Anyone replace their Furnace lately

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grassy

grassy

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I have a Teledyne Laars Mini-Therm JF (with a riello blower) that has almost reached it life expectancy and I am starting to look again. I don't want to go with an oil company’s line because they seem to be really big...the TL is about 2 foot wide, two foot tall and 3 foot deep. We were able to step down the needle to a point where the oil just clogged the nozzle..it was still possible to go more except for the fuel...

I have heard that there is a furnace in the market thate uses excess heat to generate electricity which possibly satisfies all the houe needs and is still able to sell off the excess to the local power company.



Anyone gone through this process lately ?


Grassy
 
grassy said:
I have heard that there is a furnace in the market thate uses excess heat to generate electricity which possibly satisfies all the houe needs and is still able to sell off the excess to the local power company.
Click to expand...

I've been out of the business now for about 15 years, and was never a "boiler man" but I can tell you that this claim is absolute

bullshit.jpg


Let's take the case of something I AM familiar with--forced air condensing (high efficiency) furnaces. There is only three things that can happen to fuel

1...It can get burned and produce heat into the furnace plenum

2...It can get "not burned" and be wasted up the stack

3...Heat can be wasted and sent up the stack



Part of the procedure includes the condensing concept---water vapor produced during combustion THAT WOULD OTHERWISE GO OUT THE VENT is recovered during condensation, and most of that recovered heat is transferred into the plenum. The rest of the heat--warm water--is drained off as condensate.

Some condensing furnaces have an overall AFUE well into the 90% range. the ill-fated Lennox pulse was well into the HIGH 90% range, and the vent--consisting of standard low cost PVC pipe, ran barely approaching 100*F ---stack gas temp was lower than plenum outlet air temperature!!!!!

The point? THERE IS NO "excess heat" to "produce free electricity."

In the case of an oil burner, YOU MUST keep the system at a high enough temperature to keep soot from forming in the heat exchanger/ stack system. ANY REMOVED ENERGY, I.E. "producing free electricity" MUST REMOVE energy from that hot gas, and that means IT MUST be cooled in order to do that.

There's no free ride, buddy.
 
I would have agreed with you until I saw a show..actually heard about it on internationl radio..about 3am our time..I couldn't find it on the i'net..probably didn't search for it correctly..and though my old mind was making things up but my wife saw the furnace in on a show and god bless her, she remembered the name (or part of) tonight while we were freezing our butts off walking the dogs....so I did a bit more searching and found the campany in New Zeland..unfortunately located in Christchurch where there was a large earthquake. From their web site "The quake has destroyed the Central Business District (where Whisper Tech is located) and has taken the lives of many. Numerous buildings have collapsed and it is expected that over 30% of all CBD buildings will require demolition and much of the CBD will be closed for months to come."

Here is a link to the unit..

http://www.whispergen.com/main/acwhispergen/

Here is a vid...I should warn you..the download is slow..

http://www.whispergen.com/content/library/whispergen.html

It is time for us old guys to catch up with new technology..

Ignoring the above for a moment..what is the most efficient out in the market for ale today.

Grassy
 
I'm afraid you don't "get" the relationship of fuel and energy. As I tried to explain in the above example of the condensing furnace, the fact of the matter is, by the time you EXTRACT ALL THE HEAT that you can, what's left is "darn little waste."

The example you gave seems to be a heat operated Sterling engine, so, if you have a high--efficient furnace with a 90*F exhaust output, there quite simply WILL BE NO ENERGY LEFT to operate the Sterling engine!!
 
Loks like that burner would have to run 100% of the time to run the generator. We just put in a new high-tech furnace a few years back and it's been a huge problem. No furnace people trained to maintain it, the guy that put it in doesn't want to touch it and it dies if a dirty fly parks on it. If I win the lottery I'm putting in a bone simple Weil Mclain, my old one was 40 yrears old and the only thing wrong was the hot water coil was bad.
 
I have a hot water/boiler system and our old (did I say old) Bryant boiler is in need of replacement. I chose a new Weil Mclain energy efficient boiler for a replacement. Is that the kind you have Robbie?
 

Loving our geothermal system. Provides both heat and air-conditioning, and a significant reduction in monthly operating costs.

Grant
 
toolmanmike said:
I have a hot water/boiler system and our old (did I say old) Bryant boiler is in need of replacement. I chose a new Weil Mclain energy efficient boiler for a replacement. Is that the kind you have Robbie?
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No I have a Buderus with a riello burner. It's not worth the money, it's finicky and has had little support till this year. I think the KISS method (keep it simple stupid) is the way to go. Find a simple, high effiency burner thats easy to service. You'll save more money in the long run.
 
Robbie2734 said:
..................... We just put in a new high-tech furnace a few years back and it's been a huge problem. No furnace people trained to maintain it, the guy that put it in doesn't want to touch it .....................
Click to expand...

This is the last of the equation. I've been "out" of the industry for some time, but NONE of the systems I worked on were blameless. All of them were subject to higher maintenance, some were finicky, and some were subject to expensive component failures, heat exchangers, for example.

My current furnace is a so called "80%" Nat. gas. It does have a draft blower that's subject to failure, and hot surface ignitor which breaks every so often.

It gets worse. Trying to integrate something like forced air oil and an air exchange heat pump can turn into a nightmare. So far's I'm concerned, some of the worst maintenance nightmares are the so called high efficiency oil burners. A "tech" with a hangover can soot them up in a heartbeat.
 
I just had a new NG installed a few months ago. 95%... got a nice tax credit for it also.
 
67dart..you are correct hence my question. It took almost 18 years for the company to figure out that they had hooked the TL up incorrectly..it was always banging..but it was an orfan..it was the only one within 100 miles. I have never found TL (like marvin windows) very poor in getting back to you.

No natural gas in our area..just oil and electric (folks with electric baseboards, etc are given the whilsale price whereas we have to pay full pop).

We have, I hope, only 3 or 4 years left in this house and cannot afford the payback of air/air or water thermal type of heaters.

I want to prempt the failure and replace this summer. Our oil tank has to go as well. I appreciate the input..and appreciate any help.

The search goes on..

Ian.
 
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