Firebird question

limerick_woody

Hi all,
I am not a plumber, and have limited knowledge of a boilers...

I have a Firebird in my workshop (woodworking), installed by a friend who does know a thing or two about such things - it drives a Tanner MDA water-fed, ceiling mounted heat-exchanger (fan unit) - it all works great.

I have spend the last couple of months designing and fiddling with a controller system to control the temperature overnight, keep it at about 7'degrees, too stop my cast-iron woodworking machinery from rusting.

With this setup, i monitor the air-temperature, if it drops below 7', the boiler & pump is turned, on, when the water in the pipes heats up above - say 20', it also turns on the fan (to stop cold air blowing around). This very quickly heats the room up. Say within 5 minutes, the boiler is then turned off - and as the fan/pump combo extracts the heat out of the boiler, eventually the temperature of the pipe drops below some threshold and the fan/pump are also turned off. This is very efficient

Sorry - to the question: Is it a problem for the boiler to not reach some maximum temperature - say it only heats the water up to 40' before it turns off. Can this be corrosive within the boiler? The guy who installed it - who i trust told me it could, but i didn't understand the reason. Does anyone know?

Wearb

The combustion process produces water vapour that above certain temperatures remains in a gaseous state and is dispersed out the flue. Below this dew point temperature the vapour condenses in the heat exchanger and along with the other gases produces a corrosive product

limerick_woody

- makes sense, how hot should i run it?

Wearb

limerick_woody wrote: »

- makes sense, how hot should i run it?

The manual will give the information, but you should keep the return pipe temperature above about 55C. In your case, you would probably need to fit a bypass to achieve this. Your plumber seems to understand all this and will be able to advise you as to the best solution.