Outdoor Wood Boiler Review l Pros and Cons (20 Plus Years of Experience)

hello and welcome to garrock farms in today's video we're going to talk about the wood boiler here on the farm it's used to eat the house as well as the shop my father he's going to talk about the things he likes and he doesn't like and we're also going to clean out the ash so you guys will get to see how we do that also he purchased a new wood boiler so he'll talk about that a little bit so i hope you guys enjoyed the video we bought this boiler new in o4 now my first boiler was the exact same thing except the smaller version with this which i bought in 95 but when we added the shop with it then we decided in oh four we're going to get a bigger boiler to shop one in and old five so early last winter i was losing water and i didn't know where and i i couldn't see any leaks in the firebox and i didn't know if it was my shop floor or where it was but before i investigated too deep into it i decided let's just buy a new boiler and i had a guy called he said he had one it's actually from canada it's called a portage in maine and i've looked at this boiler several different years before i decided to just purchase it and i thought well the thing is with boilers they're usually pretty good you treat them right this one's been very good to us the only thing we've been replacing is a solenoid which is known to go bad maybe every fourth fifth year it's a very inexpensive piece but other than that everything's been pretty good the leak we found it um middle of last winter it was where i had to extend the line to fit this boiler from my first boiler underneath the slab so we had to just make a makeshift line over top of ground that went to the house just for the finish out the winter but anyway like here you can see the water level and it goes to there and if i so we turn it on and we check that every day and then they got this little gauge here and really all that is is keeping your there's about right in here some places on top of the firebox and you just want to keep the water above the top of the firebox when this thing goes bad this little solenoid in here and we'll show you a picture of that later but it's it's basically just something that magnetizes and keeps the flap open and it's gets stuck so when it says it's hot enough it shuts it off with the aqua stand and the door doesn't shut and then it lets the fire rage the water starts boiling and then on top this is what they call an open system and the other one i'm thinking they call it the same thing so that's just a loose cover and there's a little vent in it but if i look at that and that's popped off that'll tell me this thing has been boiling overnight and then i check my water and it can boil for a while before it takes the water level down but anyway that was the only thing that would ever go wrong we're gonna clean the ash out of this one there's not much wood i didn't fire too hard today today's warmer and we always inspect the firebox we never burned garbage in there a few cardboard boxes and paper sacks to get it started but i won't burn garbage in there and that's usually uh that's something that guys make a mistake with they try to get rid of some of their stuff that they shouldn't now in here so they give you pretty much a diagram of how things generally need to be set up depending on your type of system but our pumps are all in our buildings in our house and in our shop and we try to keep everything as insulated as we can because all you're doing is heating the world if you don't so we just keep this wad of insulation in there you can have the pumps in here too i'd advise to put them in the buildings there's better for the pump they can catch air and whatever heat comes off those heats are building then they got valves on so i can shut one off or we had to do some work and then there's this power switch here now there you hear my solenoid shut off now i'm going to turn it on give it a second they're turned on that's all it does it's all stone is open in the draft door so anyway when it was sticking open we'd basically have to just tap on the side to get it to shut and that would tell us we either gotta lube it up a little wd-40 and there's a temperature gauge here that needs to get replaced that's the only thing and i think it's set at 180 degrees um we just never replaced it and and i know if this is operating that means it's under 180 you just get to learn it you know what now back here stainless steel chimney comes at four feet added on another four feet get a little better draft to keep your your smoke up a little higher now this doesn't look too bad i haven't cleaned this out all winter that ain't too bad there's a little soot in there i might have to get in there and push it back into the board this is all original i've never done nothing with this i'll do it inspect it and clean it got a cast iron door with an extra plate in front here to kind of help protect it and the ash pan on this one is i believe it's like a quarter inch thick see we're just going to kind of push some of the hot coals back and shovel this thing out now somebody asked what you know what we do with our ashes or we should use them on a slippery driveway in front of the barn but i've done it you have to be cautious you have to think kind of like spreading fire in front of your barn when they're hot like this and they don't cool off really fast you can put them in a pail and a week later there can still be coals inside that so what i do with them for the most part is if we got a load of manure ready to go out in the field we'll dump on top of that and spread that right away or i'll just go into a close by field and maybe drive backwards with the bobcat and just feather them out into the field it's some fertilizer especially if there's a little snow on the field one year i i i did that and there was no snow and the grass started burning and the grass was short of course but it kind of makes you think yeah so we're gonna scrape this down now in the spring we'll i'll always scrape it right up virtually sweep it but now during the heating season we just get most of it out let's say about 80 you throw some small pieces of wood back in sometimes you got a few coals you can separate them out in your skid steer bucket and then throw the coals right back on top of the fire or on top of the wood i mean and it virtually lights right up so you never really lose your temperature of your water and it's amazing when you get that ash level down now there's water jacket all the way around this and it's amazing how you don't use nearly the wood the more often you clean these out the more efficient they are and i think a lot of guys kind of like collect that a lot of things it's just not a fun job dusty job pick out somewhat of a warmer day so you can let the fire burn down a little bit we'll fire this thing from virtually from october you know as soon as it gets cold enough to say we need heat all the way till june until i need air conditioning because i can't run them together we're just set up that way we have a a gas backup and it's kind of interesting because we got one of the smaller gas tanks out back behind the house and since we put that in in 95 when we built the house and we're still on our first tank of gas yet and i have used it when the kids are small we just use a little bit to keep the floors warm or something when we had a cooler day in the summer or the spring or the early fall but this boiler has really cleaned up our farm now if you got a wood stove in the house fireplace or some sort of burner in the house you kind of want pretty clean wood now you think of obviously you have our wood firewood's made from trees that aren't so pretty anymore and they might have some insects under the bark and you split this up stack it up outside and you bring it into your house in the fall it warms up all those bugs come to life and run off into your home so out here it's like this wood pile some of this stuff isn't so pretty and as long as it isn't like a piece of styrofoam we bring it home and we use it to heat something with it and we're cleaning it up we're not just burning it up in the woods and as long as it got any kind of heart to it all now this year this is all cleaned out of an area that it's mostly box elder some birch elm soft maple woods that don't hold heat very long so we went through a pretty good pile because of that but again easy to make kind of light that's close to how close to the body you can fire it a little more often if you want to know how much wood they use it can vary tremendously by the type of wood you use so if you're using all white oak red oak some of the really good solid woods and good hardy stuff you can get twice as much heat out of a block of wood if it's a good solid piece so on a really cold night you know you can see there's a few larger pieces on the bottom where they were too heavy to throw up higher but we always try to wrestle one or two of those in every night and they'll hold their heat longer but the downside to this boiler is i think what we're doing right now and i don't think it's a terrible thing it's just the idea that doesn't have any kind of ash removal system other than you almost virtually got to shovel all the fire right out of it to clean it they send us rake with and typically every morning or at least once a day you want to go in with this rake before you throw wood in pull all your coals and kind of your small wood particles forward because when you throw wood in it kind of pushes it to the back now you remember air is coming into the front right about in here my first boiler it was coming into the side they call it a cyclone draft or something i think it was just some kind of fancy name to help sell it the draft wasn't lower on the side so then if you didn't know what you're doing when you fired it a block of wood would roll up against that draft hole and sometimes partly plug it and then we'd almost make your fire go out so you had to be kind of careful to juggle your wood which this is the better way and i think the only downside was to it is you have some kind of flexible wiring that got to go into it and you got a moving part that's all it's nothing nothing that i would change to be different but this boiler has been good for us it's never been welded we haven't had to do anything the only thing i did is replace the gasket around the door i think i'm on my third solenoid from the original which is not bad so since old four this is heated my house heated my shop so the shops are 44 by 80. well heck we got 14 foot doors in there the ceiling's even taller than that so that's a lot of area and our house is uh what is it a 58 by 30 two story we heat our garage and everything 70 degrees and warmer i'm not going to complain about it and i would never replace it if i knew it wouldn't go bad but i'm concerned like everything they never last forever now this boiler is actually for sale and i would like to sell it why it's still working to show whoever would be interested in it that this boiler is good because i don't want to disconnect it until someone's ready to to load it or to move it to their spot they claim it's like as long as it stays full of water gotten used every year you guys guys how long can they last nobody has the answer i think it's how we take care of it anyway a little bit of work but i look at it like having a couple extra calves to beat every day kind of like that with a dairy farm we're home all the time somebody's got to be here every day morning and evening anyway so check the boiler reporting anything pretty much twice a day on the really really bitter days you might want to check it a third time but you fire it right you can get by with twice a day and on the days when it gets above freezing you could probably get by it once a day with the way we're set up so it keeps this water inside this boiler 180 degrees at all times and if it's not it's feeding it air as long as it's got wood to burn it'll heat it up so then you have a radiator in your house what you call forced air so that and we got some diagrams that can show you how that stuff works but basically it's just a small pump that circulates the water from this unit to your house or from this unit to the shop so you got a line coming and a line going so all your water is doing is it's circulating and then when it needs heat it'll uh turn on the fan far as the house is concerned and blow air through a radiator just like your car would work and then distribute your heat around your house and then the shop we got a heated floor which it runs the warm water through the floor so your floor is like a giant radiator radiating heat as far as i'm concerned that's probably the better way to heat [Music] [Music] there'll be corn here next year anyway so this is all good i've been doing something for my wife for over 30 years where i would always clean out the boiler and put it in two or three five gallon buckets and take it up on a snowy hillside and then make like a heart with it out of the ashes the outline then when the sun comes out it it burns them ash down into that snow like like that's as dark and she gets a better charge out of that than buying flowers [Music] so those of you with uh some wood ash trying to impress your uh significant other that's a a great idea something real simple like that goes a long way to give my opinion about wood heat i think it's the best kind of heat out there since i've moved off the farm i've lived in a house with propane and with natural gas and by far wood heat feels the best it's just a nice dry warm crisp heat i feel like in a house heated by propane it gets kind of muggy we're gonna head into the shop and talk about that new boiler so this is our new boiler now this came somewhere out of canada we took it off the truck here a year and a half ago and pretty much set it in this spot kind of a two-door system and you know like everything would be something different to get used to there's still some things for me to learn about this boiler the one real big difference is our ashtray and this has got grates they're not shaker grates so there's a metal bar that comes with it it's just some simple scraper thing i suppose we could use this or if we have anything else that works better it wouldn't really matter but all you're doing is working the ash through the cracks so it falls into this tray and i imagine this is gonna need to be cleaned out a little more often than we clean out our other ones so what we're gonna need to do is have a steel barrel with a lid with a steel lid so i can scoop this out and dump it into that barrel and put that lid over it that might be on some sort of hinge or something simply because i've heard of this happening and it's kind of a nightmare really where guys will clean out the ashes and dump them near the boiler and end up igniting their wood pile and then of course you got an infernal right there in your wood pile near the building or house or something so something different to get used to but this completely sealed you got a gasket in here so no air gets in there this has actually got a blower in the back um that box and there's a that's an extension for the chimney and you can see the grates and there's brick in this one the other one i think it's all replaceable but it doesn't sound like something that you need to get replaced very often and then here i kind of made it a rule to buy as much plumbing parts as i think i'll need to hook this one up where the other one sits i think we're going to be able to use the same slab the firebox is similar in size one thing i've noticed is uh the door is taller heavier pieces of wood are gonna be a little bit of a challenge and the stuff that ain't so heavy it's maybe almost kind of better you're more at your level to throw it in and this one here is supposed to have less water and i don't have the specifications in front of me like like here's i think this is more of like an inspection hole where your exhaust will go up into the back come towards the front go around the corner go back toward the back and then up the flue so there's more of a a maze for your exhaust to go through and i think that's supposed to be scraped down every so often maybe it just depends on how your wood is burning if it's burning hot but i think the bigger thing for me to get used to is this two-door system it's just like going into a house where you got a storm door and then a main door so so then in the back this is our blower and an aquastack i'm thinking this is set up for 180 and i still gotta figure out what which is the in and out but we i think we got our we got a couple of pipes up there and we got a couple here so we could hook it up to two different lines i think our flu system here is pretty much the same as the other one and i think this switch here which should cut our power so right here we'd come in with our power wire from where other boilers hook we just hook right back in there and that would activate everything or if you had to work on your pump you'd shut it off so i think you can yeah there's a key lock here so you and i think it's on the front that way so you could actually lock it so some little people or something you would be concerned about you could lock it so no one could tamper with it and i was looking at the colors that comes in this brown i'm not crazy about this brown but this is just ripping steel facing for the self tappers a person could buy some steel or the color you want a couple of small sheets and fit them in there and imitate what's already in there get anything on same with the other one so then on top there's a and there's just a float down this one and i can maybe make it and that just when it's full that should be hanging out like that again that's an open system it's not sealed shut i mean it's supposed to be a little more efficient than the other one but that's a salesman for me you know trying to tell me this is versus what i have completely different company so i think they're both good companies central boilers been around a long time they've got a pretty decent replication and this one here coming out of canada let's face it it's colder up there those people got to know what they're doing and they eat stuff so here we've got a shop video coming out where i probably explained this pretty good we're heating our water so this is all you know this same setup in my house main pump where this pump is pretty much on as long as you want heat thermostat over there set at 50 degrees pump circulates constantly when it says it needs heat turns on this pump and there's a mixing valve and some different things there's a few details to it as far as in the house the only difference is is that instead of running it through all these lines it runs it through a radiator which is in your plenum inside your rich existing furnace or can be added in there or something these pumps that the amperages are they're very low they don't use hardly any electricity along with that blower on there too it's very easy very efficient all right so that's it for the boiler video i hope you guys learned something uh if uh if you guys enjoyed make sure to like and subscribe but uh before we go uh he just came back from a vacation is there anything you want to talk about well it was it was definitely different i want to explore i like to go off the beaten path i've been walking around the desert getting to see what real arizona is about not just a beating path so it was a good trip yeah the best part is i knew that things were getting taken care of responsibly here at home so uh i hope you guys enjoyed that video and we'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Gierok Farms

Views: 101,550

Keywords: Outdoor Wood Boiler, Outdoor Wood Furance, Wood Boiler, Wood Furnace, Wood Heat, Heat your home with wood, Wood Stove, How to heat with wood, Fixing, Fabricating, Snow, Pushing snow, snow removal, Selling Cattle, Skidsteer, Feeding Calves, Bottle Calves, Raising Calves, Newborn, Newborn Calf, Baby Calf, Life on the farm, Day to day life on the farm, Cows, Dairy cows, Farm tour, Heifer barn, Cattle Barn, Barn Set Up, Dairy Farm, Grazing, Winter, Winter on the farm, Winterizing

Id: E6dz07_gr3s

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022