Burning Less - Central Boiler Classic Edge 550

hi guys welcome to wood sweat and tears i'm still mike and today we're talking boilers stay tuned hey guys so last video we had talked about the woodshed now the woodshed has to feed the boiler so today i thought i'd talk a little bit about our boiler and uh why it is a very good fit for us and uh the efficiency that uh that we're seeing from it so we have a central boiler classic edge it's a 550 and when we originally sized when we were looking at a new boiler they originally sized us at a 350 and i decided to go one step up just because it gives you a little bit bigger firebox it doesn't really give you anything else other than that um but i also uh wanted to get the uh the upgrade for the uh the firestar um which is their healing technology which allows me to have it paired with my phone and no matter where i'm at in the world i know what the boiler is doing and what the temperature is so on and so forth it also gives me alerts if the fire were to go out if uh it's overheating it's there's a lot of different uh things that it can tell me and so i can either call home or i can you know talk to a neighbor if we're not here whatever to to shut it down so that's a nice feature that we like the one thing about boilers that a lot of people don't like is that you're married to them when it comes to the winter time you're really not going anywhere because somebody has to put wood in the boiler now if you have a neighbor which we do and from time to time he will help us out but for the most part this boiler right here i can get 24 hours not no problems as far as a burn time with just standard amount of wood inside of it there's times where we've went for overnight downstate and we're coming back the next day and we've gotten 36 hours and and a little bit more than that um just by filling the boiler up and it takes care of itself so you don't have to worry about uh the house getting cold or this freezing you know if the fire were to go out the other thing is is that we installed this three years ago because the boiler that we had before this was literally an incinerator i was putting in 15 to 20 cord of wood in this boiler every season and i had enough of it i knew that there was better out there and i also wanted to have the ability to heat my domestic water and i just needed something that was going to do that my old boiler didn't so once we got we started looking at boilers and i decided to go with this one the one thing they boasted about is that you're going to burn 50 percent less wood now i didn't buy it based on that because i thought it was a joke i said there's nobody that can say you can burn 50 less wood well i'm gonna tell you i'm on my third season right now and as i mentioned in the previous woodshed video we are now burning practically 50 less wood you know in some cases it just depends on the winner but we are burning anywhere from eight to ten cord a season and we live in in northern lower peninsula of michigan and you know it gets cold and we're burning this thing six months six months a year easy so um i think that's a really good selling point if you're just tired of burning a lot of wood and if you'd like to have something that's a lot more efficient now this is one of their epa models and uh it meets a uh epa phase two emission level and um so it does have a little bit more features as far as you know burning cleaner and longer so one of the things that i also like is that with my old boiler i was cleaning ash out of it every week with this boiler i'm now cleaning ash out of it twice a week all right excuse me twice once every two weeks so twice a month i'm cleaning the ash out and it all comes down through this reaction chamber door and that's actually what i have to do right now so i'll kind of show you what two weeks of ash looks like as you can see it's not uh it's not that much and uh the other thing too with this boiler is that uh this reaction chamber underneath is actually where the heat goes and then it cools or sorry it heats the uh the tubes which in turn heat the water and then it goes from the pecs into the house and then into the uh forced air furnace that we have but what the one thing that it does too is that you know that it creates a downforce of a fire and it actually burns any kind of clinkers or anything that does come down underneath it burns it even finer there's a lot of times when i do this i'm only pulling out what seems to be just like fly ash or ash so doing this every two weeks does not bother me one bit [Music] now there's a lot of the older central boilers you know everything is up here and uh you know you're not having to bend down and and get to it i do like that part but this is the way most of the new boilers are so if you're going to get a new boiler this is and it's going to be from central this is going to be it now some of the other things that i have to do when i'm doing for maintenance with this particular unit is that when i fire up and i usually fire up end of september first week of october no no later and uh the one thing that i have to do is i have to take a water sample and i have to send it to central boiler and then they test the ph and all the levels because the water that's in this system is treated and the treated water just to make sure that there's no corrosion or uh or buildup you know in your lines so um if i don't send that water sample in then they can void my 25 year warranty that i have so it's a very simple thing i just take a water bottle fill it up send it in and within a week you know i'm getting the uh the results and if i need to add any more chemical but very rarely do i even have to do that um it's been really good and you know to put a water sample in the mail once a year is uh it's not a big deal but uh that's all the ash right there for uh for two weeks of burning so uh not too bad not too bad at all i'll show you the firebox too um right now we are at uh 24 hours of burn and generally when i fill it up i'm only filling it up to about this mark right here i'm not filling it up to the top but i get 24 hours of burn out of that and then [Music] generally what i do when i come out is they give you this really nice tool this is really awesome and you just take it and you scrape the bottom this keeps it all loose and keeps it flowing and underneath here we'll have to wait for this to clear [Music] there's a tube that actually creates the after burn and then it burns down underneath here is some fire brick that actually drops the ash down below into the reaction chamber you probably see it that's where it drops so even if you have ash build up up here it's really easy to clean it out from the bottom they do give you a handle too for bypass which actually opens up the door in the very very back here and allows you to open that while the fire is burning that way you don't get a backdraft so it's a really a safety feature i haven't had anything happen to me like that yet but i guarantee if they didn't put that on there it would be a liability for them some of the other things when i do come out here and for a lot of you guys you know that burn wood i enjoy it i mean i do this once a day and i enjoy taking care of it but i basically took an old hockey stick i kept all my broken hockey sticks from back in the day and i put a uh basically a paint scraper or spackle blade i just bolted it on there and i just shake it keeps it nice and clean and then i also go around the edges to make sure that i'm getting a good seal on my door and uh when the fire is really hot it's even better because everything is really wet uh really hot and you can remove it a little bit more but generally if i come out here i don't have to do that much so i'm gonna put in the amount of wood that i need to do for uh 24 hours since we're getting late in the day here and i'll see it again tomorrow and guys like i had mentioned before seasoned wood you know there's a lot of guys that think you know it's a boiler it can burn anything you know i put swamp wood in there i can put it in there as wet as i want it'll burn it yeah it will but you'll have creosole off the yin yang that's no good and honestly this thing does not like high moisture wood when we first uh got it we were still trying to build up our supply of firewood and i did end up having some wood that toward the end of the season that was a higher moisture content it didn't like it at all it burned really really really bad so now i'm way ahead on inventory and i don't have those issues anymore so there you have it that's uh 24 hours of burn probably get a little bit more it just depends um right now it's in the single digits and it's getting below zero at night so i shouldn't say that i'm gonna get 24 out of it but um it's not going to go out while we sleep tonight i can tell you that so the other thing i do too is uh i'll show you the back side there's one tool that i created you can i shouldn't say i created it but they make them you can buy them online the problem is they're really long and i can't remember the exact name of this tool but uh i actually made this for myself so i can clean the tubes so you can see these tubes this is where the hot wat hot air comes in and it heats the water inside and then exhausts at the top of the stack if these get so beefed up with creosol your efficiency of heating the water inside becomes less and less so you can see after two weeks it's gotten quite a bit scaly so i made this tool to just simply do this goes in between it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be better than where they left it and it doesn't go that far back too that's about as deep as it goes so it's not that far probably if they had a problem with central is that you think they would have provided you a tool to do this but i had to learn this the hard way i didn't know i couldn't find anything and i asked and i asked and i think ah just get a wire brush like i can't stick a wire brush in there [Music] one [Music] there's also some vents up here i learned that the hard way too so one night i was like wondering why is this boiler running and running and running and running and it was trying to get hot it just it wouldn't heat the water well the one thing about fire is it needs air and uh the fan was going but it couldn't breathe on the back end so i found out that there's vents up here obviously where the smoke goes out the stack they just had gotten plugged and that was after two years of burning and uh really a really tough lesson to learn i was out here i had no idea they were there i didn't even see them in the owner's manual to be honest but i knew that this air had to go somewhere the exhaust and i eventually found it after poking and prodding around but uh i'll be honest yeah i was pretty confused for a while there on what exactly the issue was but as you can see here that's everything that i got out of there and now i know that my [Music] heat exchanger is definitely going to eat a lot better now it is messy i'm not gonna lie to you it's not perfect you know you gotta basically dump it on the ground i could get a dust pan or do whatever but this is what it is and every two weeks honestly that's all i got to do no problems there so so that's that well and the nice thing too is how i know i'm doing really well with my wood is that i do run a chimney brush through here and i get about a dust pan every three or four months out of uh out of this stack it doesn't even build [Music] so i'm getting good good wood now here's the uh what i i look at here when i'm doing my boiler so this here tells me what my water temperature is then it'll flip over to what the reaction chamber is now that's where we got the ash from and telling me that it's 348 degrees down there and my water is 177. now my water i have it set for 185. sometimes it goes a little over sometimes it's a little under but for the most part it stays pretty consistent and that's what i need to basically heat 2500 square feet total and once i put wood in there i'll come around and i'll look at this and i just want to make sure that my reaction chamber temperature is going up right away if it means if it's going up right away that means the system's working like it should it's getting air exhausting it everything's working if it stays the same or it goes lower then i know that i usually take my prod and i'll go down and i'll scrape the bottom of the boiler again just to make sure that it's getting air down below and sometimes that's all it takes so that's why i always run this around the base of the unit before i put wood in but for the most part guys that's it um if you're in the market for a uh for a wood boiler and uh this might be it i'll i'll tell ya i've had very little maintenance with it in the in the third season that i'm i'm with it now and it's done a very very good job and keeps the garage the house and domestic water nice and hot we can take four showers one after another and never have a worry about who's getting a cold shower because nobody is everybody's getting hot water and uh the way uh mrs uh wood sweat and tears likes it um you can peel skin off just about anything so that should tell you something but i appreciate you guys tagging along for the uh two week maintenance and uh if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below and as always please uh please like and subscribe we really appreciate those thumbs up and it lets us know that we're uh we're on the right track here and providing good content for you guys and uh next time we uh we come around uh we'll have another good uh good show for you so thanks again stay safe with sweat and tears out you

Channel: Wood, Sweat and Tears

Views: 75,621

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Id: Wpw8faChYgw

Length: 20min 52sec (1252 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021