cleaning the chimney, wood fired radiant heat

I finally cleaned the chimney this week. I had been dreading the job because I assumed I would have to climb up on the roof, build a scaffold, climb a ladder and risk my life or spend untold hundreds of dollars to have it done. After all, the point of the stove was mainly to save money. As you can see, I decided to remove a section of pipe from the inside and clean it that way.
This worked perfectly. I can not believe how clean and efficient our wood stove is. In the eight plus cords of wood we have burned this year, we have generated only enough soot in the pipe to fill a coffee cup twice. (I used Melissa's coffee cup to find that out). The ash taken out of the stove in that time was only enough to fill a five gallon bucked twice. The beetle killed spruce that we burn is not the best fire wood but it sure burns clean in my stove!


As you can see, we put a trash bag around the pipe and fished the cleaning rod up through a slit in the bag. The bag caught all the soot and the pipe was very easy to re-install.

Below is a picture of the heat exchanger that I built. It heats water that is circulated through tubes affixed under the floor of the bathroom. This heats the bathroom floor (radiant heat). There is much more to the exchanger than just a steel box, but if you want to know more you'll have to download the plans from my internet site.......someday.
As you can see, there is a pipe bringing water in and another taking water out. A third pipe is for pressure relief in the event of a boil over. It has a temp. and pressure valve on the end like the one on a home hot water tank. On the back of the stove I mounted an aqua-stat that tells a circulation pump when there is a fire in the stove. At a set temp. the pump kicks on and the floor heating begins.





Here is my circ. pump located under the house directly below the stove. The pump is on the out going line, the incoming line can be seen above it. I added valves on the lines that can be turned off so the hot water can be diverted to a temporary line to thaw a walkway or something neat like that.

The point of this project was not only to heat the bathroom floor, but to learn about radiant heat and experiment with the use of wood fire in this capacity. There is more to it than you might think. Ratio of volume to exposure time, engineering the heat exchanger to heat the water without overheating, installing the lines so they will radiate heat into the floor efficiently and insulating pipes and lines to minimize heat loss. This of course took some experimenting, but after only two boil overs that spilled anti-freeze into the living room, it works wonderfully and I have already generated some potential work for my welding business.