30-12-2011, 02:55 PM
You know you can cheat by running the "up" pipe as high as you can immediately out of the boiler?.. When I was in my teens father designed a solid fuel system where because of the house layout the hot water tank and 3 of the 8 radiators were below the level of the boiler. His solution was to run 2 "up"pipes right up the chimney and then back down again giving a cracking head on the riser. Clever bloke my father.. one of the designers of the Concorde fuel balance/trim system.
just to note:: we were "off the grid" at that house due to being in the middle of nowhere. He also built a wood fired expansion engine/turbine to generate electricity as it was cheaper and more efficient than running a noisy diesel generator. We had big valve inverters all over the place turning the 60v dc into an approximation of 250v/60Hz.. Lighting everywhere was 12v from large storage batteries. This meant a lot of our tellys had to be "tweaked" as our mains was off frequency (ex US/RAF aircraft inverters)
just to note:: we were "off the grid" at that house due to being in the middle of nowhere. He also built a wood fired expansion engine/turbine to generate electricity as it was cheaper and more efficient than running a noisy diesel generator. We had big valve inverters all over the place turning the 60v dc into an approximation of 250v/60Hz.. Lighting everywhere was 12v from large storage batteries. This meant a lot of our tellys had to be "tweaked" as our mains was off frequency (ex US/RAF aircraft inverters)
