The stove is a semi pro made local boiler, Kal Shumaker, I'll be surprised if you've heard of em. He made quite a few boilers around here. It's all mild steel with a flap style damper, top stove pipe so it not an expensive or supper hi efficiency unit, but it came with the property.
There are a few reasons why I made this. The weather this year has been very bi-polar up here, - 32C -26F last night and is suppose to be -5C +23F on Sunday, so getting the loads right makes a difference. I'm not the only one loading this thing and they don't always think, last time it boiled some one 1/2 filled the boiler with beauty dead dry 6 incher's on a 0C +32 day, ya there was a a little re-education speech, it burped out about 10 G. I'm also not just burning the best wood all the time as it's all on property cut, it eats construction cut offs, black and white poplar, pine, oak, birch, most dead dry some damp, knots and logging cut offs, some punky or lite weight ground picks. Size wise it's single 4ft's to 10in split. For the most part it's 4ft dry white poplar and as little black as I can find.
The reason I'm running anti freeze is more for pump lube and rust protection along with limited freezing protection, I also get a cut on my insurance for running it. The boiler heats my house and my shop and there is a hot water exchanger, the house has electric backup up but the shop has nothing else and I'd hate to wreck the floor, lines..... cause of a system or pump failure, e.g. we go away for the weekend and the person filling the stove doesn't check the shop. The PO ran straight water, and so did we for a few years, but there was a lot of rust contamination even with conditioner. We would flush the system every year and you'd get 1/2 a 5G pail of junk out each time. Got it really clean this past year and is stayed very clean so far.
I am going to put a top mounted surge tank and a blower style damper on it but that'll be done when the stove gets into it's own building, it's in a very dumb place but the PO did that not me.
