Homemade hydronic heating.1

First video of my experiments with woodfired hot water.

[@Joe-me6jh]

Just picked up one of these stoves at auction. The refractory cement appears to react over years with creosote and break down into mush. Seems they're around ~1950's. No leaks in mine yet, just pulled it apart to give it a once over and then it will run a couple of radiators. Be mindful that the mush/refractory in there is pretty flammable and sloughs off once you get a good fire going.

[@Yantopia]

Maybe re-render it on the inside? I love those units. Let me know how it fires up

[@Joe-me6jh]

@@Yantopia Yep, I've cleaned it up and had a fire through it. Went really surprisingly well. Going to re-render it. Might need to put some mesh in the render to keep it from falling off of the sides. Hard to find information about them these days, but I took off the casing and there was a newspaper inside talking about the truce conference in 1952 in Korea and about the cold war. They really are built like nothing else. Some of the later models with flue mounted thermostats for automatic air control look amazing but I've never seen one. Might have to go check out some estate sales.

[@Yantopia]

@@Joe-me6jhNice one, do you have a storage tank for the hot water before running it through the radiators?

[@Joe-me6jh]

@@Yantopia Yeah I've got a little 50 litre hot water service. I'll run it open to air to avoid explosions.

[@Yantopia]

@@Joe-me6jh should work well, keep me updated if you would

[@unionse7en]

One major advantage of having a thermal water reservoir (bank/mass) is you could drastically increase the flow rate of the water to keep it just below boiling and ~rapidly heat up the thermal tank.... then shut the stove down and gradually use the heat from the tank... of course also useful overnight where you can't feed the small but powerful wood burner all night. Downside... it requires a pump, at least during the day (solar). IF you put the thermal tank under your bed etc.... you might not even insulate it much and not require a pump at night, just let it loose it's heat into the space you want to heat anyway.

[@Yantopia]

I ended up using an IXL stove in the kitchen and connecting a three hundred litre tank to that with pump attached. Long time ago.

[@JSR80]

OMG I have one of these Tubulous stoves! Currently rusting away but hoping to use it to heat the workshop next winter. Thanks for posting this video

[@Yantopia]

James Roberts They are very effective at heating water. I moved onto a combustion stove with 300lt water tank attached so I could have some direct heat and cooking too. Good luck, don't let the old units die!

[@bobbrua8758]

nice job where do you get the radiators

[@barrylane8010]

any updates on this modification ?

[@Yantopia]

I hear you The problem is control, I need a header tank

[@Ben-Dedia]

if you wan more heat kip that cooper insulated