I Burn Corn

In January 2004 our family moved from one big old house in Northfield Minnesota to another even bigger, not quite so old house in Chippewa Falls Wisconsin. The Northfield house had drafts and one room that could never be warmed, even though that room housed the wood stove that went through two hundred dollars worth of wood one month. We could get it to 90 degrees at face level but it was still fifty where your feet were. From this we moved to a house that does not seem so drafty, but yet it's lack of attic insulation causes it it be even more expensive to heat. What to do? Really the attic should be insulated, but we are talking about an 1100 square foot attic, it currently has two bedrooms, but really it should be gutted out, and a plan developed, budgets created, and totally redone. This is way more than we can really do for the year. Maybe even more than we can do in a lifetime. So here we sat, waiting in fear for the next gas bill to come in.

Time passes. Summer into fall, and I attended the birthday party for my Niece's children. There sitting in her living room was a corn burning stove. I was interested. It was not at all practical for my use. Being a free standing unit, sitting off to the side of their living room it was blowing warm air into what was the central room of the house. I was pretty sure it wouldn't fit in with the wife's decor. I became very interested when my Nephew Richard Junge told me that in addition to free standing stoves companies also made forced air furnaces. He wasn't sure, but he thought they even made boilers. This was exactly what I was looking for. My first house had hot water heat, and anyone who has owned a hot water heated house can tell you, there is no better heat. Nothing is as pleasing as sitting on a radiator in the morning with a cup of coffee.

Here is what we were up against. We moved into the house January 3rd, so the first bill was a short month. We have gas heat, and an electric hot water heater. The house has a gas boiler, three gas fireplaces and one wood fireplace that we seldom use. (I am still not over the whole wood burning experience of the Northfield house -ugh, what a mess)

What we have here are the number of days on the bill, Total kilowatt/hours and the price per kwh for a total electric bill. Then on the gas side, we have total cubic feet of gas, number of therms, price and total gas bill for a total bill. This means we spent $1244 on this shortened heating season. If we would have had a full heating season, I would guess we would have spent $1730. This fall the local newspaper announced gas prices would be going up from 25-35% this year. That could push our estimated heating costs to $2163 to $2336 respectively.

So the shopping started.

I am looking for a corn boiler. My present boiler is 130,000btu but it only heats the main part of the house. It does not heat the kitchen (272sq/ft) or the office (713sq/ft - can you tell I work from home?) I was hoping to have a new furnace heat these areas as well, so I felt I was looking for something ~150,000btu.

You must remember, this was all done before there was a page like this: http://www.iburncorn.com/mani.cfm. So, I did web based research to try to find a boiler to fit my needs. I looked at a lot of different products, but there were only really two contenders. The reason it came down to these two so quickly was because I really wanted a unit that looked like it had been designed from the beginning to be a corn boiler. There are several companies out there selling what really appear to be converted gas water heaters with a corn fire pot underneath them and a fiberglass washtub/corn storage bin beside them. Even more surprisingly, for not much less money than what I define as my contenders.

Year-A-Round Corporation, Mankato MN. -- I would have really liked this company to be the one we picked. I have another nephew that lives in Mankato. I could have used the opportunity of a boiler pickup to go visit him. I think this company is really setup to build industrial units. The smallest boiler they make is 150,000btu their other models go up to 950,000. I am a web site shopper. I do some web site design. So I guess I start judging a company as soon as I see their (bad) web site. http://www.year-a-round.com So, it wasn't a real good experience. It took some work to navigate around their site because they use Java® based navigation buttons so I had to scroll to the bottom of their pages. Not sure if I was able to see the whole site or not. No prices! I could not find anywhere on their site where they had a price. The web site should be an extension of their sales force. I feel like a company who won't put a price out there really isn't interested in selling. I was able to find a feedback form where I could send in a request for pricing to their sales force. It took them over a month to get back to me!! Just to save you some suspense, their 150,00 btu boiler model 150-1B, sells for $5375 plus freight. It weighs 820lbs. One of it's features that might be worth checking out is it has electronic start. The brochure they sent me seems to indicate this electronic start can be unattended. There is nothing in the brochure about cleaning the unit out or clinker and ash removal. The burn pot does use an agitator so perhaps clinkers are not an issue?

Ok that brings me to contender number two, and who I have purchased from. Traeger Industries TPB-150 boiler manufactured by Pinnacle Stove Sales, Inc. 1089 Hwy 97 North, Quesnel, B.C. Canada. They can be reached at http://www.pinnaclestove.com/, 250 992-5050

They don't have a lot of great design on their web site but they do have really good technical information. They have a thick PDF document that shows detailed diagrams of the stove and it's wiring. A troubleshooting manual that lets you know some of the things that can go wrong. They also have prices on their site, or I should say, they did have prices. As of today, when I am typing this, they say "Call for Price". It could be they have changed their policy of publishing prices or it could just be they are out of stock right now. I didn't purchase direct from Pinnacle anyway. They offered they could sell to me but I would have to deal with customs and shipping myself. Instead, Pinnacle referred me to their US distributor: Randy White, Action Fireplace, 409 NW Ave, Crooks, South Dakota 57020. Randy or Brad can be reached at 605 543 5412.

It was a pleasure to deal with Action Fireplace. They gave me a good price and quoted me $220 shipping for drop off at my house on a tommy-lift equipped truck.

Shown on the right is an image I got form the Pinnacle web site. It is possible this is a previous years' design. The unit that I received seems to have a few differences. There is no longer a temperature gauge going into the boiler core and the draft inducers blower seems to have been moved to the backside of the unit rather than the front as shown. That and, as you will see below, they have changed the color to "universal furnace tan" instead of the industrial green.

Also, something that I will be doing some checking into. The unit is advertised as including a water pump but it has arrived without one. It is possible the pump was only included in previous year's models but it has caused some problem as I have had to purchase a pump.

What I plan on doing is installing this unit in series with my existing boiler. The corn boiler will be our primary heat source but if it can't keep up or if it runs out of corn, or during the cleaning process, if the water temperature gets too low and the thermostat demands heat, the gas boiler will kick on and pickup the slack. Basically the plan is as diagrammed below.

We will use two pumps, one for the return side of the line from the existing house radiators. The second pump will be on the return side of the new radiators we are putting into the office space, which is a new addition to the house that was built in 1997. Currently that new addition is heated only by a gas fireplace insert, and some heat coming from the gas heater stove in the kitchen. We will use two separate thermostats to control the two zones in the heating system because we like to keep the office space much warmer than the rest of the house. Additionally, corn stoves suffer from a problem where you get too much heat. It is highly advised that you create a "dump zone" where you can bleed off access heat. I think this is caused by the fact that you have to keep the fire going in the unit. So, even if the house warms up on a spring day and the thermostat is not calling for heat, the fire must keep going. If the fire keeps going it continues to build up heat. When I talked to Pinnacle on the phone, they recommended running a loop of radiators into the garage or some normally unheated space. The other thing they recommended, which would be easier in new construction, would be to run a heat loop through a concrete driveway.

Corn storage is easy in this old house. We have the old coal room directly adjacent to where the original furnace must have been. The coal chute door is still in place, only hampered by two pipes coming out of it. The larger of the two (pointing down in the image), is the vent pipe for what at one time must have been the fuel oil tank. So at one time the house had an oil burning furnace in it. Perhaps it was even the old coal furnace that got converted to oil. No one ever takes anything out in an old house, have you noticed that? I have generations of old wiring, water pipes and fuel oil pipes still hanging there. Did someone think they might be pressed into service again at some time? Were they worried that this new technology, a gas, that you couldn't even see, only smell, might not make it in the long haul. The second hole in the coal door is for that new technology. Rather than drill a hole through the concrete wall they drilled through the much thinner coal chute door. Tues of this week the furnace company is coming to the house to drill through the foundation and move the gas pipe over about eight feet. The gas pipe will drop below the level of the coal chute door and run underneath it, in close to the house before turning and going through the foundation.

Our coal room is an 8x17 room with stone walls on all four sides. It has a large-ish, wooden inset on one side with a small coal door at the bottom. I am going to reinforce this section of wall with a sheet of plywood that laps out onto the stone wall sides. The coal door wall is quite rotten at the bottom and I think if it had too much weight against it, it could burst out into the furnace room. I think this could be fixed by hanging a sheet of 4x8 plywood so that a foot of it on each end overlaps the stone on each side. I will attach the plywood to the wall by shimming out the existing 2x8s that are in position. I am going to cut out a small door at the bottom so the corn can go through into the coal door area.

Here is a shot of the existing boiler, It is a Heatmaker Mark II, 130,000btu unit which really seems to heat the house just fine. It has had a couple of problems in the time we have lived here. Shortly after we moved in we had a problem with the igniter, which is a carbon insert "M" shaped device that I guess go out every couple of years. Of course it happened on a Sunday so it was about a two hundred dollar repair visit.

The second problem is more worrisome. We have had two occasions where we woke up cold and discovered that the furnace was not running. It was a simple matter to go down and flip the switch on the side off and back on again. After this switch, the furnace started and ran just fine. The question is, what if it happens some weekend when we not home?

I talked to a friend of mine who is good with electronics. What I was asking him to build was a sensor that would trip when it got down to 55 degrees in the house. It would trip a relay that would turn a switch off, wait 30 seconds and then turn the switch back on. At the same time it would trip a relay that would turn on a light bulb attached to the circuits. Basically this would just be used to indicate if the device had worked and might help me track down what is causing this behavior. We are still in the design phase though and haven't got this unit built or anything.

From these two pictures you can see also some of the plumbing related to the heating system in this house. The pipes are 2-1/4" cast iron pipes that have been wrapped with fiberglass insulation. I am sure at one point they had been wrapped with asbestos but that has been removed at some point before we moved in. Most of the house still have the original radiators. They have been removed from the kitchen and front entry way. The kitchen is currently heated with a gas fired free-standing fireplace. The front entry is now just un-heated space.

One other thing I am hoping for, our basement is currently very cold. In fact, today is a just above zero day outside today and so that makes our basement temperature 54 degrees. That makes for very cold floors on the main floor. I am hoping the extra heat off the furnace will heat the basement space. Talking to the old timers in the heating business they will tell you that a house will never seem warm if the basement is cold.

Additionally, some day I would like to put a shower down in the basement and I am hoping to use either an old radiator to heat that space, or if there is enough excess heat, I will use the spare heat from the furnace to heat the shower room.

So now you are brought up to date. We live in an old house that is costing us too much in gas to continue to heat. Really we need to think about the long term project of insulation and weather proofing but that should be done with extensive planning. We want to do something right now that can make a difference. That caused us to settle on changing the heating fuel to corn. To this end, we have settled on purchasing the Traeger TPB-150 boiler.