I was on the roof one day and noticed lots of heat coming up the chimney. The furnace is on but hadn't run for several hours. All it can be is the boiler tubes cooling off and the heat escaping up the chimney. That heat should be in the house. There should be a cut out deflector on the stack that puts the exhaust into the basement when the burner is off thereby retaining the heat inside. It's a terrible waste of heat.
Dampers that close in the flue when the boiler is off have been standard for new boilers for 10 years that I know of
Our boiler has a automatic flue damper. Opens when burner comes on and closes when burner turns off. It interlocks with burner so if it fails to open the burner will not turn on. About 14 years old installation. ww
OP needs a new boiler thats 90+ % efficent, in addition the heat seen MIGHT be from a water heater.........
or the home itself:(
hot air you spent big bucks to heat naturally exhausts 24/7 from your chimey
as energy costs rise futher more will get interested in such losses
Youi can install a automatic damper but you can not install a "cut out" to the basement.
Automatic stack dampers have been standard for quite some time and an option at least 20 years prior to that.
However you never vent a flue into the basement of living space. The damper is sufficient because it breaks the draft.
On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:23:41 -0700 (PDT), " snipped-for-privacy@aol.com" wrote:
Real big difference in how new homes *should* be built compared to the standard older houses - regarding heat loss. Wasn't given much priority when energy was cheap. But I bet a lot of the new "McMansions" recently built were put together sloppily. Just a guess, since I haven't looked at them.
Besides the water heater, the chimney liner and bricks can retain heat for a while. I had a new NG furnace (hot air, 80% "efficient") put in 12 years ago to get central AC in the house, but it has no damper in the flue pipe. Maybe there's one in the inducer casing. And my gas water heater has no damper, so now I want to get on the roof when it's cold out to see what's going on there. Think there were mechanical dampers on the boiler and water flues in my last house, both with weighted levers - they were opened by the heat flow. Those might be illegal now. Fished a bird out of the inducer casing the first winter after this furnace was installed, then a couple months later the basement smoke alarm went off when the water heater would fire up. Took off the water heater flue to get the well-done squirrel out of it, then the next day I was on the roof putting a cap on the chimney liner. The furnace installer had made a big deal of how he was throwing in a stainless steel chimney liner, but hadn't put a cap on it. I heard that squirrel die when the heater kicked on with him stuck in the pipe, but didn't know it. Thought it was my big CRT computer monitor going bad with a high pitched electronic scream. Thinking it was the monitor was unpleasant enough. Felt real bad about not getting that cap on after the bird fell in. Would have saved a squirrel to happily live his life chewing on phone lines and whatever the hell else they do.
Wasted heat is a big subject. I was a Boilerman in the Navy and we had "economizers" in the stacks to capture escaping heat. Always thought about that whenever I felt how hot my furnace flues got and imagined all the heat escaping up the chimney. Wanted to get finned flues and rig a fan to blow on them when the furnace came on, but never bothered doing it.
Aside from bad drafts - including the chimney - and single pane windows, I think most heat escapes a home right out the walls. You can pretty easily prevent loss through the attic with a vapor barrier and a foot of insulation. But properly insulating walls on an older house can be a problem. My house was built in 1959. Small brick ranch and well built. But as far as I know the walls are uninsulated. Haven't torn off any drywall, but from seeing the switch boxes and outlets on the outside walls are shallow boxes, and from doing some drilling for hanging drape hardware and such, it seems the drywall is fastened to maybe 1x2 furring attached to the bricks.
Since my heating costs are pretty low, it just doesn't seem practical to tear off everything that is in perfectly good shape and stud and insulate the walls and deal with window framing. I've thought about the blow-in insulation, but again it doesn't seem cost-effective. Might be wrong about that. Anyway, if I ever had a home built I'd get that double 2x6 staggered studding and heat with a candle. I had a '64 Bug and actually laid 4" fiberglass bats on the floor to make it warmer in the winter. Don't know if it really made a difference, but I felt warmer (-:
--Vic
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