Category Archives: HVAC

This stands for Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning. My ‘real world’ career.

Wood is Good 03 – Wood Shed

Last post on wood we talked about DRY firewood.  Here’s my secret weapon in the war on wet firewood.  These pictures show two sheds.  The first is a small one, only about 4 ft tall.  Short, maybe 5 ft deep.  I show it to you just to emphasize what i said before about keeping wood covered.  That shed will be gone sometime this spring.  Never meant to be a woodshed.  but as long as i had it there i put some wood in it.  Smaller diameter stuff, most about the length of the shed.  That was last year sometime.  Then say 4-6 weeks ago i took out the wood, cut, split and brought it into the house.  Now i did store it near the stove.  Things do dry out easily there.  But the point i want to make is this – it lit easily, it burned fine, no sizzling to indicate it was wet etc.  Good dry firewood.

Now the bigger one, that is my main shed.  If you burn wood for heat, i recommend one like this.  note first the orientation.  This is a solar shed.  it faces almost due south.  So here in the northern hemisphere the sun shines into the shed all winter, and most of the spring and fall.  The roof keeps off rain & snow, the sun warms it and helps things dry.  The size is large enough to pile wood on either side with room to operate in between.  (around 8 ft deep x 12 ft wide, little over 9 ft tall in front).  The left side is from last year, maybe cut/split around 18 months ago.  The right side is what i started cutting this year before the snow stopped me.

This thing is a solar wood factory.  doesn’t cost me a nickel to operate.  Some day i may convert it into a full blown solar kiln.  Pretty sure if i make some kind of clear front cover the temp would soar well over 100.  Well anyway build yourself one. You’ll be glad u did. even if its smaller, make your woodshed open sided and face the sun.

SmallShedSolarShed

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Wood is good 02 – Dry Wood

So here’s the most basic principle about using firewood for heat – r u ready? DRY WOOD. Yeah about right now ur saying to yourself “is this guy for real?” Well just hold on a minute. Its true this is rather obvious but – you’d never know it by the way lots of people store their fuel. Firewood should be cut & split the year before u use it. This is a minimum. At LEAST a year. But as i drive around it is common to see firewood piled with no cover. Guess what, this aint a desert climate. Rain happens. Snow too and both will dampen that uncovered wood. If u leave it on the ground it soaks up moisture from that as well. Hey, there’s no reason for that. Grab any of the trillion or so waste pallets lying around and keep ur wood off the ground. And put something over it even if its just a tarp. Lets remember to use some common sense.

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Wood is Good 01

Lets talk about wood. Specifically firewood. About heating with firewood. First of all, this is a good thing. Its good for you. Great exercise, helps keep u connected to reality, (usually) saves money. Its good for the environment. When u burn wood, u r not adding to your ‘carbon footprint’ becuz when a tree grows it pulls carbon out of thin air (co2 actually) to use and convert into what it needs. A tree is really a pollution removal factory (no wonder they r called plants! Like i work at a yogurt plant u kno?) Hey sorry but remember i’m trying to entertain u remember?

So anyway heating with firewood is awesome! We will develop why, and how best to do it in some future installments.

Till later – Have a great day!

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It’s all about Heat Exchangers

OK, lets talk HVAC! I decided that the first discussion dedicated to Heating and Cooling, should be about the most basic central component of any system – the heat exchanger. What is that, you ask? Well i’m glad you did.
As you likely already surmised, what a heat exchanger (hereinafter referred to as HX) is, can be found by simply studying the name: it “exchanges” heat – that is it passes heat (or cold, a lower level of heat) from one medium to another. A medium is simply the air or water you are heating or cooling, or the “products of combustion” from your fire. In commercial systems the mediums may be an antifreeze mixture, steam or other possibilities. Let’s look at a few examples to help you get a better idea of what’s going on.
Example: your typical home furnace burns fuel, then passes the “products of combustion” through a HX to the chimney, or more often these days to a sidewall vent using a forced blower. On the other side of the HX the furnace uses a blower to force the air from your home through and it picks up the heat the “products of combustion” are giving up, increasing the temp in your house.
Example 2: your window air conditioner forces freon to evaporate inside a HX with your room air blowing across the other side, the room air gives up heat and the freon changes from liquid to vapor (evaporates or boils). The AC moves the warm vapor to a second HX while increasing the pressure, which increases the temp – while outside air is forced over the other side which picks up the heat and discards it to the outdoor air. Meanwhile your room air is returned to your room with less heat – that nice cool breeze is why we pay the electricity to run the AC.
Example 3: your boiler burns fuel and discards the “products of combustion”, but not before putting them through the HX – the heat passed into the water that circulates through another set of HXs, your radiators or baseboard heaters. The room air moves through the radiators by “convection” and warms the house.
So you see, “heat exchangers” are all around us. They are our friends. Without heat exchangers we would all still have to burn our fuel in a fireplace, possibly get the “products of combustion” into the air we breathe and soot up the house, to say nothing of the fact that when you leave the area of the fireplace, you leave the heated area.
A word about “products of combustion” – that is a term for the mixture of soot (carbon) CO2, CO, water vapor and excess air that comes off a fire in varying amounts. The mix is determined by many factors that we won’t get into here. But lets just say we want it removed from the living space for health reasons after we take as much of the heat out as possible.
Congratulations! you now understand (you do understand, don’t you?) the basis of all heating and cooling equipment. The heart of every furnace, boiler, air conditioner, chiller, fan coil etc is the Heat Exchanger – keeping mediums separate while passing energy between them.

Long Dark Winter / Over

Hello. It’s been way too long. Nearly a year. No way to run a blog, i know.
But i been really busy. Remember my 12 hour job w/ the hour commute? Still there.
Also helping remodel apartments w/ my son-in-law. That takes care of all my free time. And just in case, my job is at night, remember? So on all those “free” days (read: everyday) many times i sleep them away. Truly, there ain’t no free lunch.
In other words, my body clock is so screwy that its hard to use the days, because i am now a nocturnal creature. I have always been somewhat like that – easy for me to stay up at night. But now, it’s often hard to stay up at day. And to sleep during the day is pretty weird too. You must have dark or it’s no good. If the room is light you can only sleep for a short time, then the light wakes you. The dark blue blanket over the window gets me there.
Well enough about that. I have news – just added three categories: HVAC, Food and Gluten. Strange combo you say? True enough. For those who may not know – Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning = HVAC. My life of employment has been here. I will write more on this.
Food – one of my good friends at work is a food guy. He attended a really good chef school and ran a deli business for a number of years. He has a great talent with food, and love for it. It’s really funny, often we speak of food, and he will always say his mouth is starting to water. So hopefully my blog will incorporate food items and recipes from the “Mystery Chef”.
Gluten? What is that you may ask. Well it’s a sticky substance that naturally is in wheat and some other grains. So what? So my wife is allergic to it. There are degrees of intolerance to the stuff. Some folks are bothered by it enough that it is almost like a poison to them. Most are less so. And the medical community and society at large are relatively ignorant on the subject. Although many restaurants are starting to get with the program. Yup, attach dollars signs and people take notice – good old American commerce is still alive and well. I will attempt to get my wife to write on this issue, or help me with it. She is somewhat of a local expert (had to become one of necessity). Many who have this issue may not know it, and wonder about their health issues – why can’t the doctors figure out what’s wrong? Listen, don’t get me going on that one! But just imagine if you couldn’t eat anything with wheat – no bread, no bagels, cookies, no pasta – sounds a little impossible doesn’t it? Well once you get the hang of it, it’s not so bad. There are substitutes for wheat flour (rice flour combinations) and other ways to go. But enough for now – just hopefully you will see some pieces on that subject here.
I will start using my “can’t sleep at night on my day off” time to blog more. The long dark winter of no writing has (hopefully) turned to spring. Wish me luck.