I think this is the beginnings of an economy based on perpetual growth and fossil fuel energy running headlong into geological energy constraints. Basically I see an undulatory downward path for the rest of my life. From here out, I think any rallies in our economic condition are going to be met with spiking commodity prices that knock us right back down.
Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 8:13 am Post subject: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
I've been looking for an outdoor wood burning stove and was going to go with Central Boiler until I ran across Greenwood Furnace. What they claim seems to be pretty impressive.
They claim:
Max. Sustained Firebox Temperature of 2000 degrees
Virtually No Smoke
85% Efficiency
Uses 60% less wood
They claim this is all true because their stove also burns the gasses put off by the wood.
It all sounds too good to be true??? Does anyone have any experience with one of these? What's the good, bad and the ugly?
Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 8:29 am Post subject: Re: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
Commanding_Heights wrote:
They claim:
Max. Sustained Firebox Temperature of 2000 degrees
Virtually No Smoke
85% Efficiency
Uses 60% less wood
They claim this is all true because their stove also burns the gasses put off by the wood.
nothing too out of the ordinary here for any high efficiency wood stove. This stove is probably a "Second Burner" stove that adds in extra air to ignite the unburnt gases.
The only problem with this type of stove is that they have to be hot to run efficiently (could be a problem on mild days with a big Furnace type stove).
I prefer Catalytic stoves because once they "flame off" they become self sustaining and don't require a hot firebox. That's not to say catalytics don't have their down side. The Catalysis needs to be replace every couple of years ($100 - $200us for an insert) and any metal (nails) in your wood ruins them
btw, can we have a link? _________________ Angry yet?
Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 8:54 am Post subject: Re: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
Burning green wood is not even remotely efficient. As was said, you need to get the fire very hot to get any kind of burn, which requires constant attention. And of course dry wood to start a good fire.
You'll also be faced with a bigger task of keeping the thing clean, and and much greater chance of flue fires.
More fundamentally, you need to think about what it is you are getting into with an external furnace. You first must understand that they are basically not efficient since you have to move the hot air/water into your home, which means more setup work, more equipment to maintain, more opportunity for heat loss. Plus you need to distribute that heat in your home, which means more loss due to inherent inefficiencies in the interior equipment.
Then you need to consider your work load attending to this furnace. Remember I mentioned a green wood fire requires more attention. You going to walk outside and deal with this at night, when it's raining, snowing? _________________ Gravity is not a force, it is a boundary layer.
Everything is coincident.
Love: the state of suspended anticipation.
To get any appreciable distance from the Earth in
a sensible amount of time, you must lie.
Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:11 am Post subject: Re: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
RdSnt wrote:
Burning green wood is not even remotely efficient.
Greenwood is just the Brand name (link). They're tacking on the Green label to make an environmental statement. We'll see a lot more of this as time goes on, but eventually people will come to realize that not everything that is green is good.
Ultimately for all the reasons you've stated RdSnt I'm more of a fan of smaller room/area heating than large single setups. With a well insulated home, a couple of woodstove is all that's needed. Just talking the other day with the Marketing VP (about the ice storm no less) and he was saying how their temperature control for their woodstoves is opening the windows.
Defeats the purpose of have a high efficiency heat source when you have to throw away half your heat because its too much for the house to absorb. _________________ Angry yet?
Joined: Jan 03, 2005 Posts: 1206 Location: western Wisconsin
Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 12:07 pm Post subject: Re: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
Looks like the "Greenwood" is actually a wood-fired boiler that meets the requirements of an indoor boiler, and they are trying to compete with those inefficient outdoor boilers by promoting their product in outdoor uses with adequate additional shelter--such as a small shed to house it. Most outdoor boilers don't have to meet any environmental or efficiency standards, and are actually not permitted in many communities due to the excessive amounts of nasty smoke that they often emit. The Greenwood looks a bit better than that.
Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 1:44 pm Post subject: Re: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
FoxV wrote:
Defeats the purpose of have a high efficiency heat source when you have to throw away half your heat because its too much for the house to absorb.
That's why the high efficiency (or any really) wood boiler is so ideal - you can provide a heat storage (think large water) tank beside it, heat up the water in the tank when firing the boiler, and then once the fire goes out, the stored heat in the tank heats the house. Very little heat wasted.
The Greenwood boilers look good - also check out HSTarm. They are a very similar product. The Greenwood does have a larger firebox though, but shouldn't be a huge issue unless you have an extra large house you're heating. Personally, I'm probably going to buy an HSTarm, but I'm still considering the Greenwood. _________________ Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. -- Winston Churchill
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2007 6:25 am Post subject: Re: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
Gideon wrote:
"Max. Sustained Firebox Temperature of 2000 degrees"
Seems wrong. Iron begins to glow red around 900-1,000 degrees, as any long time wood stove owner can tell you. It would seem odd to have a boiler working at 2,000 degrees. Iron would warp/deform etcetera, I'd guess.
True, but that's why the Greenwood's firebox is made from ceramic.
Gideon wrote:
"Virtually No Smoke"
ONLY if you are burning seasoned wood and you are burning it hot and completely. Otherwise, NO WAY.
Yeah, but these boilers burn a little bit differently - they use wood 'gasification', which is where the efficiency and very reduced smoke comes from. Although, as you mentioned, the Regency secondary burn is a similar idea and will get roughly similar efficiency.
Gideon wrote:
"85% Efficiency"
Possible if secondary burn is provided.
"Uses 60% less wood."
These statements are an advertiser's balm and a foolish consumer's bane.
60% less than what? A campfire?
These are some of my main reasons for considering the HSTarm over the Greenwood - claims like these seem a little fishy, so what else are they exaggerating - their quality?
Gideon wrote:
Downsides?
You need to keep a fire going constantly, even in not-so-cold temps. That's a hassle and a waste.
If you tie your domestic hot water in, then you have to run the boiler in the summer. THat's a waste too.
Actually, these are more upsides to the boiler over a woodstove.
As I mentioned above, if used with a heat storage tank, the boiler can be fired as needed to heat the storage tank, so in cool, but not cold weather, you may only have to fire the boiler every few days. Compare to a woodstove, and you would have to light a fire every day, and open a window or door to manage the heat.
As far as the water heating, again, the heat storage tank takes care of that - you don't have to fire all the time - you could probably get away with 10 days between firings.
Although a solar hot water heater would be an ideal companion to something like this - you could heat your storage tank, particularly in the summer for hot water only, and maybe not even have to fire the boiler. It even would supplement the boiler in the winter, giving you more time between firings.
The main disadvantage over a wood stove is the requirement for electricity to run the circulation pump though. However a small scale solar/wind setup (or even just a battery backup) could take care of that. Significantly less power than a forced air would be required.
The other advantage of a boiler system is that rooms can be heated individually - so for space that you don't require or aren't using can be closed off and you can heat rooms to independent temperatures, saving heat. _________________ Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. -- Winston Churchill
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2007 2:39 pm Post subject: Re: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
The main attraction of such a device is to have the burner OUTSIDE your home. Having heated with only wood for many years and having many neighbors who did the same, house fires are all too common. Our next door neighbors lost their home and a 1-year old baby, our best friends lost their home on Xmas Eve one year. I know that wood heat CAN be safe, but in real life people forget to clean the chimney, supports can break, any number of things can happen. We've never had a fire, but after seeing a number of them it does make you nervous and we've thought about it many times.
Another really good solution is what we called a "Russian Fireplace" or "Russian Stove". It's basically a really big stack of bricks with a small firebox and a series of flues running through it. In Missouri, with fairly cold winters (0-10 degrees F were common), you could build a fire in the morning and one in the afternoon and keep your home warm 24/7. It operates on the idea of a short-burning very hot fire that burns and then goes out, but warms up the masonry which then radiates the heat for hours. The ones I saw were on the order of 3'-4' wide, 4'-5' tall and 4'-5' deep, so it was a lot of bricks to absorb the heat. Without the constant fire burning it was a lot safer than a traditional stove, didn't get creosote buildup and didn't require constant maintenance.
I really do like the idea of a small concrete structure with a firebox in the middle, surrounded by coils of copper pipe and backfilled with sand. Insulate the outside, then run water through the pipes and into radiators in the house. With a good thermal mass your could probably get by with one good fire a day.
If you haven't heated with wood you probably don't realize the amount of work involved. I remember in really cold weather we had 3 stoves running to heat a big old farmhouse. Before bed I would have to fill each stove and adjust it, then bring in another load of wood for each stove to use in the morning so it would thawed and ready to burn. That was close to an hour of chores every night, plus several times during the day, it could become almost a full time job just keeping the stoves going.
Now glad to live in a place where it seldom gets below freezing, we could live without heat if necessary and one small stove would keep the chill off the house.
Joined: Aug 03, 2007 Posts: 4398 Location: Boston Suburbs
Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 4:49 am Post subject: Re: Greenwood Furnance? Looks Awesome - Anyone Own One?
bobaloo wrote:
If you haven't heated with wood you probably don't realize the amount of work involved.
Someone has to come up with a way to load wood into like a cartridge and have a loader device automatically push another log in at the right time, kind of like a CD duplicator or something. I suppose making something like that safe and glitch-free would be a challenge.
America could adopt this stove, but does America do it? No, she sticks placidly to her own fearful and wonderful inventions in the stove line. The American wood stove, of whatever breed, is a terror. It requires more attention than a baby. It has to be fed every little while, it has to be watched all the time; and for all reward you are roasted half your time and frozen the other half... and when your wood bill comes in you think you have been supporting a volcano.
More like a kiln than the traditional metal stove.
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