Challenges

Tuesday we started to get cold rather than hot water at the kitchen sink. I had burned the stove low and slow, feeling fine with non-intense heat, since I am a miser with logs and trying to save money. It wasn't until Tuesday night that the thought crystallized in my head that there was a problem. Pushing the reset button on our EFM 80's vintage boiler down in the basement, it would choke and burst into flame, sputter, and struggle to a stop. I checked the fuel and thought it was at 1/3 of two 350 gallon tanks. I figured maybe some debris got into the filter and clogged it. I figured I could get to that Wednesday sometime.

Wednesday I ran some errands and eventually got to changing my oil filter. My boiler still would not come on. We called the plumber. Good plumbers are busy; it is cold. He couldn't get out until Friday. The weather man was calling for 15 degrees F and we began to put more logs in and open the air intake all the way to our showroom burn unit. We started to get cool. I was getting maybe 400 degrees F out of the burn chamber and then I cracked the lid and got it up to about 600 degrees F.

My house dropped down to 64 degrees. The water coils seemed unphased by the heat and that bothered me. It seemed like the water in the system did a better job of cooling the coils running through the burn system than the fire did heating the water in the pipes. We found out that part of our wonderful warm in the radiator system was furnace heat.

Well, now the furnace heat is gone. We found out today when the plumber came that we are out of oil. The plumber also replaced the filter in the pump and replaced a clogged nozzle, after scolding me for letting it get so dirty.

The Sedore is heating our home but now only to about 65 degrees, except in the showroom where it is often up to about 70. At the moment we don't have tap water since we haven't placed an order for more oil (for the demand hot water system which was consuming much more oil that we thought.) Instead we are planning to install an electric hot water heater and continue to rely on our Sedore for our house heating.

As far as the coils go my theory is that we need to increase the amount of coils in the burn chamber in order to have the stove function more like a boiler. Not sure when or how I will get to making that change. But in the meantime the stove is saving us and we are grateful.