Lets see, I left off last time with the holes drilled and the exchanger in, so I will start with the inside hook up. Here are the pics. You will see that I have valves to be able to manually shut off the flow to the exchanger and a pressure gauge. I used a mix of cpvc pipe and pex.
I also installed a valve so I could fill my water tank from inside the house.
Also in the top picture you can see a grey box strapped to the pipe. That is my indoor aquastat that breaks the connection from the thermostat in the house to my power hungry heat pump compressor. It kicks the heat pump off when the water temp in the pipe goes above 80 deg.
Here is a picture of my completely uninsulated pex pumping the hot water to the house. I am eventually going to bury it, after I decide how best to insulate it. I am not loosing near as much heat as I thought I would. (Google automatically added the snow when I uploaded it to Google+)
Here is a pic of the top of the wood burner. You will notice I had to add insulation.
When I first hooked this thing up I couldn't keep temps above 120 until I put this insulation on there. Another thing I had to change from my original design was the water return location and the vent location. This all resulted from the fact that I didn't put enough effort into researching what actually goes into designing a hydronic heating system. I ordered 3/4 pex because that was one of the options for the pump I bought and because of the cost savings over 1 inch. I turns out that between my 3/4" lines, the length of the run and the fittings I had a really high head pressure that resulted in very low flow, even though I had a large pump. As a consequence there the water wasn't be circulated through the tank like I thought it would so the water around the burn chamber was boiling and going right out the 2 inch vent above it. To remedy that I took the return line from the back of the tank and put it into the 2 inch fill/vent. I capped the 2 inch vent and instead put a piece of 3/4 inch cpvc in the port where the return had been. The idea being this would cause the water to naturally circulate to the back, it has cut down on water loss.
Another issue I had once I got this thing running was the fact that it was eating MASSIVE amounts of wood. I figured out this was due to the fact that my blower fan ran full blast all the time. I bought a dimmer switch instead of the correct part and it only kind of works, but slowing the fan down saved me a lot of wood and raised the heat in the tank. It will actually go over 150, but it still won't hit 180.
