Heating With Wood

[Scupper]

Has anyone tried heating an AP system with a woodstove or wood furnace, pumping water directly from the FT through a heat exchanger and back to the tank? Possibly setting it up as a thermo siphon?

If so, how is it working?

Thanks,

Scupper

[badflash]

This wouldn't work very long. The bio-growies will clog it up in no time. You need to use a clean water loop to do this. Don't use anti-freeze or anything like that as it could leak into the fish water.

A thermo siphon won't move enough water and would require the stove to be below the tank level.

What can work is low pressure steam injected into a mixing tank, but it is a lot more work and technically tricky.

[urbanfarmer]

You could try setting up one tank in the system that is metal and burning wood underneath that.

[badflash]

Sounds like fish soup to me....
Might work for a while, but things go wrong and that sounds like it could go REAL wrong.

[Scupper]

Thanks for the input. Badflash, if you read Brier's post under heaters dated 10/17/2010 you will see the type of system I am considering. As a newbie I may not be using precise terminology yet, but I thought Brier’s idea was interesting and worth consideration.

[badflash]

Scupper, I was replying to urbanfarmer's post.

On the hydronic heating part, a double heat exchanger isn't inefficient energy wise. Heat isn't lost in the process as long as things are well insulated. The cost goes up and the heat through-put goes down.

I've seen setups where copper tubing is wrapped around a barrel stove and a small pump moves water through it. Hose clamps are used to transition from copper to plastic pipe. Coils of plastic pipe in the tank transfer the heat. Pure water is used as the heating fluid. The pump is placed on the return side of the plastic pipe to minimize the pressure on the tubing.

[RickS]

I plan on incorporating a snorkel stove that heats the water and ambient air in the greenhouse. I was going to put it in a sump basin on the return end. This would take some of the burden from the electric heaters.