a setup like this to heat the entire house.

Maybe instead of stuffing a bunch of tubing inside the stove, weld bungs on the stove at each circulator tube, and circulate the water through those.

strat0 wrote:Ya, I do know that I would need volume.... 1" stainless tubing, and approximatly 8 lineal feet of it within the fire chamber.... cmon guys!!! info? Thoughts?

I think there are too many unknowns to calculate before doing it. Once installed however it would be relatively simple to install a hose to one end and have the other end empty into a maybe 4 five gallon pails. Measure incoming water temp and outgoing and how long to fill the pails. This will give you how many gallons per minute at what temp. rise Which will tell you how many Btu you are capturing with that particular fire.

strat0 wrote:Ya, I do know that I would need volume.... 1" stainless tubing, and approximatly 8 lineal feet of it within the fire chamber.... cmon guys!!! info? Thoughts?

Okay, here's my best scenario...you do the tubing thing and heat a volume of water in a 80 gallon or bigger storage tank. See it as a large battery to which you will trickle charge and store your heat for use at a latter time. You will get a good amount of heat out for some time, depending on volume of the tank.
After the usable heat is extracted from the tank it will take some time again to trickle charge it back to a usable temp, and the cycle repeats.

Your controls and safety's will need to be exactly the same as required for any boiler installation.

lsayre wrote:My advice would be to get a coal boiler designed and tested for the task at hand.

That is good advice...anything less will be a lot of money spent for mediocre performance. I hate seeing people spend thousands a system that doesn't heat their house properly.

Hmmmm, well how much would a coal boiler cost me? My home is a ranch, 1800 squ ft. r11 in the walls, r38 in the ceilings. wide open basement. I can do the work, as I am very mechanically inclined, and in the trades. I also have a hvac friend who is going to help me. I really like the gravity fed stove. Is there such a creature that is a boiler? I would like to stay away from being dependant on electricity. Maybe set the system up so it would operate ok without it?