How much oil or gas did you use

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Are you looking?
No, just curious because I knew Laynes was looking and I had made a couple suggestions.
I have a tank that came with the house, but now with no gas logs any more we don't use it. I will keep the tank around though because at some point in the future I may switch to a HE gas furnace for "primary" heat. I'm waiting a few years to see what the new EPA regs bring about but I think the ole Yukon is gonna be upgaded and I only have one possible chimney connection so if I go HE gas I can vent that out the wall and save the chimney for the wood gobbler. BTW, if nobody comes up with anything new that catches my attention Kuuma will be on my short list
 
I think I will be going with hyperheat heat pumps for primary heat in the somewhat near future.
 
I dont have gas or oil. I do keep a small kerosun heater for emergencies. Got a 5 gal can of kero been setting in the shed for a few years now. I burn about 4 cord a year and heat all my hot water during the winter. My powerbill is easily cut in half from what it was before the wood stove. If i could figure out a way to burn wood and cool my house in the summer, I would.
 
We have an all electric house so no gas or oil. We heat 100% with wood unless we're out of town. We have two heat pumps for heating and cooling and our electric bill for AC is considerably more than our winter time electric. We're in middle Georgia so winter mornings are typically 20 degrees or so but it will usually warm up to 40 by afternoon. The last couple winters we've had temps in the single digits which is not typical. We go through about 4 or 5 cords a year in a wood furnace in the basement. (not hooked into the ducting), all convection.
 
I dont have gas or oil. I do keep a small kerosun heater for emergencies. Got a 5 gal can of kero been setting in the shed for a few years now. I burn about 4 cord a year and heat all my hot water during the winter. My powerbill is easily cut in half from what it was before the wood stove. If i could figure out a way to burn wood and cool my house in the summer, I would.
steam generator!!! :D:D
 
Actually, I have figured out a way to cool my house using wood. Its called thermo syphon. You heat the water as it flows thru a pipe, the hot water pulls cold water into the pipes. The cold water is first pulled thru a heat exchanger much like your airconditioner condenser, and hot air is forced over the heat exchanger, blowing cool air into the home, and the warm water is pulled out of the exchanger as it continues on toward the worm attached to the wood stove. there the water is heated even more and continues to rise in the worm, drawing even more cool water thru the heat exchanger. This has to be done in a closed loop, where the heat can rise and fall along with the water in the pipes. The heated water passes thru another heat exchanger that exhaust the hot air to the outside. To make this work, you have to have a fairly large cold water storage . I have a small creek with 57* water year round, I plan on building a small pond and running my excess hot water under the pond before it returns to the cool air heat exchanger.

. This should work, I have experimented this method using buried pipe and circulating the water thru the pipe and using a solar water heater. It worked fairly well except that the ground became heat saturated and stopped providing the cooling of water circulating inside the pipe. By using a creek filled pond, the water should never become heat saturated. This should work with either wood heating the water or using a solar hot water heater, but i bet the solar method will be a lot easier than burning wood.
 
Actually, I have figured out a way to cool my house using wood. Its called thermo syphon. You heat the water as it flows thru a pipe, the hot water pulls cold water into the pipes. The cold water is first pulled thru a heat exchanger much like your airconditioner condenser, and hot air is forced over the heat exchanger, blowing cool air into the home, and the warm water is pulled out of the exchanger as it continues on toward the worm attached to the wood stove. there the water is heated even more and continues to rise in the worm, drawing even more cool water thru the heat exchanger. This has to be done in a closed loop, where the heat can rise and fall along with the water in the pipes. The heated water passes thru another heat exchanger that exhaust the hot air to the outside. To make this work, you have to have a fairly large cold water storage . I have a small creek with 57* water year round, I plan on building a small pond and running my excess hot water under the pond before it returns to the cool air heat exchanger.

. This should work, I have experimented this method using buried pipe and circulating the water thru the pipe and using a solar water heater. It worked fairly well except that the ground became heat saturated and stopped providing the cooling of water circulating inside the pipe. By using a creek filled pond, the water should never become heat saturated. This should work with either wood heating the water or using a solar hot water heater, but i bet the solar method will be a lot easier than burning wood.
Couldn't you just pump the cool water from the creek through the heat exchanger to get cool air? Or did I miss something?
 
This will be our first full winter in this house.

We moved in an Jan of this year and managed to heat entirely with wood. We have NG here and that ran the hot water heater, stove and on demand water heater in the addition. Our average utility bill for elec. and NG was around $90 per month for just shy of 2500 sqft.

This year will hopefully also see a more efficient wood use. We moved the stove to a more central location so we shouldn't have to use the heatilator as much. Very inefficient but it can bring the temp from 70 to 80 in a matter of a few hours on even the coldest day.
 
Couldn't you just pump the cool water from the creek through the heat exchanger to get cool air? Or did I miss something?
Yea, you can but, it takes electricity to run a pump, and we need the hot water. I have used a 2'x2' solar water heater to heat water to 130* in the middle of winter. The solar heater was placed on the roof an piped to a modified hot water heater. I cut the bottom out of the hot water heater, no electricity is connected, and placed 30ft coil of copper tube inside the tank and then welded the bottom back on the hot water heater. Modified hot water heater is placed in the actic. Fresh water runs thru the copper tube keeping it seperate from the solar heater. The copper tube is then ran to another hot water heater, which is hooked to electricity. In summer, this setup gets hot enough that the hot water heater never turns on. System is very efficient and cost less than $100 to build, you can get plenty of old water heaters at the dump for free. I did run into a problem with the welded hot water heater tank rusting out, which is something I did expect, just havent figured out a way to rustproof the tank after welding. The advantage to using old water heaters is that they do have popoff valves already installed. I have measured 180* temps in the solar heater in the summer months, in fact I had to unhook the heater to prevent small kids from getting scalded. The over heating problem can be solved just by adding more hot water storage capacity. I built this system for a friend of mind and he had a couple of small girls. I will be building myself a new retirement home pretty soon and plan on using some of the lessons learned to heat and cool my new home.
, This pic is of my current heater exchange that is connected to my wood stove. Works very well in winter, but not so good in summer. 0217131536.jpg
0217131541.jpg 0217131536.jpg 0217131540.jpg 0217131541.jpg
 
I just figured you were using electricity for the fan. Are you powering the fan some other way?
 
For a thermo syphon system, you dont need a pump to move the water. Natural convection will take care of that part for you. To make part of the system AC, well,Yep, you need a fan. My buddy that I helped install his setup, actually built his own solar panels. He bought all those little modules and soldered them together. I aint got the eyesight for that, nor the patience. He took a heat exchanger out of a old furnace and placed it inside his duct work, and used the furnace fan to circulate the cooled air thru his house. To be honest, we had a lot of problems making his system work. Since this was more a experiment with great hopes of it doing wonders than actually knowing what we where doing, we did make a few mistakes. Our first mistake was in calculating just how much pipe needed to be buried in the ground, as well as the type of pipe we should be using. being the cheapskate he is, we just bought irrigation tubing to bury. We placed 300ft in ditches, 2ft deep. ground temps hovered around 61* at the bottom of the ditch. This was in July, ambient temps around 90+degrees. One would think 61* would be plenty cool enough, but the heat exchanger was to small. Water temps in 61*, water temps out about 62-63*. We just wasnt getting the air temp drop we needed. to make matters worse, after a day or two of running the system, the ground temps started getting saturated and going up. We could tell this was happening because the water temp into the exchanger was going up. The system worked, but it wasnt the the wonder cure we where hopeing for. Did it cool his house, well, if you ran the furnace fan all night, and kept the curtains closed during the day, and limited the amount of opening and closeing doors, it would keep the house cooler than not running anything at all. Did we learn anything from this experiment, I would say we learnt a lot. Mostly that you need a lot more than 300ft of buried irrigation tube to keep from heat saturating the soil, and you also need a lot better heat exchanger than a small one out of a furnace to get any real temp drop in the air going thru it.
 
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