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Post by rhinokeegan on Mar 1, 2017 8:05:41 GMT -8
If you do several back to back burns the room temp and the chimney temp will come up until no condensation occurs. Or you could go to insulated chimney pipe... I'm planning a marathon run to really get the heater working. I've just been timid because I'm afraid of too much heat, too soon causing big cracks in the mortar joints. There are a few cracks I want to address before I run it again. Thanks for the clarification on the pulsing! I'm working on the door right now and hopefully I'll be able to install it in a week or so. I appreciate all of the timely responses. I'd never have done this without you guys. Keegan
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Post by DCish on Mar 2, 2017 5:42:53 GMT -8
Very interested in your door work. That's looming for me, and I'm very curious to see others' approaches. Looking good!
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Post by rhinokeegan on Oct 31, 2017 21:22:45 GMT -8
Project Update... So It's been a while and I figured that I should update the heater project. After last winter the heater was working pretty well and I was happy with the performance but I wanted to make a couple changes and hopefully improvements. First, the top of the firebox had developed a crack and I wanted to replace the firebricks with a singe cast refractory block for the top. This meant taking the drum off and some light demolition. While it was apart, I decided that I would make some new concrete caps a little bigger and thicker for more mass on the top of the bench portion. It was then that I decided to move the exhaust location to the far end of the bench section to try and increase the time the hot gasses spent inside the heater. (Peter had made this suggestion in the building phase and obviously I should have listened to him because it worked beautifully.) I finally added the digital temperature sensors and made a little enclosure for the meters. I located them at the top of the steel drum (not directly above the riser), at the top, back corner of the brick bench, and in the exhaust ducting just before it exits the building. I also managed to finish my door and get it mounted which seems to be a big improvement over using cinder blocks. Here's a few photos of one of the first burns with the new changes. This first one shows the exhaust ducting now coming from the far lower corner. Also the new door, and above the door you can see the lighter colored refractory piece that I made to replace the cracked bricks. The new refractory also has better insulative properties than the original brick. I also added the radiant barrier to the walls and I want to add some more. Below is the thermocouple mounted in the drum Below is the thermocouple mounted in the bench. Below shows the thermocouple mounted in the exhaust before leaving the building Below show the temperature in Centigrade. Top is the steel drum, second is the brick bench , and bottom is exhaust temp . It's also of note to report that the exhaust temps are significantly lower with this new setup which I'm very happy about. More heat for the building and less lost outside. I'm finding myself glued to the temp readouts and watching them change over time and getting very little work done in the garage I want to restate my thanks to everyone here who's helped with their advise and their examples! I'd truly never have built this heater without this forum. Keegan
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Post by Orange on Nov 1, 2017 1:08:03 GMT -8
cool, I really like your setup! Did you see the top of te barrel glowing red? Did you notice the effect of a radiant barrier?
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Post by woodrascal on Nov 1, 2017 4:39:22 GMT -8
Looking great Rhinokeegan! Have you a link to the temp probes and displays? I'd love to incorporate some into my own BB heater that I'm currently building.
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Post by rhinokeegan on Nov 1, 2017 5:35:53 GMT -8
cool, I really like your setup! Did you see the top of te barrel glowing red? Did you notice the effect of a radiant barrier? Thanks! I haven't noticed the barrel glowing. I think the barrel is shedding the heat pretty quickly and I usually run a fan pointed at the barrel to try and maximize the distribution in the shop space. I do believe the radiant barrier is working well. It's always cool to the touch, even when the heater is going strong so it must be reflecting almost all of that energy.
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Post by rhinokeegan on Nov 1, 2017 5:40:38 GMT -8
Looking great Rhinokeegan! Have you a link to the temp probes and displays? I'd love to incorporate some into my own BB heater that I'm currently building. Thank you! Here's a couple amazon links for the sensors and thermocouple. The sensors come with thermocouples, but they are only 0.5m long so I bought longer ones. Here's the sensorThis is the thermocouple I used for the barrel
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Post by woodrascal on Nov 1, 2017 5:41:49 GMT -8
Thanks very much for the links rhinokeegan
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Post by Jura on Nov 1, 2017 5:52:51 GMT -8
Project Update... I want to restate my thanks to everyone here who's helped with their advise and their examples! I'd truly never have built this heater without this forum. And I as a part of the forum would like to congratulate you not only for an succesful built but (even more) for the best forum member attitude ie. follow up & update. I'd love to read more about the temp measurement unit, too
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Post by rhinokeegan on Nov 14, 2017 7:01:34 GMT -8
Thanks Jura, I'll post up some more pictures of that unit when I can get back out there.
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Post by Jura on Nov 14, 2017 11:14:54 GMT -8
Thanks Jura, I'll post up some more pictures of that unit when I can get back out there. Well..in fact you had already posted what I asked about. You had done it already in the meantime I was writing my post with my questions. (now I can see the photos are gone, and I wanted to use them as a teaser for a friend of mine who we are building a rocket with)btw what was the max temp you observed in the bell?
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Post by pianomark on Nov 14, 2017 12:07:29 GMT -8
rhinokeegan,
I would love to see more photos of your stove after the changes you made. I hope to build something similar in my new (not quite finished) shop/studio/workspace. Apparently your photos above have gone missing, it seems to work better to host them on another site with a link here.
Also, any ideas in hindsight of what you might have done differently.
Thanks! Mark
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Post by rhinokeegan on Nov 14, 2017 14:12:24 GMT -8
So far the highest I've seen is 503c or 937f. This was the inside temp and not the temperature of the steel drum.
I'm not sure what happened to the photos, but I'll take some more and replace them. I do have them hosted off site, but somehow (probably my mistake) they got deleted. Thankfully the rest of the photos in the thread are still working.
Regarding what I'd do differently...
I've already changed some things that I've mentioned like moving the exhaust to the far side of the bell/bench which has resulted in significantly lower exhaust temperatures. However I have noticed that it's slightly more difficult to establish a strong draft when starting the stove from dead cold. I working on a solution to that little problem.
I re-made the top of the firebox with a cast-refractory piece instead of firebricks. I had some issues with cracks developing in the mortar joints from expansion. This, I'm sure, is because the firebox is sticking out from the rest of the brick bell. It doesn't have any lateral support that a brick wall would provide on either side of the firebox. If I built another one, I'd probably make the firebox flush with the bell.
Something I'm thinking about, but won't do this year is to add a second steel drum/bell on the far side of the bench section. Because this is in a workshop/garage I want the instant heat that the steel drum provides, and I don't really benefit too much from the "heat battery" of the brick mass. When I 'm done working in the garage, it may be a week or more before I'm back and by then the benefits of a heated mass are far behind me. It'd be interesting to see what kind of temps I could get out of a second bell.
I might do a webcam pointed at the temperature display that I can view from my phone to see what's happening. That's not really necessary, but would be for geeky fun.
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Post by Jura on Nov 15, 2017 14:00:55 GMT -8
I might do a webcam pointed at the temperature display that I can view from my phone to see what's happening. That's not really necessary, but would be for geeky fun. I'm working on a raspberry pi project to monitor my compost pile temperatures that would transmit the measurements over wifi into a server based data base. One way of obtainig it is here But it seems I'll end up with this sorry in PL LNG only but with links to ENG sitesthat allows to access the data sent from raspberry to the web service allowing to access the visualized data by this smartphone app
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Post by rhinokeegan on Nov 18, 2017 12:39:40 GMT -8
Thanks Jura,
I don't have any experience with the raspberry pi or arduino stuff... Maybe a new project.
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