Our self made wood stove

nick disjunkt

Adventurer
the pieces of steel I`ve cut out with a grinder with a 115mm disc/blade (?). More funny it was to cut out a ring from a 5mm steel plate... ...and the 3mm Stainless steel top with its ~80mm chimney hole. :) Even if the grinder is doing the most of the job, the hand hurts anyway after all... :/ I don`t want to imagine to cut this by hand :D

That’s some neat work with a grinder! I hate cutting circles with an angle grinder, I have some huge and expensive hole-saws from being too lazy to use a grinder. For 3mm a decent blade on a jigsaw might have been easier, although you have to go slow as they get extremely hot. I burnt through several grinders and hundreds of discs on my truck before I had removed all of the steel from its life as an armoured cash-in-transit truck, and so I bought a small plasma cutter. It has been pretty useful, and not too expensive. If you start building the burners for other people maybe you should look at getting yourself one?


I didn`t know how to solve the problem with the heat exchanger, exactly because of what you are asking for. I didn`t want to have a circulation pump working all the time when heating. Sure it would have other nice consequences and possibilities (like groundfloor heating, radiators, preheating the machine of the Truck,...), but I didn`t want to be dependent on electricity, or I would like to have an always working system (no matter the circumstances). The amount of Ah/day of such a small circulation pump is a lot- not that much for one day, but day by day in winter to much.

Maybe I should say that the hole boiler story is going to be an experiment and I`m open to get any other ideas how to fix this. I`ll begin on this principe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IRLVCJ1olA No glycol, no electricity. If this won`t work out well... ...the boiler will also have an integrated heat exchanger... ...just in case of- but then I`ll be forced to use a pump and extend the whole system to prevent the coolant boiling.
And yes, thank you to make me thinking; then the whole story will need a thermo switch to make the pump running.

Until now I didn`t thought a lot about that- already enough to think about the stove. It belongs to part 2. But actually I don`t even care to much about. If it won`t work, it won`t work and I`ll put in a normal Truma gasboiler.

The thermo syphon on the video works well, but I think you might have difficult in your application getting it to work reliably. My primary concern is that once the whole tank is hot, the syphon will work much more slowly. In your case, if you cannot get heat out of the system quick enough, the water will just get hotter and hotter until it boils. This works fine in the video as the guy can just shut the fire off, but if it is cold outside and you need to warm the truck up, you do not want to have to kill the fire when the water is heated!

If you fitted a large truck radiator under you truck with a thermostat to open the system at about 80 degrees, the cold radiator down low, and the hot tank high up in the truck might be enough to passively loose enough heat once your water tank is hot. You could then fit an electric pump to kick in at 90 degrees so that you can rapidly cool the coolant if it starts getting dodgy. Just an idea, this is uncharted territory for me. You might find wild animals sheltering for warmth by the radiator though!

The water pumps on webasto/eberspacher units are pretty efficient, have you looked at the power consumption of these?
 

dwh

Tail-End Charlie
View attachment 275864


Beautiful!

Makes me think of this:


1935-shallow-water-rig.jpg
 

Dream

Observer
@Dwh
You are not the first who sees similarity with this helmet! :) But yes, it would fit perfectly to sailing boats.

@Nick
Thank you for your commentar! It's always good to get different opinios! In our country we use to say: the more heads, the more knowledge!

This possibiliy brings me back to the startpole of the circle. First it began with the Eberspächer Hydronic (radiators, groundfloor heating, boiler and trucks engine) with the stove instaled in the system. Than I said I could make running this entire system primarly by the stove what would actually permit to not to install the Eberspächer at all. The youtube video showed me how to make heating the water with a stove without using a pump (what I've found perfect in our cirumstances). I already found a solution to stop heating the water by using valves, but it would be uncommon because of manual operation and dangerous in case of "oh, I forgott to turn the valves!" Maybe a thermostate and a pressure (?) valve could make it running without my actions.
But yes, finally you're right! (...and again I'm on the same pattern... :/ ). To make a larger system with more "clients" (radiators, groundfloor, blabla) and a pump. And in this way a Hydronic could take place without further big invests......and rise the lazy comford by pushing buttons.:) But there's another reason more or less important: this truck will make trips to countries where gasoil costs a potatoe, so "economically unreasonable" to make a move elsewhere than to move the button with one finger. :)

So again I am seriously (re)thinking the whole situation...
I will try to find a mixed solution. Heating the boiler by running the stove, using the thermic at beginning and, as the themperature is growing, using the pump (by pressure interrupter (?)) in addition to bump the heat in radiators and/or groundfloor (and evtl. engine).
Like this the pump maybe will work less. If I remember well the consumption those pumps afre running at about 2 amps (12V)... ...not thaaat much. In case of I can install one more solar panel and the story is done.

Tomorrow I'll see. Maybe I can paint the body. Colour is anthracide grey, resisting up to 900 degrees.
 
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Dream

Observer
latest impression...
...and tomorrow "HE" will be finished! Yes!!! :victory:

Then I can start prepare myself for next part... ...the heat exchanger.
 

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cruiserpilot

Adventurer
If you light a fire in that, you're going to need a bigger truck! Beautiful workmanship, reminds me of a pirate ship for some reason.
 

Dream

Observer
Here it is!
 

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Dream

Observer
The decision about how to heat the water:
The heat exchanger will take place in the chimney, so that this one will be independent of the stove (in which case ever...).
A waterheating diesel stove (Eberspacher, Webasto or Autotherm) will be installed as a Backup stove.
Both (considering needs the one or the other) will heat the whole system. I`ll take the consumption of the circulation pump in charge, and that's it.
 
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toyotech

Expedition Leader
that is really nice. seems like with all the parts custom made, should have just made it 100% custom instead of using the gas bottle
 

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