Wood Stove Pool Heaters

[Sprucecat]

Could you please email me the design of heating your pool I Have a 30 foot above ground pool and plan on using the tub and shower steamers heat exchanger 140000 BTU with a wood boile

[ibra0078]

I would love some details of the wood heaters. Thank you

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[Sprucecat]

After looking for info on heating a pool with a wood boiler all winter I came up with a Buderous Logan’s G201 used for $300 . I believe it holds 12 gallons of water along with 60 total feet of 1 inch pex is probably roughly 15 gallons. I have 2 -140,000 btu tube in shell heat exchangers pool side and I have the boiler pump 007 next to the heat exchangers on the lowest point. I have a 1/6 hp utility pump pumping water from the pool through the heat exchangers and back to the pool roughly a total of 9 feet pumping at around 25 gpm. I fired up the boiler on may 16 pool temp was 58 degrees boiler temp runs between 140-180 degrees water going back in the pool was 15 degrees warmer 5 days later pool temp was 75 degrees and we were swimming.The following week The temp outside got down to 30° at night when it started to warm up again I fired the boiler up again for another week and got the pool temp to 80 degrees, when the pool temp is 80 and the boiler is still running water going back into the pool is 95° the pool right now is 87° I haven’t ran the boiler for over a week. By the way I have a 30 foot pool with 54 inch sides ,And the total wood that I burned was just over a face cord, I never thought it would work this efficient, next year I might add a third heat exchanger and also the boiler is rated at 140,000 BTU

[mknmike]

I am planning on finishing the upstairs of the garage in which my pool equipment resides. The garage has a chimney which I plan to use for a wood stove.

I am planning on getting a natural gas high efficiency mod-con combi (including tankless hot water heater) boiler that’s identical to to the one I’m going to be installing into the house. Rather than buying several hundreds of dollars of spare parts to have on hand, I plan to have a complete spare boiler in the garage that I can steal parts from if the boiler in the house fails. So it’s going to be way-oversized, and I will look for a heat exchanger to put on a separate “zone” on that system. I will have the option for fossil-fuel heating the pool.

I like the concept of heating with renewable wood fuel that will emit its CO2 into the atmosphere one way or another, so I might as well offset my natural gas use with it. Just burn it HOT and clean to avoid smoke particulates that are bad for the environment.

Since I’m going to have the wood stove, I figure I might as well install a heat exchanger to perhaps suck up a little bit of that fuel and heat. I have read that this can be a challenge to get the right flow rate and make sure you don’t over-cool the fire box, or the wood won’t burn hot enough to burn clean. So it seems that you need to have the water pre-heated or perhaps some sort of divider to make sure you aren’t running cold water directly into the fire box, maybe capturing heat in the flue or above the actual firebox.

If you can achieve condensation of flue gasses, then you can assure you are capturing almost all of the heat. This makes me think that an ideal scenario would be to have a coil run up the flue and have a condensation trap at the bottom of the flue where condensation would be run to a drain.

It gets complicated, but designing it sounds fun.

In my case, I’d like to have loops that could be shutoff to heat exchangers on both the natural gas boiler, and also the wood stove.

Determining the best heat exchanger for water heating might be something I’ll investigate over at hearth.com

Edit: https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/bio ... df.137252/

[mknmike]

I’ve got a ton of wood to get rid of, and the pool water is cool right now, trying to warm it as much as possible. Burning the wood for aesthetic bonfires seems like a waste. I’m tempted to try and setup a heat exchanger on the pool filter system. I would think that the return to the pool would be the place to add the heat exchanger.

Hmm…

The solo-stove we have for yard-fires is a pretty excellent design for clean burning. I would think that the heat exchanger should sit above the burn chamber to assure it doesn’t cool the combustion area.

Basically the exhaust area would probably be ideal. In fact, running the water completely down the chimney would be ideal for a condensing setup. Since the water will never get that warm, the setup should probably always condense. So I will have to setup a drain for the (acidic?) condensate.

… or just buy a pool heater.

[Kim&Dan]

I heat our pool with wood. It is 88,000 gallons, L -shaped pool, up to 12 feet deep. From mid May until start of October, we keep pool water 86-88 degrees.
Using a Central Boiler connected two 400,000 btu heat exchangers. Flow to the exchangers is controlled automatically by temperature sensing aquastats and automatic bypass valves. Usually only have to run one of the two heat exchangers except in early May when nights can occasionally be in upper 40’s or low 50’s.

[mknmike]

Very cool!