3 degrees F where I am camped tonight. I am relying on my Vevor diesel heater to continue to keep me and my cat warm in my van. This is my second cold winter on the road full time using this heater and I love it. I am very grateful for all of your videos because I am now much more familiar with my heater, and its operation and maintenance. You are helping a lot of people out here, more than you will ever know. Thank you.
@@OverlandOne I will be working out in it tomorrow I have a 14hr day scheduled at work at least it is going to be warmer than it was on the 19th... Wind chill -40°f
Hey! As a fellow Calgarian I appreciate your videos. I am a plumber, and I can tell you the condensate will destroy the copper coil. It's not so much about pH as it is the make up of the condensate. It is an electrolytic sulotion and the condensate is carbon based. Electrolysis will destroy any copper or brass fairly quickly. Over the years I have had several employees couple condensate drains with a brass or copper fitting. It will be completely eaten away within 6 to 8 months. If you want to do an experiment, put a few ounces of condensate in a Pyrex cup, add a copper fitting. That would be a really interesting time lapse, actually. Measure the pH along the way.
Thanks for your comment. I appreciate it. That's interesting. I suppose a combination of the acidity and the fact that the exhaust particulates make a good electrolyte. I have removed my exchanger as I have long term plans to use it to heat my garage. I will have to make an update video to inform people of this. I wonder if you could install a drip solution to combat this 🤔
@@loweredexpectations4927 What do you mean with drip solution? No, you cannot avoid the self destruction, because this water condensation is eating where it is happening. Better use this expensive heat exchanger with a water/rust inhibitor/antifreeze mix and heat this fluid circuit with a more cost efficient heat exchanger . Maybe a stainless one - will be less efficient, but this can be compensated with size - but stainless will have a limited lifespan too. V4A quality will cost more than V2A, but is more corrosian resistant. Also aluminum, which protects itself fairly well, will get pinhole corrosion. Maybe brass? That's one of the materials, i've no experience with. Whatever solution, exhaust condensation comes with a cost. That's the real reason, why this part of the heat isn't harvested as a standard by the manufacturer in any heater. And keep in kind - even if used in low setting, your exhaust gas needs to have enough heat left to not clog the exhaust outlet with ice. That's a challenge too.
@loweredexpectations4927 A suggestion would be to find the secondary heat-exchanger from a dead high-efficient furnace. Most wholesalers like EMCO, Wolseley, BA Robinson, Frontier etc will have an area where we will drop off furnaces ad water heaters that we replaced. You could grab one there for free and also gain some other parts that might be fun to play with too.
If this is mostly due to galvanic corrosion, you could get isolating unions to separate the SS and copper. As long as it has a high temp gasket like silicon. Otherwise you can get SS air handler coils used for steam. Pricier and harder to find nowadays with everything being HW now. But if you wanted this as a primary heat source, might be a good investment.
Cast iron objects are known to stay warm for a long time because they are usually much thicker and heavier, allowing for much more stored thermal energy overall. Also, you're getting thermal conduction mixed up with thermal radiation. While cast iron is a poor thermal conductor, it is an excellent radiator, having significantly higher emissivity than either copper or aluminum.
Thanks for the comment. I responded to this and when I read it back, I sounded like a dick, haha. Let's try again. Yes, cast is WAY better at radiating heat energy than copper. Cast aluminum, if oxidized is pretty ok. The reason why copper is way more efficient in this scenario, is because while radiators depend on radiation for dissipating energy, they rely on conduction for absorbing it. In a traditional cast rad heating system, your water circulates through the rad continuously (when there is a call for heat). It doesn't need to be good at absorbing the energy, because the heat doesn't get absorbed isn't just dumped outside. In contrast, when capturing heat from the exhaust, it does not recirculate. It goes in one end and out the other. Whatever comes out is lost / waste. You can of course do things to improve the efficiency of cast iron. Increasing the surface area in contact with the exhaust gases will capture more energy, but this means larger, or more radiators. Copper and aluminum are such great conductors that they absorb energy quickly. They are also easier to make intricate shapes with so you can have a very large surface area with a pretty small exchanger. Copper and aluminum does not need to depend on radiating because it is such a good conductor. It conducts to the air. A little air flow moves away that heated air, maintaining a good temperature differential. Okay... hopefully that is less dick like.
Hi Joel, I installed 3 Vevor Diesel heaters in the bays below my 2016 Tiffin 36’ Motorhome … I am 4 season now and have been running with full water, etc. nice, quiet, smooth. My 2 propane furnaces are back ups and refueling is only a very short trip to the gas station.. Michigan 👍
I think of the cast iron radiators like a battery. Takes an hour for it to charge and lets out heat for an hour. It has its uses for certain applications. Our diesel heater is not of them as its running 24/7 at this time. So there is no heat cycling as the cast iron is meant for.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah... certain types of heat sources are better matched to cast exchangers or sand storage. Generally intense heat that is difficult to throttle. I thought of using the explanation below in my video, but it's a long one, haha. 1. Is that some stores heat will get hot. Something that is hot, does not absorb heat well. Something that doesn't absorb heat well will then allow heat to be lost into the atmosphere. In contrast, something that does not store heat well, is radiating heat into your living space. It is not storing heat, so it is not hot, so it absorbs heat more efficiently the entire time your heat source is running. 2. Is that, the reason why it get hot is because it releases heat slowly. If you have a milk jug with no holes in it, and you pour milk into it, it will fill up pretty quickly. Once it is full, the milk will spill out and be wasted. In our case, the milk jug has a little hole in it, so the milk comes out slowly. It takes a little longer to fill the jug, but eventually it spills over wasting milk. You happen to have your bowl of cereal under the little hole, so you can use the milk that comes out, but it takes a really long time to fill your bowl with milk... You can probably eat it faster than it's coming out, so you're never going to have enough milk, even though it's spilling everywhere. WIth a copper radiator, you have a milk jug with a giant hole in it, and the milk comes out just as fast as it goes in, so the jug never gets full. You have your cereal bowl under the hole, and you pour milk into the jug when you desire a bowl of cereal. LOL... Hopefully that makes sense. Cast iron releases heat slowly, so unless you have a very well insulated area, you're not getting enough heat output to keep the space warm. When the cast iron gets warm enough to radiate heat efficiently, it is too hot to absorb heat efficiently, so you are then wasting heat.
@@loweredexpectations4927 what about both - best of both worlds? .. the cast iron or sand to soak up heat ..to radiate later .. but once heat soaked the exchanger would pull the rest out into the room.. this would allow the unit to radiate heat after the heater was turned off.
@@WilliamTythas Others have suggested this, and it could be practical depending on a few things. How to explain this without ranting. If you are running your exhaust through a cast exchanger first, it is going to be absorbing some heat. If it is efficient and absorbs most of the heat, then the copper exchanger won't be doing anything until the cast rad heats up. During this time, your living space is not gaining any heat from the exhaust, so it will take longer to heat up your ... tent, for example. If the cast radiator isn't efficient and doesn't capture much heat, the heat will pass through into the exchanger where it is captured and immediately put into your air space. The cast rad, in this case will take even longer to heat up, and in the meantime will actually be absorbing heat from the air space, causing it to take longer to heat up. The cast rad will continue to absorb heat from the air, and exhaust, until the temp of the cast rad is up to room temp. At this point, it will be at equilibrium and not add or take any heat from the tent air. Another problem with heat batterie, of any material, is that they will eventually cool off... If you have a cast iron radiator in a space that drops down to -15C overnight, it will lose all of its heat energy in a few (or several depending on mass, the starting temp and ambient air temp). The cast radiator will eventually drop to -15C.... and when it does, you now have to expend energy getting it form -15 back up to 20 before it isn't just absorbing heat that you are generating. In contrast, a copper or aluminum exchanger will cool off in minutes after shutting the heat off, but it will also heat up within minutes, meaning that the heat you are generating (have paid for) is actually heating your air space and keeping you warm. If I were going to attempt to store energy (and I have) I would use water (or antifreeze) and not cast iron. Water has a better capacity, the ability to capture heat quickly, the ability to store it until you want to use it, the ability to store it in a remote location, the ability to resize depending on your heat source etc. Ultimately, you need to generate energy to heating the space. You can burn 8 litres if fuel during the day, put 4 litres of that heat into storage and 4 into the air, or you can burn 4 litres of fuel during the day and 4 litres during the evening. However, if your energy storage isn't 100% efficient (and it's not) then you are better off generating and using the heat in real time.
Yes, I have Heavy 600LB cast iron radiators connected too a High Efficiency Condensing Boiler. The Radiators are wonderful. They radiate heat in a very comfortable way, Like a Battery giving off energy. There is No Fan Blowing and it stores energy so it allows the Boiler to shut down while the radiator keeps radiating. You can't beat it.
Ace video again! Thanks for showing people how effective a real heat exchanger can be! People will say ‘it’ll clog up’ so would be good to see if you can test for a decent amount of time and then confirm or not (I don’t think it will).
Yeah... I have run it for over 2 weeks and there are zero signs of any soot at all. I took it into the garage and blew through it yesterday, and not a hint of problems. Deterioration of the materials is probably my biggest concern. Not sure what could be done to counteract this. An anode or perhaps electrical isolation.
Excellent work. Well worth the long form vid. I used approx 2m of the stainless pipe, same as us supplied with the heater, bent to fit in an electric cabinet cooled by computer fans, run by a thermostat. The difference over that short distance is amazing. The pipe enters at around 100c and exits around 24c. Can't see how to include screenshots of the thermal camera here. Love the pH scale, banana level! Can't see that being used in work.
Haha... I didn't mean to, but now that you say "banana scale" that reminds me of Curtis at Cutting Edge Engineering here on youtube. He sometimes measures things size in bananas. Well done with the pipe... I assume the fans make all the difference in the world, because I did a test last year where I used 25 feet ( I believe) and it wasn't as effective as yours.
❤ As a boomer I can keep the focus on the whole video. I'm using the welded steel radiator in my house, it's not accumulating much heat but it's able to dissipate all the heat. It may work with a cast iron type but I don't have it to try. I really like your scientific method and skills
Haha... yes, some of us can focus for an hour. The exhaust on these only produces about 1000w so I can see why your steel exchanger works. I'm sure a cast one would work as well, Especially if you had a fan blowing on it. Cheers !
Thanks for making all these videos..i have a heat exchanger like yours from an old ac unit..getting same results with a cheep 12vt fan from an atv..this video made me think instead of powing the fan,im going to duct the fan of the diesels input to my heat exchanger so i dont need to power the other fan.
Thanks for the comment, Martin. Just make sure that the air flowing over the exchanger is not hot air. If the air is hot, you will not capture as much heat out of the exhaust. Maybe you meant this, but you could use the air inlet side of the heater to pull room temp air over the exchanger.
@@martinsmith3613 That's a GREAT idea, and I honestly am glad I didn't think of it, haha. It makes WAY more sense than an additional fan, but it would mean building ductwork and it would have taken me forever to get that done. I would like to try it again some day and give it a go... I did, however, just come up with an idea for a modification that I'm fairly certain would allow diesel heaters to burn waste oils... really nasty stuff without any build up issues. I have lots of ideas bouncing around in my head, but this one feels like it needs to be done.
The reason for the cast iron radiator is not to heat the area quickly. That is what the heater is for. It keeps radiating heat after the heater is shut down. A copper core radiator will indeed captture and release heat from the heater exhauct. Whis is better depends on what use you have.
Yeah, I get it, cast holds heat longer but there's only so much heat to go around, and if you have a heat source that has a variable output, why not store your heat in the diesel fuel and run the heater longer? The argument is that cast iron acts as a battery and produces heat after the heater is turned off, but why not just make the heater 20% more efficient by using a copper exchanger, and then you have 20% extra fuel to burn, instead of turning your heater off. The option of running your heater now to heat a batter includes a pretty high penalty due to lack of efficiency. So, you burn that extra 20% fuel now, but you are not saving all 20% of it... you are probably saving 10 - 15% If you have a system that doesn't throttle well, or that doesn't lend well to turning on and off, or a scenario where you just can't keep the heat source going... sure. There might be a good argument for storing heat. Otherwise it makes more sense to store the heat in the diesel, by not burning it.
this may be one of the best videos on the subject. the heat exchanger is counter flow and is as efficient as it can be in this spot in the system. the only thing that would make it more efficient is running the fan only as much as needed which is completely possible thanks to that fancy fan controller. simply put the probe of the fan on the exit pipe of the heat exchanger and set the controller to keep it max 2 or 3 degrees above the room. incidentally there is a way to get the exhaust temp further down extracting even more heat. by running the exhaust after the room heat exchanger through a heat exchanger with the incoming combustion air it will be close to outside temp and the combustion air will be preheated. this means that no heat goes outside at all and those are used in buildings under the name concentric vent. by the way your setup is already a condensing furnace and has net efficiency above 100% because it gives out more heat energy than the fuel itself contains.💯👍 i bet much higher then expected
I am really glad to see that that crazy acid stunt didn't cost you your entire hand. Especially if that is the one you use the most on those lonely winter nights.
😂🤣😂🤣 I would never risk damaging such an important piece of equipment as my hand. As a matter of fact, what you see in my videos is actually a stunt double, or CGI... never the real right hand.
I did something a little different as far as exhaust heat recovery. I used a 100# propane tank and ran the exhaust into that. The tank is mounted horizontally at an angle to let the condensate drain. I increased the outlet to 2” diameter in attempt to mitigate any difference in back pressure. My exhaust temps are about 70 degrees f with the garage at 55. I’ve not had any problems with ice buildup at the exit. When you first showed those 55 gallon drums I thought maybe you were gonna try running the exhaust into one of them. Your heat exchanger looks like it works great! That’s supper efficient and pretty space friendly too. Part of the reason I didn’t use a fan is because well electricity isn’t free and somewhat reduces what’s gained from exhaust heat scavenging. Fan noise was another deterrent for me.
It's very cool how different people tackle this scavenging task, haha. That's not a bad efficiency. a few fins welded to the outside or something like that and it's possible you could get a little more... if you care, haha. I had a few oil drums a couple of years ago and had considered trying that, but I couldn't justify keeping the drums around. Now that I have these... Hmmmm. Maybe I should give it a try. I love the fact that it is soooo compact and efficient. The fan probably draws about 20 - 30 watts. It would be interesting to know how many watts it scavenges.
@ yeah I could do more but it’s working good enough for me and I kinda tend to go crazy on a project and then leave it 95% finished for years so I don’t wanna break tradition 😂 Truth be told I got the big propane tank idea from someone in a comment section that said they used a 55 gallon drum. I imagine it would work pretty well as the relatively thin steel would transfer heat fairly quickly. Certainly not space friendly like your heat exchanger setup though. Yes it would be interesting to know how many but’s are saved but it’s beyond my pay grade haha
A beer keg maybe as it won't rust inlet in the top and exhausted threw or near the bottom the warm air will stay at the top until it cools and goes to the bottom they call this a stratification chamber in the rocket mass heater groups @@jeffclark5024
Curious, what is the air temperature coming out of the vent of the diesel heater? And what is the air temperature coming out from where your fan is blowing through the heat exchanger? Great video, thank you for sharing!
I generally don't bother collecting this data, because it is deceiving and typically just adds confusion. The outlet temperature will change drastically based on what the inlet temp is. It will also change based on air speed or restriction. A good example of this ..., a diesel heater outlet temperature of 70 - 100C will not heat up my tent as much as 30C air coming off of the 16x16 heat exchanger. While the temp is much lower, the volume of air (and therefore heat energy) is much greater. I hope this makes sense. Cheers!
I use diesel heater to heat garage work shop. works great with 16' long stainless steel standard heater exhaust pipe. I used exhaust pipe it came with at the end then a 4' pipe and 10' pipe all spliced together with the cheap diesel mufflers that came with heater. I place the high efficiency 2024 Hcalory Toolbox 2 heater high self in my garage and run exhaust in a straight line diagonally down along the wall. From other RUclipsr I used steel wire to create brackets to safely space off the wall. Also from a commenter on RUclips I covered the Hot end of the pipe stack with 32 extra large Stainless Steel Scrubies to pull extra heat into air w/o the need of a fan or a proper heat exchanger. Also i can touch the Scrubies with out burning myself as they spread the heat are not a great heat conductor. Result, when all is said and done, Temperature drop from 510 deg F to 115 Deg F. ...when I used thermocouples tightly secured at both ends of exhaust pipe with hose clamps, Thank you for your thorough informative Video. I prefer my setup over yours because of it simplicity. However I acknowledge my system will not work in a tent. One last comment my exhaust Carbon Monoxide measured between 15 and 28 ppm. Thank you for your Video!
Nice !! I love the creativity of different people. I have done a similar test, just on the floor of my garage using about 26 feet of the same stainless tubing. A passive system is simple, quiet and relatively cheap. Well done.
Hello Joel. Just wanted to let you know what I did this year. I installed an oil drip line into my wood stove. Used motor oil and transmission fluid are wonderful. Stay away from veg oil,too high of a flash point to be easily self sustaining, smokey, produces too much carbon black. Messy,messy,messy. Motor oil and transmission fluid drip, very clean warm steady heat. AND no electricity needed. Perfect for off grid people like me. Rock on brother!
Just think of wood fire as your ignitor and the stove box as your burn chamber on a diesel heater. Only difference is a blower. If you want to play around with a blower, you have the little square hole with a cover in the floor of the wood stove to play with. Main thing is STAY WARM!
@@tjhouston4916If your woodstone is Set up the code.You should have an upload behind it to Set up a fan for circulation, Just make sure the fan is off when you open your door of the stove while burning and For starting the fire 🔥
I'll never forget what I read as a kid. White man builds big fire and sits far away. Indian builds small fire and sits close. To me it's also a matter of fuel economy. Winters are long.
Rest of the world is moving to catalytic converters in wood stoves and you burn engine oil raw.. stupid nothing more.. Have you seen wild fires in usa or snow ? Yeah that as what we people harvest. Don't you have LPG or Natural gas as supplied by a truck to an over the ground tank and burn in a furnance? Burns much much cleaner
If you have a couple few you'll get several :) I would probably wrap the exhaust going to the exchanger, and depending on the outdoors temp I might wrap the exhaust going outside. Below zero F can create some interesting freeze phenomenon. I appreciate all the experimenting you're doing, I have two 8KW heaters, and you've taught me that I would never do what you're doing to them lol except for the heat exchanger. We do have some biodiesel at the Shell gas station I've been experimenting with, but that's as far as I'm going.
Wrapping the exhaust outside seems like a good idea as it could avoid freezing on real cold days. Any heat that is lost inside will just heat the air, so I suppose it depends on what the goal is. Haha... That is the most important lesson. Never do what Joel does. I would like to try biodiesel some time. I have a feeling that it would be perfectly fine, but I'd like to see what the heat output is and test it for myself. Cheers.
39:29 I'm not sure you have this correct. your humidity reading is going down because the temperature is going up and therefore can hold more moisture. Not because there is less moisture in the air. Your reading is relatively humidity. Relative to the temperature. The condensation from the exhaust, is from the combustion process of burning the fuel.
That’s not true, humidity depends not only because of temperature, also because how is wet around, same example like in sauna’s, there can be super hot but also hi humidity levels
Oh... I hadn't considered that at all. At the very end of the video, I did have the realization, that there was so much more water coming out because 1. There was ice inside of the exchanger when it starts up, and 2. The ice cold exchanger is much more efficient at condensing the moisture than when it reaches 24C, for example. It makes sense what you are saying though. Thanks. The air is able to hold more humidity at the warmer temps, so it is not releasing it. I had a clip talking about the combustion process releasing water... and then realized as I was talking, that's all I know about it, lol. I have no idea how much or what the determining factors are.
@@Orentas01 I always thought a sauna was a very dry heat as opposed to a steam room. But I guess they all get called a sauna. Regardless, if you have a sealed box with a sensor that measures relative humidity (which most do) and increase the temperature then the humidity will go down, there is the same amount of moisture in the air. It will stay in the air untill the air temperature goes below it's dew point. That is the point at which the air isn't able to hold the amount of moisture it contains.
Well done! Looking forward to the Arduino stuff. _It takes a lot of guts to show your bed._ That's what mine looked like until I just started sleeping on the couch ten years ago :)
Thanks !! I'm also excited about the arduino stuff. Hoping that it doesn't take over my life, haha. My bed has been a mess for several years... this is particularly bad, haha. I slept on a couch in my house for 6-7 years. I'm moving up in the world.
Awesome video man, thanks for posting. Have you ever thaught of running a 6 foot long exhaust or so and then run a 4” duct with fan or pellet stove intake hose (3”) around it to reclaim the exhaust heat? Might be all you need.
I have heard of people doing this but with a bit longer exhaust. I ran a 26 foot exhaust but not with the external ducting. If you do this, you can use the inlet side of the heater to pull air through, instead of using an extra fan. A commenter pointed this out.
@@Triumphium Nope. Even though the exhaust is very hot because the heat is being spread out over a large area, the temp coming off the exchanger isn't very hot. Maybe 30C
Great video as always - bought myself a Vevor diesel heater 5KW and set it up with a cast iron radiator - now i have to find a heat exchanger instead 😀
HAHA... awesome !! Check the outlet temp and see what it is ... if it is close to room temp, dont worry about it. If it is pretty high, trying moving a little air over the rad and see what happens. I don't think there's anything wrong with cast iron radiators... They are just not as efficient as modern ones. Cast will last a hundred years and if your house burns down, it will be the one thing you don't' have to replace.
@@loweredexpectations4927 i tested the temperature outgoing. We had just around 0 degrees C outside, and the temp was 24 measured directly in the outlet tube. Some vapour shows, But I am sure I made a mistake when I set the whole thing up as I used the top as outgoing and the bottom as inlet. This gives off a lot condensation that I have had to put in a valve so I can let the water out. But I heat my workshop to 18 degrees in just over 2 hours. I am very pleased with my diesel heater.
@@larsskytte Thanks so much. How large is your radiator. It is working really well. Other than making sure it can drain, I wouldn't change anything. It will take longer to heat than a copper one would, but it will also last forever.
@ The radiator is just over 1,5 m long 65 cm high and 18 cm wide - the workshop is a smaller one 6 x 3,5 m insulated with 5 cm rockwool in the walls. the system works well, the only thing is the condensation. - this will be changed in time.
for the exhaust i like that style of setup or just radiator fins (like base board water heaters) the most to extract the potential lost heat. but for batteries for people who want to have less fluctuations in room temperatures. having something like a sand battery on the hot air side going though it to soak some of the heat off the air outlet side would help stabilize the room but it doesnt provide more heat just less fluctuations. the goal is to get the most heat out of it before it exits the house. with the sand battery or cast iron or rocks. its just to help stabilize and radiate the heat over time after the heater is off.
👍 Yeah. A large thermal mass can help stabilize the temp in a space. In these cases, it is important to have really good insulation. Thermal masses like sand, rocks or even concrete release heat slowly (that's why they hold heat) and to heat any space, you need to be inputting more heat than is escaping.
Hey!I recently started to play with these automation electronics too!!Mainly because i try to make the diesel heater turn on/off by itself.And i think i did it.
-30 here this morning and my GSHP is working beautiful house is 72 and cosy. The stored energy in water is amazing and I never had to burn anything I did use some electricity some from my solar and some from the grid which is mostly hydro and nuclear here in Ontario Canada.
I have a similar setup that uses a turbo charger intercooler and 12V auto radiator fan with a variable speed controller. My results are similar to yours. I feel that my efficiency is very high.
Right on !! Thanks for sharing. I had a small intercooler from a SkiDoo but figured I would use something a little larger. I'm sure an old car radiator and many other things would work very well. The nice thing about these exchangers is how easy they are to connect. The exhaust fits so well it's like it was made for it, haha. With a bit of tinkering and a trip to a scrap yard, and you can probably do this for $100 though.
That's a fancy heat exchanger, cast iron might not exchange heat better than copper, but I think in most cases people already have them or get them for cheap. I am still planning on using a cast iron radiator for my setup, if my space gets heated up to a point where it no longer cools the exhaust gasses then I'll consider that a 1st world problem. You could also increase the cooling capacity of the cast iron by adding a fan to it.
Thanks for the comment. It is really fancy. I think a budget minded person, who likes to tinker, would do just as well with a car radiator or intercooler. Many of those have fans built in. I have looked for a cast iron radiator for 2 years now. On the east and west coast, they are common and cheap. Also where heating oil is used...🤔. Where I am in Alberta, these things are much more rare and have become collectors items. I have seen a few, but they were around $800. I didn't dive deep into the explanation on cast not being great, but on top of what I said in the video, it needs to be hotter to pass heat into your living space. The copper will dump heat into your room if it is even a few degrees warmer than ambient air, but cast will have to be significantly hotter to warm the air space. This is part of the reason for the lack of efficiency. Putting a fan on a cast radiator would be a really good idea. We are only dealing with 1000 watts, so I would assume a 2 foot long 18-20 cast radiator would work efficiently, but it will also weigh 150 - 200 lbs. I almost bought some modern aluminum ones off amazon, but they weren't rated very high in btu either.
I'm glad you have good luck with the diesel heater. I've replaced all fuel lines, pump and cleaned out the burn chamber, new glow plug and screen. The heater still errors out with e-08. I'm really hating these things now.
Sorry to hear you are having problems. Does the heater start up and run for a while before giving you an E-08 code? I don't know your exact situation, but I would suggest going back to the extreme basics. Detach the inlet and exhaust, make sure your fuel tank is close to the heater and above it. Make sure there's no air in the lines. If it still has problems, you then have limited things it can be. It could be as simple as a bad temp sensor telling the ECU that the temp is too low.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I have one of the portable units (upright) I replaced the fuel pump and put all nylon fuel line and a fuel filter. There are no leaks. The heater will start up and run from a cold start for a while then shut down with e-08. I spent an hour today taking everything apart and cleaning it. I may try one more thing by buying another burn chamber. Only parts left that have not been replaced would be the temp sensor, the air intake fan and the controller board.
Hi, I have had similar problems in the past my solution was a new burn chamber, I had cleaned the old one but the problem is cleaning the base of it where the mesh or wire wool is, another thing to do is check the temp sensor, good luck with it, from bitter experience I know these things can be a pain to get running reliably. Also, make sure to run it on a high setting every so often as this reduces carbon build up good luck with it hope that helps
@@kevin34ct That's frustrating. The fact that it is starting is an indicator to me that the chamber is okay. If there is a chamber problem, they usually have starting issues. Something else that I just thought of. The error 8 code is simply the ECU detecting that the temp of the exchanger is lower than expected. So, either the ECU is getting bad information (bad sensor) the ECU itself is bad, or the temp is actually dropping too low. I would make sure the sensor is properly in contact with the exchanger and that the wires are not pinched, and the connector is secure. If you have a way to monitor the temp of the exchanger, most controllers have a setting that shows you exchanger temp, then keep an eye on this. The heater should start up, and within a few minutes get to over 150. Once operating a normal temp range is between 170 and 210, depending on lots of factors. If the temperature jumps around quickly, more than a few degrees in a few seconds, then there is a reading issue. Temp changes happen fairly slowly, so any quick changes indicate a sensor /sensing issue. Bad sensor, wiring or bad ECU. If you notice the temperature dropping gradually, this indicates that the temp of the exchanger is actually dropping. This either means that the burner is 1. not getting enough fuel or 2. can't burn the fuel it is getting. To determine what situation you have, I would allow the temp to drop until you see the E-08 code, and immediately disconnect the power. This will not hurt anything, despite what the internet says. Let the heater cool off and pull the chamber out. If it has a build up of fuel (you can actually see liquid fuel in the chamber or it drips out) this is a very strong indication that you are getting fuel, but it is not burning. If the chamber is clean of fuel, this is an indication that it wasn't getting enough fuel. Despite all of your efforts with the fuel system, it is quite possible that you have a bad pump or there is another fuel issue.
@@kevin34ct Hahahaha! That's why mine is still sitting apart where it was last winter. I just couldn't bring myself to tearing it apart, cleaning it, and putting it back together again, IN THE FREEZING COLD, only to have it err a short time later-----after I'd get my hopes up. I got so desperate I bought 7 catalytic heaters off eBay. This year I put a drip waste oil/transmission fluid, mixed with diesel to thin it a little and give an instant light with a torch line to my woodstove. Sure am saving wood. Only need to put a piece of two of wood in now and then to give the flames something to lick off of. I'm really liking this setup.
One just has to look at the coefficient of thermal conductivity of the different materials and you can clearly see that copper and aluminum beat cast iron hands down at extracting heat. Where cast iron comes in is with cases where you want a thermal mass to store heat for later release as you pointed out at the end of your video. That said, water is far better for heat storage which is why I am using a copper pipe/tube run through a modified stainless steel beer keg filled with water/antifreeze mix to extract and store the waste exhuast heat for later slow radiation from the surface of the beer keg. I'm also thinking of running the heater output vent through stainless steel exhaust tubing mounted in the same keg as the heater puts out far more BTU at any one time than I need to heat the volumes I plan to use it for, one being a greenhouse.
You nailed it ... exactly. If you want heat now, my setup is better. If you want heat for later, water, or glycol is far superior. Easily expandable storage, and easy to keep in storage until you want the neat... then when you want the heat you can get it quickly. You might want more than a kegs worth of water. As it heats up, it too will become less efficient at collecting heat. The system I have in my house uses a mixing valve so that I heat 200L, then, when that 200L is up to 50C, I start heating another 200L. If you do something like this, you maintain efficiency longer, and can continue to collect heat energy as long as you have more water to heat.
@loweredexpectations4927 From what I gathered there's about 500btu per hour waste heat reasonably available to be extracted from the exhaust. The keg will hold 14 gallons and that will be able to soak up about 6960 Btu of heat, roughly 14 hours, with a 60 degree F temperature rise (50F to 110F). The keg itself will be radiating heat the whole heating cycle as well. I have a 275 gallon caged IBC tote that I could use for heat storage as well.
@@michaelg4931 If you have a reasonably efficient method of capturing the heat energy, you will collect about 6X more than that. The exhaust produces about 800 watts (2800 btu/h) That is a LOT larger keg than I had imagines. I was thinking of a beer keg... 5 gallons. 👍
I built a sand battery from a 55 gal drum, the heater can be on all day and the exhaust passing though the wall is at most body temp, nealy all the heat is lost in the radiant/ sand. BUT, it takes forever to heat up, I like your idea better
I love the different solutions that people come up with... I love even more that two people in a row have not just called me an idiot and said I was right, lol. It's awesome to be able to capture the heat rather than let it go to waste, but like you said, it will take all day to heat up. Someone pointed out to me that you can just use the air inlet of the heater to draw air through the exchanger, meaning that you don't' need an extra fan or extra electricity.
Idea for a part two. Run the SS exhaust pipe thru a water path made with a drywaller mud pan(s). Make the water flow, by gravity (hot to cool circulation, can be done passively), or worst case use a small hot water circulation pump from a house boiler (about a hundred $). Water flows around exhaust pipe absorbing the heat efficiently, runs to your heat exchanger fan assy, then back to the mud pan(s). You already have 90% of the set up now. If you want build a top to the mud pans, plexiglass would work nice for showing in a video. probably need an expansion chamber in the fan radiator loop to allow for water in the closed system to expand when heated. Probably just a verticle leg of bigger pipe for an air compression chamber.
Radiators and LPS are *consistent* heat. They are definitely not the most efficient, and boiler maintenance is always hot dirty work. I have a cantankerous Gordon-Piatt burner on one that won't ignite and locks out if the ignitor isn't obsessively centered and really clean. Best part is it always happens at the coldest part of the morning, and by the time I get there it's working. Learned to brush it out, fight the electrode to the center, and enjoy half a season of proper operation. 😂 I prefer air handlers with HX 7 days out of 7.
LOL... yes, your heater always stops working on the coldest days. I recently got a Beckett that I'm planning on making a boiler for... we'll see what happens with that plan.
Could you make a trap for the condensate to drain like is on an LP or natural gas furnace? That way you could run a line to an inside drain so it won't freeze.
I was sure I responded to your comment.... Hmmm. Yes, that would work. You would need to install a water trap just like in a sink drain, to ensure no exhaust leaked out.
👍😎in my shop the 4 inch exhaust runs about 15 feet horizontal on ceiling then exits the building. The 4 inch inside of the shop is surrounded with 8 inch with a fan attached just before the 4 inch exits. The fan blows air through the 8 inch back to the stove where the air is blowing out from behind the stove. Exhaust from building is same as shop temp. This works great but I have to run a draft inducer . When burning wood or pellets I get a lot of condensation I had to install condensation drain and 1 gallon jug to catch liquid smoke.
@@RUredE2go LOL... I talk to so many people that I sometimes forget who is who, who said what, where they are and so on. It's all really confusing talking to someone online. I'm sure if you had told me face to face, you would have remembered..... Maybe, haha.
If it helps, transfer of thermal energy is the interface area multiplied by the square of the difference in temperature. Read: Double the difference in temperature is four times the rare of energy transfer for the same area. Affiliate relationship aside, that HX and fan seem grossly oversized. For a not too dissimilar heat scavenging purpose, I've used a junkyard heater core and electric radiator fan from a 90s Ford E series van. $25US and about a half hour to pull. The fan was overkill for my purpose, for your ~8kW (my best guess) heater, I doubt that anything bigger than such junkyard scrap would be worth a tiny efficiency improvement. Might be worth checking if your affiliate has something a little more budget friendly, especially if a crossflow HX with inlet on opposite corner from outlet was available simplifying the condensate draining issue.
Great info. I used these components because I purchased them for another project, and people requested that I do this test. It is very much overkill and $$$ A scrap yard radiator would be very cheap and have a built in fan, or at least an easy to source and cheap 12V fan... That could easily be throttled down. I might get around to testing a more practical solution, some day. Like I said, I used these items as I had them and many viewers have requested this.
If you over cool your exhaust you’ll generate sulfuric acid due to the composition of oil. It’s why on a residential system or any oil you want a stack temp > 350 if not you’ll eat your chimney liner or even that heat exchanger
Thanks for the comment. This is true, and why I tested the PH of the exhaust condensate. It is a lot less of a problem how that they make ultra low sulphur diesel. Home heating oil may not he ultra low sulphur... I know that aviation fuel is not low sulphur. The more sulphur, the more sulphuric acid. aka acid rain. These little diesel heaters burn MUCH cleaner than home oil furnaces. It's sort of insane how well they actually work, considering how basic they are.
Have a think- imagine a heat exchanger for the combustion air... extract all the heat from the burner exhaust to only heat the incoming air. Then only rely on wasted or leaked heat. It works amazingly well.
I'm not sure I'm picking up what you are laying down. We are talking about the primary heat exchanger (body of the heater) or a secondary one like I am using in this video ? I think you might be saying to use the inlet air side of the heater to pull heat out of the secondary exchanger ?
Very cool experiment! Did you "mouth blow" through the heat exchanger (when it was brand new) to see if it has much restriction for the exhaust flow that might plug up heater eventually? Do you think the condensation water has an easier path to exit with the exchanger horizontal like you have it versus vertical with ports facing down? Thanks! PS.....might be time to wash the sheets....lol
I did blow through it and there is some resistance, but it is hard to tell because resistance is related to flow and these don't have a lot of flow. Nothing I saw during my testing (CO readings, color of condensate, temp of heater) makes me think that flow is a problem. I ran it for 2 weeks and it ran well and has no signs of blocking up, at all. CO is a great indication of what the future holds. Laying flat is the best (perhaps only) way for the condensate to get out, due to the routing of the passages in the exchanger. I put a lot of thought into this and almost called the test off because of what I saw. Perfectly level, laying flat is the best position. Any other position could cause enough water to be trapped that it bursts the exchanger. This is a pass cooler so the pipes actually go from the inlet side, to the other end and back a few times. It would trap water and start gurgling and shut off if you put it any other way.
@@loweredexpectations4927 Thanks for feedback! Great channel for us tinkerers. Hope you come up with something you could patent and make money with, maybe bring a product to market.
My homemade exchanger is 1" black pipe in a downward grid pattern with aluminum fins (3"x5") every few inches . Inside a box with a grid pattern the same as the pipe. A 7" fan sucks air in the bottom and out the top. currently my fan kicks in at 40C and out at 35C, any cooler than that i had a ton of condensate dripping out the exhaust exiting the garage wall and thats a problem in that location , so i raised my set points up untill i had almost 0 drips.
Thanks for the comment. There are lots of ways to do this for sure. I like how creative people are. y I believe condensate starts to form at around 80% efficiency, but there are other factors that come into play. If you are trying to get every bit of efficiency possible, then you need to deal with condensate. If you are willing to allow heat to escape, then you have a lot less to worry about.
Thanks for the comment and suggestion. I did think about measuring the air temp, but it is actually kinda tricky. An inferred meter will just give the temp of what the air is hitting. I should have put the fan probe in the bin, suspended in the air.
You should use platinum fluff it's good for removing incomplete combustion it's used in fireplaces and it's good for being used as a Cadillac converter
I have been looking into catalytic converters for another project. I wasn't able to find "platinum fluff" in a google search. In these heaters, unless you do something to mess them up, I'm pretty sure that they run too clean to keep a catalytic reaction going.
I thought the vevor heat exchanger was made for water to air. It’s not normally as efficient for air to air, that’s a different design. Like a furnace plenum. So this was a good experiment. I was wondering about the exchanger filling with water, but I stay till the end!
Yes... this is intended for water to air. I'm surprised it works as well as it does. I'm sure you have seen now, but it does keep some water. It doesn't "fill" but some stays in there.
It's possible that that could work, but a automotive injector operates at about 60 psi with gasoline. They need to operate at 100+ when using oil, due to the increased viscosity. In fact, 100 psi is for diesel. Most people who try to mist oil preheat it to thin it out. The pressurized tank would would work, but it would need an air compressor attached to the tank to maintain the pressure.You would also have to depressurize the tank before adding oil to it. A small tank would have to be filled often and a large tank would take a long time to fill, with both oil and air. Ideally It would also have a oil level sensor to shut down before the oil ran out, or you would blow a lot of air out of the tank when it went empty.
@loweredexpectations4927 just use a larger injector. Once pressurized very little air is needed to maintain at 2L / hour. Very steady pressure and flow. A 100 lb propane would be good. A ball float drain would block flow when empty
For piping/tubing maybe try borosilicate glass, it can withstand up to 3000°F and the heat will escape the glass into the air most efficiently and no rust, corrosion problems in the glass parts.
I really don't understand complicating all this with a heat exchanger, any long enough pipe will exchange the heat until it gets to a certain temperature then that is where you end the exhaust pipe/tube and exit the building. When the pipe is 80°F you've extracted the most heat you need the rest is just going to cause a loss of the main heat if you try to go too low your other heated space will try to compensate to balance and end up using more energy.
I don't understand the added expense of a heat exchanger when any pipe/tubing that can withstand heat can be used as your exchanger to the length of where the temperature hits 75° then you end the pipe at that length and exit the building at that point.
That would be really cool and I would love to try it !! I do question if it is really good at transferring heat tho... seems like it would be a good insulator. I'm wondering what the cost of this would be and how you would make corners, instead of having one very long piece. I would love to see that tho. Neat idea.
You are both right and wrong, but you admitted that you don't' understand. It all has to do with surface area... I'm not going to do the math, but you are welcome to. "If you have a long enough pipe" = enough surface area. A heat exchanger like mine is about 300 inches of pipe, laid out in such a way that it is compact. Then it has aluminum fins on it to create even more surface area. Not 100% sure what you are trying to say about "cause a loss of the main heat". As I said in the video, you can only cool the exhaust off to room temperature. If somehow, the air in your heated space is above the exhaust temperature, then you would be heating the exhaust. That is not possible unless you have two separate heat sources.
Copper is resistant to acid/base attack but only in the absence of oxygen. So, while pH=5.5 isn't *that* acidic, it's more acidic than you'd expect in a household water supply, for example. I'd keep an eye on it, but it's not going to dissolve-away any time soon.
Thanks for the comment. That's interesting. Probably not a lot of oxygen in there when the heater is on, but once it is shut down, that could be a problem. I don't plan on running this long term, but that's good to know.
Quality heat exchangers should use silver solder and not lead based solder. Silver solder is stronger and has a much higher melting point. You can run just about any flammable liquid through a diesel heater (except gasoline/ petroleum or other highly inflammable liquid) also it doesn’t really need to be liquid at room temperature as long as you can safely warm it to liquify. Used cooking oil is the cheapest and you only need to filter it a bit.
Yeah. The lead solder that I mentioned was the reducer and elbow that I added after the fact. Not sure if you have seen any of my other videos, but I have tested lots of other fuels, including some that didn't work sowell, like gasoline and alcohol. I tested varsol, and some paint thinners, ATF, and cooking oil. Cooking oil will cause issues if you run it more than 50/50, regardless of how well it is filtered. I really enjoyed those videos and would like to try more in the future.
@ . I may have seen your other videos on fuel or it may have been someone else’s. The closer to petroleum something is the faster it burns with less thermal energy transfer so you go through more of it with greater risk of explosion because diesel heaters are not designed to burn those types of fuels. There are things that the various military organisations used that could burn those fuels safely, but they are mostly for cooking equipment.
@@anomamos9095 They do make diesel heaters that are designed to run on both diesel and gasoline. I have not owned one, but some of the high end companies sell them. I assume the chamber design is quite different. It was nerve racking burning the diesel... especially when it flamed out and was still pumping fuel into the hot chamber...
Yeah I must admit I was surprised I didn't get bored at some point but there was the right amount of stuff going on and information to keep my interest throughout.
@@dn7783 Yeah. Making videos is tricky, editing videos is tricky and deciding what you want your video to be, is ... you guessed it ... tricky. Some people tune in only for the info. For those people, they get annoyed by an introduction. They just want the facts. Other people just want to see something neat come together. Others want to feel like they are along for the journey with the video creator... Much of my audience tunes in to hear me say "garage" and to see my cats. I hope you didn't miss the part where I poured acid on my hand, haha.
Isn't comparing cast iron to the exchanger similar to heat storage compared to heat recovery? I plan to go this road in the near future. Also to help when using a old cast iron rad, couldn't a fan be used as well when the rad is brought up to temperature ?
Hey, thanks for the comment. If you have access to a cheap or free cast rad, use it and create some air flow. That will help a lot. There are a lot of problems with heat storage, and when I talk about it I always end up ranting... so I'll try not to. With this small copper exchanger, (or a similarly sized car radiator) heat recovery will be as close to perfect as you can get. Over 90% efficiency. This means that if you want it to be 20C, you can run your heater at a lower setting and conserve fuel for later... instead of conserving heat for later. I could just end here. When trying to store heat in cast iron, the reason it stores heat is 1. it's thermal mass, and 2. because it does not absorb or release heat quickly. Not absorbing heat quickly means that it will not capture all of your heat. So, you are still burning fuel to heat now, and fuel to store heat, and a lot of the fuel you are burning to store heat is being lost, as it is not being absorbed quickly enough. To make things worse, as the cast stores heat, it will increase in temperature. As it increases in temperature it becomes even less efficient, so now you are dumping even more heat out to the atmosphere. I just realize that I probably could have just said "if you are using a fan to strip heat out of your cast rad, you are not storing it for later" and you would have had a "hmmmm, good point" moment, haha. If the fan actually works, the cast won't get (very) hot and therefor won't be storing heat for later.
It sounds like you could get away with a much smaller heat exchanger. Perhaps you could divert the heat to a sand battery once your room is up to temperature, then turn off the heater and pump the air back through the same small heat exchanger until that is exhausted (no pun intended). That would need some soot-proof valves though. All the best with your Arduino stuff 🙂.
Yeah... it would be interesting to see how small it could be. The smaller it is, the more power will be used by the fan to keep it efficient, so that could end up being diminishing returns. A sand battery after the exhaust could be a way to capture more heat energy. The "problem" is that the sand would have to be below ambient temp to absorb energy, meaning that it would also pull heat from the air. In my little tent, this could actually work out if I took the time to run exhaust through the ground. It is already a sand battery, but pulling heat from the air instead the exhaust.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I was thinking you could switch the sand battery in parallel (or now I'm thinking before the heat exchanger, depending on how you it interfaces with the air) which you could later run in a loop with the heat exchanger to discharge it using a small pump. You might be able to pump air directly through the sand instead, and it might be much easier.
@@ThisRandomUsername All things that you can do. In the end, you have about 800 - 1000 watts of heat. If you use all of it to charge a battery, then you can't use it now. If you put half of it into a battery you can use the other half now. If it is being put in the sand, it's not heating you now. In my opinion, using storage tanks with water or antifreeze, as a battery, makes the most sense, but only if you are producing excess energy. If the heater and the exhaust is making 6000 watts and you need 6000 watts to keep the tent warm, then putting any into a battery means you're not as warm. If you only need 3000 watts and are making 6000, you should put the extra 3000 into a battery. The thing is, I was bringing the tent temperature to 25C and then opening the door and windows to purposely cool it off. In real life , you would turn the heat down so that it maintains 20C, and burn less fuel. Instead of trying to store excess heat in a battery (of any sort), just don't make excess heat. This exchanger saves you about 20% of your fuel. You can then decide to run your heater for 20% longer or keep your heater running when you would have normally turned it off. Why not store the energy in the diesel fuel at no extra expense or bother, rather than burning the fuel now and storing the energy for later 🤷♂
@@loweredexpectations4927 Ah, that makes perfect sense. Quite right, diesel is much more dense than any thermal battery. I guess if you're burning some wood or something that's difficult to start up it would make sense to store heat in water or some type of thermal battery.
@@ThisRandomUsername Exactly. Larger heaters / burners tend not to like being turned on and off, and other heat sources are harder to throttle... some can't be tended to all the time and aren't automated, so there still are lots of reasons to use some sort of thermal storage. It's just not as practical as one might assume at first glance.
31:22 yes you can with a wet heat exchanger. evaporation sucks heat.(water being same temperature than ambient air) try it with few shot from a water mister on your fan. this is why wind feels cool on skin.
@@qwertymnbvc-k9x I think that you think I'm disagreeing with you... At 31:43 in my video, I point out at evaporative cooling would cool the temp of the exchanger down. Yes, evaporative cooling 100% works. That is what wind chill is, and yes, that's why water or alcohol feels cold on your skin. This, however, is not a good solution for extracting heat from the exchanger for the purpose if heating up the tent, or for collecting the energy. The heat energy from this process is used to evaporate the water, and is therefore of no use to us. If we used evaporative cooling on the exchanger, the heat from the exchanger is used up changing the state of the water and therefore cannot also be used to heat the air space in the thent. Hopefully that is clear.
PH is the scale is how acidic or basic something is. Acidity refers to the strength of an acid and is lower on the PH scale. 7 being neutral. Not at all acidic or basic. Some people use the word "alkaline" instead of "basic".
A property of carbon monoxide many people don't realize is, it's not only the concentration but also the duration of exposure. Carbon monoxide binds onto hemoglobin more tighter (???) than oxygen or carbon dioxide. The results are even at a low concentration, with a long enough exposure it can reduce the ability of blood to take up oxygen.
Yea, I have talked about the dangers of CO in previous videos. Friend of my family passed away after building a home made camper with a faulty heating system. People generally don't die from CO poisoning unless they are sleeping, because the symptoms become hard to deal with long before that point. I'm sure I have had mild CO poisoning, at least once, and could feel it the next day. From everything I've read, the upside (if you can call it that) is that it is not cumulative. The hydrocarbons and VOCs are much more harmful in this way.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I once had an automotive instructor that said he was particularly sensitive to CO because he had been exposed to it too many times .
Great another Video im always happy When you make another Video 🎉 hope you are doing better than Me right now. Im going through some stuff but it will always get better 😊
Thanks for the comment. Much appreciated. I'm sorry to hear you're going through stuff.... I'm okay, but am also dealing with some terrible stuff. That's why there wasn't a video last Sunday. Take care.
Hey Joel, I saw the same model "Eskimo" shelter set-up in my local Peaey Mart yesterday (which is closing forever in April!). I'd never seen a quilted tent before, and I guess I've been living under a rock.
That sucks that Peavy Part is closing... Eskimo tents / shelters are really good and well known. This tent is over 10 years old. Andy bought another one a few months ago so that we could use this old one in the yard. Vevor sells tents like this now, as well as others, but I think the Eskimo brand is top notch.
@@loweredexpectations4927 The only really good "deal" at Peavey here has been the bulk fasteners, which I've taken advantage of quite a bit over the last several years. But they've let that stock run-down over the last year. Now I know why....
That exchanger is probably overkill. I had no doubt that it would cool the exhaust to ambient. My quest is to find something at low cost. looking for a few scrap hydronic baseboard units.
I almost bought a few of those baseboard hydronic things a few years ago, but couldn't justify the cost to scavenge 800 - 1000 watts, at best. I did this test because this exchanger will be used for other projects. It is very much overkill.
Look into what they call a stratification chamber in the rocket mass heaters making one out of a corrosive resistance metal Barrel maybe something like a beer keg I would be real curious to see how that would work so I would not require any electricity
Thanks for the comment. A viewer pointed out that I could have used the return air / air inlet for the heater to pull air through the exchanger, and that would mean no extra fan and not much extra power, if any. Stratification chambers are interesting and I was going to build one out of a 55 gallon drum... I still might as I'm just curious. Stratification depends on the surrounding material being able to absorb the heat energy before the entire chamber is full of hot air. If the chamber surface does not absorb air fast enough, it will essentially overflow with hot air and it will spill out the exhaust. What it comes down to is surface area. A very small copper heat exchanger can have a very large surface area. It does this by having large manifolds connected to several small pipes. There is over 64 feet of 3/8 copper tubing in a 16x16 inch exchanger. That's equal to 80 square feet of surface area. So an 8x10 foot surface squeezed into a 16x16 space... and that's not including the aluminum fins. I have a few steel drums that I could use, maybe I will give it a go.
I've always used acidic and basic. Not sure if that's what I heard in school or on the interwebs. When I heard "alkaline" from people describing soil here in parts of Alberta... I was like ... "I've heard that word before .... oh... basic" haha. Yeah... I should probably just give in and do long videos. Thanks for your support.
I might be wrong Joel, but does the heat exchanger not act as a recipient of 'wind chill'? If you stand outside and it is 0 degrees, you can measure and everything will be 0... However when the wind blows (or Joel turns the fan on) then you can measure that the temperature will be lower than 0, will it not? This is from motorcycle experience not from my school physics lessons 😁
The answer to that is both yes, and no. The air moving over the exchanger will strip heat off of if, much like wind chill. So this is the yes part. The no part is because wind chill is caused by evaporation. I had mentioned evaporative cooling in the video. If you have 0C air the wind hitting a piece of aluminum will not cause it to cool more than 0C. If it hits your skin, it strips moisture out if your skin and actually causes it to be colder than 0. A piece of aluminum that is 100C will cool off much faster if it is windy, but it will not cool below the air temp. I hope this makes sense. 👍
@@loweredexpectations4927 I have just done some actual research and of course you are 100% correct 😁👍 Everyday is a school day! And I just need better motorbike gear for winter...
@@OurITManager 🤣 The important thing is, I managed to convey the information without sounding like a dick, and you did the hardest thing on earth and admitted that someone else was right.... I didn't even know that was possible in the internet !! Well done. I learn MOST of what i know from getting things wrong and messing things up. Get some better gear and stay warm !!
I kinda tried that in one of my earlier videos... except the cat was in the burn chamber... There are 2 main issues with using a cat on a diesel heater. 1. Cats need to be really hot to operate and cars typically dump extra fuel at startup, to get them up to temperature. The exhaust from a diesel heater may not be enough to get them up to operating temp. 2. Cats stay hot because engines are very inefficient, and dump a lot of unburnt fuel out the exhaust. This unburnt fuel burns in the cat and keeps it hot. These diesel heaters, as you may have seen from this video, burn really efficiently and produce almost no CO. You would have to purposely dump extra fuel into the exhaust to get the cat to work... if you could get it to work at all. Diesel heaters run clean enough that a cat or DPF would likely do nothing.
There are 2 main issues with using a cat on a diesel heater. 1. Cats need to be really hot to operate and cars typically dump extra fuel at startup, to get them up to temperature. The exhaust from a diesel heater may not be enough to get them up to operating temp. 2. Cats stay hot because engines are very inefficient, and dump a lot of unburnt fuel out the exhaust. This unburnt fuel burns in the cat and keeps it hot. These diesel heaters, as you may have seen from this video, burn really efficiently and produce almost no CO. You would have to purposely dump extra fuel into the exhaust to get the cat to work... if you could get it to work at all. Diesel heaters run clean enough that a cat or DPF would likely do nothing.
I do believe aluminium is a much better conductor of heat than copper is. How much more efficient an aluminium one would be, I don't rightly know, since a lot depends on the construction of the heat exchanger and the resulting flow (constriction) of the exhaust gasses Energy efficiency must also take into account the amount of electrical energy you consume (to run the fan e.g.). I think I made the remark a while ago that, if you ran your fan on a battery recharged with a (small) solar panel, you could increase the overall energy efficiency quite a bit. How about using a thermostat on the fan to switch it on or off as needed to keep a certain ambient temperature?
Copper is actually a little better than aluminum. I believe the only thing better than copper is gold and silver, but I might be wrong about that. Yeah, luckily, the exchanger doesn't require much air flow, so the amount of power is minimal. Better yet, a few people pointed out that you can use the air circulation fan on the inlet side of the heater. It might draw a few extra watts due to the extra load, bit it wouldn't be much. You could use a thermostat on the fan, and that could save you some power.
Hi Joel, I checked it, and indeed copper is roughly twice as efficient in heat conductivity as aluminium is, but it is also much more expensive than aluminium. That would explain why heatsinks and car radiators i.e. nowadays, are often built rather from aluminium than copper. Shaving off pennies is all the rage in industry I'd say ;)
@@TechneMoira Yeah, for sure. Corporations are always trying to give us less and charge us more. Aluminum is a little easier to machine and shape compared to copper, so that also helps... it's also much lighter weight and alloys with other metals. I didn't think of all of those things till I started responding, haha. The benefit of chatting with people.
Empirical data trumps intuition, supposition and opinion always. Intuition would lead one to believe that the hot exhaust contains an amazing amount of wasted heat and reclaiming it would double the efficiency of the heater. In reality, I am not convinced that the added expense, complication (with its effect on system reliability) and maintenance are worth the effort for the average guy with a diesel heater heating an occupied space. My plan is to simply use a 10 foot 1 inch diameter copper pipe as an exhaust, exposed to the space being heated. Totally passive with perhaps a flapper valve on the outside. From previous comments, corrosion may be my greatest concern...Time will tell. Great videos, always learning something new and I appreciate your effort and testing. You are a clever and tenacious boy my friend🤗 Love the cat inclusions also!😺
I agree... as I said at the first of the video... the max you have to gain is 800- 1000 watts, and that's without power for the fan. This may not be practical for most people. I have almost pulled the trigger, several times, on the long 1 inch copper pipe. If you do it, let me know how it works. My assumption is that the exchanger will work better due to the massive surface area. You can get those aluminum things that go on the outside of copper pipe for heat transfer... that would help. Either way, I want to know what happens. Thanks for the comment !
@@loweredexpectations4927 I will for sure let you know how it goes. I am thinking (hoping) that by time the hot exhaust travels through 10 ft of copper pipe that it will be close to ambient inside temp by time it reaches the outside. If that doesn't completely work like I am hoping I will try installing a T to go to two 10 ft 3/4" pipes....More surface area and the same or better internal exhaust gas flow. Trying for a completely passive system without heat exchangers or fans. I am sure that the heat exchanger will be way more efficient with the resulting expense and system reliability Issues I am trying to avoid. My system should be up and running in a couple of weeks . Keep up your great work!
@@markmetzger5430 I agree, a passive system would be nice. Someone did point out in the comments of this video, that I could have used the air inlet of the heater, to pull air over the exchanger... That seems like a great solution, but I also like totally passive.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I like the air inlet Idea of pulling air through the heat exchanger and I wonder if it would also increase the efficiency of the burn as it is raising the temperature of the incoming air to the burn chamber? 🤔 Gosh it's easy to go down a rabbit hole with these heaters and efficiency😂Which totally suits my nature 🤗
@@markmetzger5430 Haha, yes, it is easy to go down many rabbit holes. To be clear, I'm talking about using the exchanger air / return air and not the combustion air. The combustion air would not have enough flow. While using the return air through the exchanger could increase heat slightly, I don't think it would have an effect on overall efficiency other than in very cold conditions. In this situation, preheating the air for the heater could have an effect. These heaters are fun and easy to get lost in. Take care.
You got like 98% energy recovery from the Exhaust... but HOW MUCH IS IT ? Would you make another test to calculate the Energy in Watts ? You could heat water with it and measure the increase of temperature in 1h for a specific amount of water.
This is a good point, and I tried to address this at the first of the video. Trying to calculate this using air would be incredibly difficult. Even if I had my tent in my garage, the "natural" fluctuations in temp would make it really hard to figure out the difference between real data and quirks. I also mentioned at the first of the video that I had used water to test the BTU of the exhaust and that it was 800-1000 watts. The reason for this gap in wattage is because the bin of water I used was NOT insulated, so it would have had some heat loss. Heat loss, when measuring such a small amount of watts leads to readings that can be wildly off.
And the best exhaust recovery exchanger I have found is a 10' ¾"diam copper pipe I annealed, filled with sand and coiled it around a 5" pipe. Removed the pipe dumped the sand out and go straight onto the exhaust outlet.
Interesting. I had heard others mention brushless motors and thought it was complete nonsense. I see they are running one motor for the combustion air and one for the heating air. The results that you are suggesting here could be due to lower combustion air speed / volume and increased exchanger air flow. Interesting. If I didn't' already have 10 too many projects on the go I'd give this heater a test. I might have to do it anyway.
@@theslicksteve For real !? That's awesome. So you tracked setting, exchanger temp, exhaust temp ? After I saw your comment yesterday, I found one on amazon (for way too much money) and bought it.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I not sure how to share the spreadsheet other than I posted it on my RUclips account You should be able to see it there I think.
Question, what would the heat recovery be if the diesel heater was in one room and the radiator in another room . How much heat out of both individually .
That's an interesting idea. A little trickier to do, but interesting. I did a test before where I used water to capture the heat from the exhaust. That makes it much easier calculate, as you have a known volume of water and can accurately measure the temp increase over time. I determined in that test that the exhaust produces about 800 to 1000 watts, so it would be enough to heat a fairly small space. A single room of a house.
I you were indoors that would be ideal... using the coldest air in the room. In the tent it would have an endless supply of cold air, haha. (probably draw in outside air)
Cast iron is insanely durable, they will still be around in a hundred years. Aluminum and copper can last for a long long time, as well, but doesn't take as much abuse, and you need to make sure that your water is just right.
Joel, almost every pic I send to my friends of "here's the cool thing I'm working on" is taken on my bed. Fortunately, my GF visits me infrequently, and she's required to give me 24 hours notice, so I can "de-bachelor" the house and my bedroom.
@@loweredexpectations4927 My bedside table currently feattures a multi-meter. A couple of wrenches, bits and pieces of RF plumbing, and a digital caliper. At the foot of my bed, there's a para-grid antenna, and on my "shelf of artifacts" there's a memory board from a Cray X-MP that was once owned by CSE (Communications Security Establishment). Am I ill? Do I need help? :) :)
Interesting..That probably is the most efficient way to collect exhaust heat...I'm sure there is a woman out there that would be comfy in that bed snuggled up with various electronics and the cat..
I was shocked at how efficient it really was. I knew it would be good, but it's really impressive. Haha... I'm sure there's one out there too. The point to this was supposed to be something like .... The mess of this bed accurately depicts the rest of my life and ESPECIALLY what it's like in my head, haha.
hey i found a super cheap centrifuge for waste oil ..Omega Fruit And Vegetable Juicer Model 1000 ..drill holes to make it not hold so much oil on the top... aint no thing like a chicken on a string
Thanks man !! I've seen a few videos about these but didn't know what brand or model they were... I just got 800L of oil today so maybe I'll look into that, haha.
I don't know, what kind of magic people are interpreting into cast iron radiators, but there are some basics without any magic. These heat exchangers don't have many fins, so they are low performance. That didn't matter at all with the high temperature steam, they were used with. Even later, when steam heating was widely replaced with water, they were run with high medium temperatures and were never meant to cool this medium down too much. The usual steam or water heating circuit needs high return temperatures - you realized the resulting problems, when the heat transfer medium returns too cool, remember that? With that in mind an old style low efficiency radiator works like intended. If you need more heat, install more radiator surface. Cast iron does indeed have an advantage to the more modern high efficiency radiator made of sheet metal - cast iron is way more corrosion resistant. That's the real reason, why you may combine this type of radiator with combustion exhaust gasses as a heat medium, which is inevitably kind of chemically aggressive, when cooled beyond condensation, this gas is also carrying some amount of H2O as part of the carbon combustion process - cast iron will simply last much longer than a modern radiator in this case. If it isn't efficient enough, no wonder with that little surface and just thin hot air to heat it, use a larger one. But you won't find them any more, they do bring good scrap money for decades now. And they are from Victorian times, - so, if a rare survivor shows up, it's a sought after steam punk item today. Good video 👍
I knew that you would have some sensible, in depth things to say about this. I went to school with cast iron radiators and you learn quickly not to touch them. To work well, they need to be hot, just like you say. Yes. It is more corrosion resistant and stands up a LOT better to abuse than many other materials. We used to he able to find them or cheap or free, on the East Coast of Canada... but here in Alberta, they are a collectors item. Due to the size required, you need several of them and they are over 100 KG each. It would be interesting to see how long this exchanger will last. I have had peopel tell me a few months or several years. Who knows.
I haven't tried that... I can't' say for sure, but I don't know if it could be done, without building your own system. The issue is that the ECU or controller is going to be getting different feedback from each heater. If one is giving a temp of 200C the other may be giving 190, so for the display on the controller... I'm not sure what would happen. The ECU would have issues with this as well, as it is connected to the fan, glow plug and heat sensor. Some ECUs do health checks on these things and if one is out of spec, it will give an error code and shut down. Two glow plugs would look like a bad glow plug. So... now that I've talked to myself about this... the way I would try it is to see what happens if you use one controller and 2 ECUs ... it might do nothing, or it might work okay except for returing nonsense for some of the data. Some ECUs dont' care if you disconnect the controller after start up, and others do... so yeah... Basically, a long way of saying "I don't know" haha.
Maybe this has been covered but firing up a carbon monoxide detector inside the environment may be a bad tip. Most have self calibrating at start up and you must do that in a clean environment then bring it into where you are checking. Otherwise it can calibrate the dirty air and give false readings.
Yeah. I am aware of that, but thanks for pointing it out. They tell you that in the manual and tell you if it is in a high concentration for a while, also not to trust it until removed and restarted. I appreciate the heads up.
Thanks for the comment. I think you are probably talking about counter flow ? That would only be possible if a water to water type exchanger was used. There's no way to have counterflow with this setup. That being said, it is working at well over 90% efficiency.
Hello again. While the fans are listed in the description below, a viewer pointed out that a person COULD use the inlet air on the diesel heater, to pull air through the exchanger... I think this is genius. I'd like to try it that way. You would have to create some sort of duct work for this to work, but I think it's a great idea.
@@lisforlifer The description is kinda hidden just below the video where it says how many views and how long ago it was posted. You have to click on that area to expand the description.
@loweredexpectations4927 now I see it, that fan is very versatile I think I should have one of those lol Thanks for showing me where the link was I did not know that you could expand it by clicking more.
People don't understand emissions that well. Too rich or too lean cause dirty combustion and poor emissions. That's why automotive systems have become more and more complicated over the years. Keeping something running efficiently, with good power or in this case heat output, and managing emissions and clean air can be a complicated task.
I've been trying for two years to get a cast rad... I suppose I could use a bin of sand. The "issue" is that the sand, or cast, will only absorb heat energy if it is colder than the exhaust. Currently, the exhaust is exiting at 24C, so the sand would have to be cooler than 24C. This also means that it would be absorbing heat from the air, so it's sort of a catch 22.
Yes, and no... and no, haha. Yes, but it is not copper like a piece of tubing. I believe it is copper 2 oxide that will catalyze at room temp. Other copper compounds can also react but at much higher temps.
The Ending....BEST WAY TO LIVE! (I'm exactly same!) 😂 Edit : Hey, don't forget to incorporate backing music (in btween scenes),in your videos. the last one was perfiict, not too loud.
@@loweredexpectations4927 Like I said. :), but it's fun bumbling along wiff stuff, like solar, scooter, heaters....just can't focus on single project here. doh!
Strange, just the other day some ol' pommy dude was using and old propane cylinder (using same concept, less fan) I suggested maybe use a fan forced radiator... 🤔 😂👍
Haha... Genius. I have suggested something like this to a lot of people over the years but never had the opportunity to test it myself. I plan on using this exchanger for something else in the future, but figured I would take advantage of having on available, and test it in this scenario.
I have a bench that looks like your bed. And I kinda took over the kitchen table working on the trains...lol I started on the programming but I need a better teacher.
If your fuel pump was a gasoline fuel pump, it's probably why it didn't last long. You'll need a diesel pick up pump That'll pick up something with higher viscosity. Fuel filter type makes a huge difference too.
Check out the cheap 12v marine diesel or scavenge pumps that can be had being 12v you can speed control them. They are a bit high flow for the application but can be made to bypass they hold up well in this application.
Unless you thin the oil ? I kinda worried about the longevity of these pumps. I had an old power steering pump that I was going to use but wanted something quick and off the shelf. We'll see where this goes.
3 degrees F where I am camped tonight. I am relying on my Vevor diesel heater to continue to keep me and my cat warm in my van. This is my second cold winter on the road full time using this heater and I love it. I am very grateful for all of your videos because I am now much more familiar with my heater, and its operation and maintenance. You are helping a lot of people out here, more than you will ever know. Thank you.
Thanks for the wonderful comment ! I'm glad you and your cat are staying warm !! I'm glad that I can help and or entertain
The high temp where I am is Forcast to be -7°f through Tuesday... Current wind chill -32°f
@@dodgeme1986truck Stay warm. Our windchill is only about -6. -32 is serious cold. I hope you have a good heater and plenty of fuel.
Wow I would not camp in that and I have a vevor in my camper.
@@OverlandOne I will be working out in it tomorrow I have a 14hr day scheduled at work at least it is going to be warmer than it was on the 19th... Wind chill -40°f
Hey! As a fellow Calgarian I appreciate your videos.
I am a plumber, and I can tell you the condensate will destroy the copper coil. It's not so much about pH as it is the make up of the condensate. It is an electrolytic sulotion and the condensate is carbon based. Electrolysis will destroy any copper or brass fairly quickly.
Over the years I have had several employees couple condensate drains with a brass or copper fitting. It will be completely eaten away within 6 to 8 months.
If you want to do an experiment, put a few ounces of condensate in a Pyrex cup, add a copper fitting. That would be a really interesting time lapse, actually. Measure the pH along the way.
Thanks for your comment. I appreciate it.
That's interesting. I suppose a combination of the acidity and the fact that the exhaust particulates make a good electrolyte.
I have removed my exchanger as I have long term plans to use it to heat my garage. I will have to make an update video to inform people of this. I wonder if you could install a drip solution to combat this 🤔
@@loweredexpectations4927 What do you mean with drip solution?
No, you cannot avoid the self destruction, because this water condensation is eating where it is happening.
Better use this expensive heat exchanger with a water/rust inhibitor/antifreeze mix and heat this fluid circuit with a more cost efficient heat exchanger . Maybe a stainless one - will be less efficient, but this can be compensated with size - but stainless will have a limited lifespan too. V4A quality will cost more than V2A, but is more corrosian resistant.
Also aluminum, which protects itself fairly well, will get pinhole corrosion.
Maybe brass? That's one of the materials, i've no experience with.
Whatever solution, exhaust condensation comes with a cost.
That's the real reason, why this part of the heat isn't harvested as a standard by the manufacturer in any heater.
And keep in kind - even if used in low setting, your exhaust gas needs to have enough heat left to not clog the exhaust outlet with ice. That's a challenge too.
@loweredexpectations4927 A suggestion would be to find the secondary heat-exchanger from a dead high-efficient furnace. Most wholesalers like EMCO, Wolseley, BA Robinson, Frontier etc will have an area where we will drop off furnaces ad water heaters that we replaced. You could grab one there for free and also gain some other parts that might be fun to play with too.
If this is mostly due to galvanic corrosion, you could get isolating unions to separate the SS and copper. As long as it has a high temp gasket like silicon.
Otherwise you can get SS air handler coils used for steam. Pricier and harder to find nowadays with everything being HW now. But if you wanted this as a primary heat source, might be a good investment.
@@andrewt9204 the condensate contains the dissimilar metal, isolation wont help.
Cast iron objects are known to stay warm for a long time because they are usually much thicker and heavier, allowing for much more stored thermal energy overall. Also, you're getting thermal conduction mixed up with thermal radiation. While cast iron is a poor thermal conductor, it is an excellent radiator, having significantly higher emissivity than either copper or aluminum.
Thanks for the comment.
I responded to this and when I read it back, I sounded like a dick, haha. Let's try again.
Yes, cast is WAY better at radiating heat energy than copper. Cast aluminum, if oxidized is pretty ok.
The reason why copper is way more efficient in this scenario, is because while radiators depend on radiation for dissipating energy, they rely on conduction for absorbing it.
In a traditional cast rad heating system, your water circulates through the rad continuously (when there is a call for heat). It doesn't need to be good at absorbing the energy, because the heat doesn't get absorbed isn't just dumped outside.
In contrast, when capturing heat from the exhaust, it does not recirculate. It goes in one end and out the other. Whatever comes out is lost / waste.
You can of course do things to improve the efficiency of cast iron. Increasing the surface area in contact with the exhaust gases will capture more energy, but this means larger, or more radiators. Copper and aluminum are such great conductors that they absorb energy quickly. They are also easier to make intricate shapes with so you can have a very large surface area with a pretty small exchanger.
Copper and aluminum does not need to depend on radiating because it is such a good conductor. It conducts to the air. A little air flow moves away that heated air, maintaining a good temperature differential.
Okay... hopefully that is less dick like.
Hi Joel, I installed 3 Vevor Diesel heaters in the bays below my 2016 Tiffin 36’ Motorhome … I am 4 season now and have been running with full water, etc. nice, quiet, smooth. My 2 propane furnaces are back ups and refueling is only a very short trip to the gas station.. Michigan 👍
Very cool... Thanks for sharing.
Cheers from Canada.
I think of the cast iron radiators like a battery.
Takes an hour for it to charge and lets out heat for an hour.
It has its uses for certain applications.
Our diesel heater is not of them as its running 24/7 at this time. So there is no heat cycling as the cast iron is meant for.
Thanks for the comment.
Yeah... certain types of heat sources are better matched to cast exchangers or sand storage. Generally intense heat that is difficult to throttle. I thought of using the explanation below in my video, but it's a long one, haha.
1. Is that some stores heat will get hot. Something that is hot, does not absorb heat well. Something that doesn't absorb heat well will then allow heat to be lost into the atmosphere. In contrast, something that does not store heat well, is radiating heat into your living space. It is not storing heat, so it is not hot, so it absorbs heat more efficiently the entire time your heat source is running.
2. Is that, the reason why it get hot is because it releases heat slowly. If you have a milk jug with no holes in it, and you pour milk into it, it will fill up pretty quickly. Once it is full, the milk will spill out and be wasted. In our case, the milk jug has a little hole in it, so the milk comes out slowly. It takes a little longer to fill the jug, but eventually it spills over wasting milk. You happen to have your bowl of cereal under the little hole, so you can use the milk that comes out, but it takes a really long time to fill your bowl with milk... You can probably eat it faster than it's coming out, so you're never going to have enough milk, even though it's spilling everywhere.
WIth a copper radiator, you have a milk jug with a giant hole in it, and the milk comes out just as fast as it goes in, so the jug never gets full. You have your cereal bowl under the hole, and you pour milk into the jug when you desire a bowl of cereal.
LOL... Hopefully that makes sense. Cast iron releases heat slowly, so unless you have a very well insulated area, you're not getting enough heat output to keep the space warm. When the cast iron gets warm enough to radiate heat efficiently, it is too hot to absorb heat efficiently, so you are then wasting heat.
@@loweredexpectations4927 what about both - best of both worlds? .. the cast iron or sand to soak up heat ..to radiate later .. but once heat soaked the exchanger would pull the rest out into the room.. this would allow the unit to radiate heat after the heater was turned off.
@@WilliamTythas Others have suggested this, and it could be practical depending on a few things.
How to explain this without ranting.
If you are running your exhaust through a cast exchanger first, it is going to be absorbing some heat. If it is efficient and absorbs most of the heat, then the copper exchanger won't be doing anything until the cast rad heats up. During this time, your living space is not gaining any heat from the exhaust, so it will take longer to heat up your ... tent, for example.
If the cast radiator isn't efficient and doesn't capture much heat, the heat will pass through into the exchanger where it is captured and immediately put into your air space. The cast rad, in this case will take even longer to heat up, and in the meantime will actually be absorbing heat from the air space, causing it to take longer to heat up. The cast rad will continue to absorb heat from the air, and exhaust, until the temp of the cast rad is up to room temp. At this point, it will be at equilibrium and not add or take any heat from the tent air.
Another problem with heat batterie, of any material, is that they will eventually cool off... If you have a cast iron radiator in a space that drops down to -15C overnight, it will lose all of its heat energy in a few (or several depending on mass, the starting temp and ambient air temp). The cast radiator will eventually drop to -15C.... and when it does, you now have to expend energy getting it form -15 back up to 20 before it isn't just absorbing heat that you are generating.
In contrast, a copper or aluminum exchanger will cool off in minutes after shutting the heat off, but it will also heat up within minutes, meaning that the heat you are generating (have paid for) is actually heating your air space and keeping you warm. If I were going to attempt to store energy (and I have) I would use water (or antifreeze) and not cast iron. Water has a better capacity, the ability to capture heat quickly, the ability to store it until you want to use it, the ability to store it in a remote location, the ability to resize depending on your heat source etc.
Ultimately, you need to generate energy to heating the space. You can burn 8 litres if fuel during the day, put 4 litres of that heat into storage and 4 into the air, or you can burn 4 litres of fuel during the day and 4 litres during the evening. However, if your energy storage isn't 100% efficient (and it's not) then you are better off generating and using the heat in real time.
Yes, I have Heavy 600LB cast iron radiators connected too a High Efficiency Condensing Boiler. The Radiators are wonderful. They radiate heat in a very comfortable way, Like a Battery giving off energy. There is No Fan Blowing and it stores energy so it allows the Boiler to shut down while the radiator keeps radiating. You can't beat it.
@ That last paragraph is right on the dot for practical usage of our heating systems.
Keep the good work. Your own way to test and explain all this saves us a lot of money and testing. anything you play with I'll be here watching
Thanks for the support !!
Truly appreciate all your work. I’ve learned a lot of great information. Thank you.
Thanks or your comment ! Much appreciated.
Ace video again! Thanks for showing people how effective a real heat exchanger can be! People will say ‘it’ll clog up’ so would be good to see if you can test for a decent amount of time and then confirm or not (I don’t think it will).
Yeah... I have run it for over 2 weeks and there are zero signs of any soot at all. I took it into the garage and blew through it yesterday, and not a hint of problems.
Deterioration of the materials is probably my biggest concern. Not sure what could be done to counteract this. An anode or perhaps electrical isolation.
First time viewer here! You earned a sub!
I'll be digging through your videos every chance I get!
Thanks for joining the party !! There's a LOT if stuff to look through, haha.
Excellent work. Well worth the long form vid. I used approx 2m of the stainless pipe, same as us supplied with the heater, bent to fit in an electric cabinet cooled by computer fans, run by a thermostat. The difference over that short distance is amazing. The pipe enters at around 100c and exits around 24c.
Can't see how to include screenshots of the thermal camera here.
Love the pH scale, banana level! Can't see that being used in work.
Haha... I didn't mean to, but now that you say "banana scale" that reminds me of Curtis at Cutting Edge Engineering here on youtube. He sometimes measures things size in bananas.
Well done with the pipe... I assume the fans make all the difference in the world, because I did a test last year where I used 25 feet ( I believe) and it wasn't as effective as yours.
❤ As a boomer I can keep the focus on the whole video.
I'm using the welded steel radiator in my house, it's not accumulating much heat but it's able to dissipate all the heat.
It may work with a cast iron type but I don't have it to try.
I really like your scientific method and skills
Haha... yes, some of us can focus for an hour.
The exhaust on these only produces about 1000w so I can see why your steel exchanger works. I'm sure a cast one would work as well, Especially if you had a fan blowing on it.
Cheers !
Very cool experiments. Thanks for taking the time to do them.
Thanks for the comment !
Hi Joel,
Thanks for doing all this testing.
Cheers from Oregon,
Philip
Thanks for the comment !
...is this guy a pool guy? He sounds just like my pool guy. All chemical and stuff. Lol great video!!
Haha... Not a pool guy, ... YET.
Thanks for making all these videos..i have a heat exchanger like yours from an old ac unit..getting same results with a cheep 12vt fan from an atv..this video made me think instead of powing the fan,im going to duct the fan of the diesels input to my heat exchanger so i dont need to power the other fan.
Thanks for the comment, Martin.
Just make sure that the air flowing over the exchanger is not hot air. If the air is hot, you will not capture as much heat out of the exhaust. Maybe you meant this, but you could use the air inlet side of the heater to pull room temp air over the exchanger.
@loweredexpectations4927 yes pull the air from the blower fan that pushes room air over the heater fins.
@@martinsmith3613 That's a GREAT idea, and I honestly am glad I didn't think of it, haha. It makes WAY more sense than an additional fan, but it would mean building ductwork and it would have taken me forever to get that done.
I would like to try it again some day and give it a go... I did, however, just come up with an idea for a modification that I'm fairly certain would allow diesel heaters to burn waste oils... really nasty stuff without any build up issues. I have lots of ideas bouncing around in my head, but this one feels like it needs to be done.
The reason for the cast iron radiator is not to heat the area quickly. That is what the heater is for. It keeps radiating heat after the heater is shut down. A copper core radiator will indeed captture and release heat from the heater exhauct. Whis is better depends on what use you have.
Yeah, I get it, cast holds heat longer but there's only so much heat to go around, and if you have a heat source that has a variable output, why not store your heat in the diesel fuel and run the heater longer?
The argument is that cast iron acts as a battery and produces heat after the heater is turned off, but why not just make the heater 20% more efficient by using a copper exchanger, and then you have 20% extra fuel to burn, instead of turning your heater off.
The option of running your heater now to heat a batter includes a pretty high penalty due to lack of efficiency. So, you burn that extra 20% fuel now, but you are not saving all 20% of it... you are probably saving 10 - 15%
If you have a system that doesn't throttle well, or that doesn't lend well to turning on and off, or a scenario where you just can't keep the heat source going... sure. There might be a good argument for storing heat. Otherwise it makes more sense to store the heat in the diesel, by not burning it.
this may be one of the best videos on the subject. the heat exchanger is counter flow and is as efficient as it can be in this spot in the system. the only thing that would make it more efficient is running the fan only as much as needed which is completely possible thanks to that fancy fan controller. simply put the probe of the fan on the exit pipe of the heat exchanger and set the controller to keep it max 2 or 3 degrees above the room. incidentally there is a way to get the exhaust temp further down extracting even more heat. by running the exhaust after the room heat exchanger through a heat exchanger with the incoming combustion air it will be close to outside temp and the combustion air will be preheated. this means that no heat goes outside at all and those are used in buildings under the name concentric vent. by the way your setup is already a condensing furnace and has net efficiency above 100% because it gives out more heat energy than the fuel itself contains.💯👍 i bet much higher then expected
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I does work much better than I expected.
I am really glad to see that that crazy acid stunt didn't cost you your entire hand. Especially if that is the one you use the most on those lonely winter nights.
😂🤣😂🤣 I would never risk damaging such an important piece of equipment as my hand. As a matter of fact, what you see in my videos is actually a stunt double, or CGI... never the real right hand.
@@loweredexpectations4927 You're watching the LockPickingLawyer, and in this video I dump corrosive substances on my hand. 😂
@@kdawson020279 HAHA... I'm' not that classy or good. He's a boss.
@@loweredexpectations4927 You'd have to give the guy a hand, but he has two, allegedly connected together by a practicing attorney.
I did something a little different as far as exhaust heat recovery. I used a 100# propane tank and ran the exhaust into that. The tank is mounted horizontally at an angle to let the condensate drain. I increased the outlet to 2” diameter in attempt to mitigate any difference in back pressure.
My exhaust temps are about 70 degrees f with the garage at 55.
I’ve not had any problems with ice buildup at the exit.
When you first showed those 55 gallon drums I thought maybe you were gonna try running the exhaust into one of them.
Your heat exchanger looks like it works great! That’s supper efficient and pretty space friendly too.
Part of the reason I didn’t use a fan is because well electricity isn’t free and somewhat reduces what’s gained from exhaust heat scavenging. Fan noise was another deterrent for me.
It's very cool how different people tackle this scavenging task, haha. That's not a bad efficiency. a few fins welded to the outside or something like that and it's possible you could get a little more... if you care, haha.
I had a few oil drums a couple of years ago and had considered trying that, but I couldn't justify keeping the drums around. Now that I have these... Hmmmm. Maybe I should give it a try.
I love the fact that it is soooo compact and efficient. The fan probably draws about 20 - 30 watts. It would be interesting to know how many watts it scavenges.
@ yeah I could do more but it’s working good enough for me and I kinda tend to go crazy on a project and then leave it 95% finished for years so I don’t wanna break tradition 😂
Truth be told I got the big propane tank idea from someone in a comment section that said they used a 55 gallon drum. I imagine it would work pretty well as the relatively thin steel would transfer heat fairly quickly. Certainly not space friendly like your heat exchanger setup though.
Yes it would be interesting to know how many but’s are saved but it’s beyond my pay grade haha
A beer keg maybe as it won't rust inlet in the top and exhausted threw or near the bottom the warm air will stay at the top until it cools and goes to the bottom they call this a stratification chamber in the rocket mass heater groups @@jeffclark5024
Nice. Coolest video about cdh and the heat exchanger for so long.
Very good job 😊
Hey, thanks, I appreciate it !
Curious, what is the air temperature coming out of the vent of the diesel heater?
And what is the air temperature coming out from where your fan is blowing through the heat exchanger?
Great video, thank you for sharing!
I generally don't bother collecting this data, because it is deceiving and typically just adds confusion.
The outlet temperature will change drastically based on what the inlet temp is. It will also change based on air speed or restriction.
A good example of this ..., a diesel heater outlet temperature of 70 - 100C will not heat up my tent as much as 30C air coming off of the 16x16 heat exchanger. While the temp is much lower, the volume of air (and therefore heat energy) is much greater.
I hope this makes sense. Cheers!
I use diesel heater to heat garage work shop. works great with 16' long stainless steel standard heater exhaust pipe. I used exhaust pipe it came with at the end then a 4' pipe and 10' pipe all spliced together with the cheap diesel mufflers that came with heater. I place the high efficiency 2024 Hcalory Toolbox 2 heater high self in my garage and run exhaust in a straight line diagonally down along the wall. From other RUclipsr I used steel wire to create brackets to safely space off the wall. Also from a commenter on RUclips I covered the Hot end of the pipe stack with 32 extra large Stainless Steel Scrubies to pull extra heat into air w/o the need of a fan or a proper heat exchanger. Also i can touch the Scrubies with out burning myself as they spread the heat are not a great heat conductor. Result, when all is said and done, Temperature drop from 510 deg F to 115 Deg F. ...when I used thermocouples tightly secured at both ends of exhaust pipe with hose clamps,
Thank you for your thorough informative Video. I prefer my setup over yours because of it simplicity. However I acknowledge my system will not work in a tent. One last comment my exhaust Carbon Monoxide measured between 15 and 28 ppm.
Thank you for your Video!
Nice !! I love the creativity of different people. I have done a similar test, just on the floor of my garage using about 26 feet of the same stainless tubing.
A passive system is simple, quiet and relatively cheap. Well done.
Hello Joel. Just wanted to let you know what I did this year. I installed an oil drip line into my wood stove. Used motor oil and transmission fluid are wonderful. Stay away from veg oil,too high of a flash point to be easily self sustaining, smokey, produces too much carbon black. Messy,messy,messy.
Motor oil and transmission fluid drip, very clean warm steady heat. AND no electricity needed. Perfect for off grid people like me.
Rock on brother!
Just think of wood fire as your ignitor and the stove box as your burn chamber on a diesel heater. Only difference is a blower. If you want to play around with a blower, you have the little square hole with a cover in the floor of the wood stove to play with.
Main thing is STAY WARM!
I did that with a woodstove years ago I mainly use it just to light the fire but it worked great.
@@tjhouston4916If your woodstone is Set up the code.You should have an upload behind it to Set up a fan for circulation, Just make sure the fan is off when you open your door of the stove while burning and For starting the fire 🔥
I'll never forget what I read as a kid.
White man builds big fire and sits far away. Indian builds small fire and sits close.
To me it's also a matter of fuel economy. Winters are long.
Rest of the world is moving to catalytic converters in wood stoves and you burn engine oil raw.. stupid nothing more..
Have you seen wild fires in usa or snow ? Yeah that as what we people harvest.
Don't you have LPG or Natural gas as supplied by a truck to an over the ground tank and burn in a furnance? Burns much much cleaner
If you have a couple few you'll get several :) I would probably wrap the exhaust going to the exchanger, and depending on the outdoors temp I might wrap the exhaust going outside. Below zero F can create some interesting freeze phenomenon. I appreciate all the experimenting you're doing, I have two 8KW heaters, and you've taught me that I would never do what you're doing to them lol except for the heat exchanger. We do have some biodiesel at the Shell gas station I've been experimenting with, but that's as far as I'm going.
Wrapping the exhaust outside seems like a good idea as it could avoid freezing on real cold days. Any heat that is lost inside will just heat the air, so I suppose it depends on what the goal is.
Haha... That is the most important lesson. Never do what Joel does. I would like to try biodiesel some time. I have a feeling that it would be perfectly fine, but I'd like to see what the heat output is and test it for myself.
Cheers.
39:29 I'm not sure you have this correct. your humidity reading is going down because the temperature is going up and therefore can hold more moisture. Not because there is less moisture in the air. Your reading is relatively humidity. Relative to the temperature. The condensation from the exhaust, is from the combustion process of burning the fuel.
That’s not true, humidity depends not only because of temperature, also because how is wet around, same example like in sauna’s, there can be super hot but also hi humidity levels
Oh... I hadn't considered that at all.
At the very end of the video, I did have the realization, that there was so much more water coming out because 1. There was ice inside of the exchanger when it starts up, and 2. The ice cold exchanger is much more efficient at condensing the moisture than when it reaches 24C, for example.
It makes sense what you are saying though. Thanks. The air is able to hold more humidity at the warmer temps, so it is not releasing it. I had a clip talking about the combustion process releasing water... and then realized as I was talking, that's all I know about it, lol. I have no idea how much or what the determining factors are.
@@Orentas01 I always thought a sauna was a very dry heat as opposed to a steam room. But I guess they all get called a sauna.
Regardless, if you have a sealed box with a sensor that measures relative humidity (which most do) and increase the temperature then the humidity will go down, there is the same amount of moisture in the air. It will stay in the air untill the air temperature goes below it's dew point. That is the point at which the air isn't able to hold the amount of moisture it contains.
Well done! Looking forward to the Arduino stuff.
_It takes a lot of guts to show your bed._ That's what mine looked like until I just started sleeping on the couch ten years ago :)
Thanks !! I'm also excited about the arduino stuff. Hoping that it doesn't take over my life, haha.
My bed has been a mess for several years... this is particularly bad, haha. I slept on a couch in my house for 6-7 years. I'm moving up in the world.
Awesome video man, thanks for posting. Have you ever thaught of running a 6 foot long exhaust or so and then run a 4” duct with fan or pellet stove intake hose (3”) around it to reclaim the exhaust heat? Might be all you need.
I have heard of people doing this but with a bit longer exhaust. I ran a 26 foot exhaust but not with the external ducting.
If you do this, you can use the inlet side of the heater to pull air through, instead of using an extra fan. A commenter pointed this out.
@ wouldn’t that melt the intake fan?
@@Triumphium Nope. Even though the exhaust is very hot because the heat is being spread out over a large area, the temp coming off the exchanger isn't very hot. Maybe 30C
Great video as always - bought myself a Vevor diesel heater 5KW and set it up with a cast iron radiator - now i have to find a heat exchanger instead 😀
HAHA... awesome !! Check the outlet temp and see what it is ... if it is close to room temp, dont worry about it. If it is pretty high, trying moving a little air over the rad and see what happens.
I don't think there's anything wrong with cast iron radiators... They are just not as efficient as modern ones. Cast will last a hundred years and if your house burns down, it will be the one thing you don't' have to replace.
If you do test the outlet temperature... let me know what it is. Very curious.
@@loweredexpectations4927 i tested the temperature outgoing. We had just around 0 degrees C outside, and the temp was 24 measured directly in the outlet tube. Some vapour shows, But I am sure I made a mistake when I set the whole thing up as I used the top as outgoing and the bottom as inlet. This gives off a lot condensation that I have had to put in a valve so I can let the water out. But I heat my workshop to 18 degrees in just over 2 hours. I am very pleased with my diesel heater.
@@larsskytte Thanks so much. How large is your radiator. It is working really well. Other than making sure it can drain, I wouldn't change anything. It will take longer to heat than a copper one would, but it will also last forever.
@ The radiator is just over 1,5 m long 65 cm high and 18 cm wide - the workshop is a smaller one 6 x 3,5 m insulated with 5 cm rockwool in the walls. the system works well, the only thing is the condensation. - this will be changed in time.
for the exhaust i like that style of setup or just radiator fins (like base board water heaters) the most to extract the potential lost heat. but for batteries for people who want to have less fluctuations in room temperatures. having something like a sand battery on the hot air side going though it to soak some of the heat off the air outlet side would help stabilize the room but it doesnt provide more heat just less fluctuations. the goal is to get the most heat out of it before it exits the house. with the sand battery or cast iron or rocks. its just to help stabilize and radiate the heat over time after the heater is off.
👍 Yeah. A large thermal mass can help stabilize the temp in a space. In these cases, it is important to have really good insulation.
Thermal masses like sand, rocks or even concrete release heat slowly (that's why they hold heat) and to heat any space, you need to be inputting more heat than is escaping.
Hey!I recently started to play with these automation electronics too!!Mainly because i try to make the diesel heater turn on/off by itself.And i think i did it.
Sweet !! That's awesome. I wish I would have started playing with it years ago.
-30 here this morning and my GSHP is working beautiful house is 72 and cosy. The stored energy in water is amazing and I never had to burn anything I did use some electricity some from my solar and some from the grid which is mostly hydro and nuclear here in Ontario Canada.
Sweet ! That's awesome.
I have a similar setup that uses a turbo charger intercooler and 12V auto radiator fan with
a variable speed controller. My results are similar to yours. I feel that my efficiency is very high.
Right on !! Thanks for sharing. I had a small intercooler from a SkiDoo but figured I would use something a little larger. I'm sure an old car radiator and many other things would work very well.
The nice thing about these exchangers is how easy they are to connect. The exhaust fits so well it's like it was made for it, haha. With a bit of tinkering and a trip to a scrap yard, and you can probably do this for $100 though.
That's a fancy heat exchanger, cast iron might not exchange heat better than copper, but I think in most cases people already have them or get them for cheap. I am still planning on using a cast iron radiator for my setup, if my space gets heated up to a point where it no longer cools the exhaust gasses then I'll consider that a 1st world problem. You could also increase the cooling capacity of the cast iron by adding a fan to it.
Thanks for the comment.
It is really fancy. I think a budget minded person, who likes to tinker, would do just as well with a car radiator or intercooler. Many of those have fans built in.
I have looked for a cast iron radiator for 2 years now. On the east and west coast, they are common and cheap. Also where heating oil is used...🤔. Where I am in Alberta, these things are much more rare and have become collectors items. I have seen a few, but they were around $800.
I didn't dive deep into the explanation on cast not being great, but on top of what I said in the video, it needs to be hotter to pass heat into your living space. The copper will dump heat into your room if it is even a few degrees warmer than ambient air, but cast will have to be significantly hotter to warm the air space. This is part of the reason for the lack of efficiency.
Putting a fan on a cast radiator would be a really good idea. We are only dealing with 1000 watts, so I would assume a 2 foot long 18-20 cast radiator would work efficiently, but it will also weigh 150 - 200 lbs.
I almost bought some modern aluminum ones off amazon, but they weren't rated very high in btu either.
I'm glad you have good luck with the diesel heater. I've replaced all fuel lines, pump and cleaned out the burn chamber, new glow plug and screen. The heater still errors out with e-08. I'm really hating these things now.
Sorry to hear you are having problems.
Does the heater start up and run for a while before giving you an E-08 code? I don't know your exact situation, but I would suggest going back to the extreme basics. Detach the inlet and exhaust, make sure your fuel tank is close to the heater and above it. Make sure there's no air in the lines.
If it still has problems, you then have limited things it can be. It could be as simple as a bad temp sensor telling the ECU that the temp is too low.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I have one of the portable units (upright) I replaced the fuel pump and put all nylon fuel line and a fuel filter. There are no leaks. The heater will start up and run from a cold start for a while then shut down with e-08. I spent an hour today taking everything apart and cleaning it. I may try one more thing by buying another burn chamber. Only parts left that have not been replaced would be the temp sensor, the air intake fan and the controller board.
Hi, I have had similar problems in the past my solution was a new burn chamber, I had cleaned the old one but the problem is cleaning the base of it where the mesh or wire wool is, another thing to do is check the temp sensor, good luck with it, from bitter experience I know these things can be a pain to get running reliably. Also, make sure to run it on a high setting every so often as this reduces carbon build up good luck with it hope that helps
@@kevin34ct That's frustrating. The fact that it is starting is an indicator to me that the chamber is okay. If there is a chamber problem, they usually have starting issues.
Something else that I just thought of. The error 8 code is simply the ECU detecting that the temp of the exchanger is lower than expected. So, either the ECU is getting bad information (bad sensor) the ECU itself is bad, or the temp is actually dropping too low. I would make sure the sensor is properly in contact with the exchanger and that the wires are not pinched, and the connector is secure.
If you have a way to monitor the temp of the exchanger, most controllers have a setting that shows you exchanger temp, then keep an eye on this. The heater should start up, and within a few minutes get to over 150. Once operating a normal temp range is between 170 and 210, depending on lots of factors.
If the temperature jumps around quickly, more than a few degrees in a few seconds, then there is a reading issue. Temp changes happen fairly slowly, so any quick changes indicate a sensor /sensing issue. Bad sensor, wiring or bad ECU.
If you notice the temperature dropping gradually, this indicates that the temp of the exchanger is actually dropping. This either means that the burner is 1. not getting enough fuel or 2. can't burn the fuel it is getting.
To determine what situation you have, I would allow the temp to drop until you see the E-08 code, and immediately disconnect the power. This will not hurt anything, despite what the internet says. Let the heater cool off and pull the chamber out. If it has a build up of fuel (you can actually see liquid fuel in the chamber or it drips out) this is a very strong indication that you are getting fuel, but it is not burning. If the chamber is clean of fuel, this is an indication that it wasn't getting enough fuel.
Despite all of your efforts with the fuel system, it is quite possible that you have a bad pump or there is another fuel issue.
@@kevin34ct Hahahaha! That's why mine is still sitting apart where it was last winter. I just couldn't bring myself to tearing it apart, cleaning it, and putting it back together again, IN THE FREEZING COLD, only to have it err a short time later-----after I'd get my hopes up. I got so desperate I bought 7 catalytic heaters off eBay. This year I put a drip waste oil/transmission fluid, mixed with diesel to thin it a little and give an instant light with a torch line to my woodstove. Sure am saving wood. Only need to put a piece of two of wood in now and then to give the flames something to lick off of.
I'm really liking this setup.
One just has to look at the coefficient of thermal conductivity of the different materials and you can clearly see that copper and aluminum beat cast iron hands down at extracting heat. Where cast iron comes in is with cases where you want a thermal mass to store heat for later release as you pointed out at the end of your video. That said, water is far better for heat storage which is why I am using a copper pipe/tube run through a modified stainless steel beer keg filled with water/antifreeze mix to extract and store the waste exhuast heat for later slow radiation from the surface of the beer keg. I'm also thinking of running the heater output vent through stainless steel exhaust tubing mounted in the same keg as the heater puts out far more BTU at any one time than I need to heat the volumes I plan to use it for, one being a greenhouse.
You nailed it ... exactly. If you want heat now, my setup is better. If you want heat for later, water, or glycol is far superior. Easily expandable storage, and easy to keep in storage until you want the neat... then when you want the heat you can get it quickly.
You might want more than a kegs worth of water. As it heats up, it too will become less efficient at collecting heat. The system I have in my house uses a mixing valve so that I heat 200L, then, when that 200L is up to 50C, I start heating another 200L. If you do something like this, you maintain efficiency longer, and can continue to collect heat energy as long as you have more water to heat.
@loweredexpectations4927 From what I gathered there's about 500btu per hour waste heat reasonably available to be extracted from the exhaust. The keg will hold 14 gallons and that will be able to soak up about 6960 Btu of heat, roughly 14 hours, with a 60 degree F temperature rise (50F to 110F). The keg itself will be radiating heat the whole heating cycle as well. I have a 275 gallon caged IBC tote that I could use for heat storage as well.
@@michaelg4931 If you have a reasonably efficient method of capturing the heat energy, you will collect about 6X more than that. The exhaust produces about 800 watts (2800 btu/h) That is a LOT larger keg than I had imagines. I was thinking of a beer keg... 5 gallons. 👍
I built a sand battery from a 55 gal drum, the heater can be on all day and the exhaust passing though the wall is at most body temp, nealy all the heat is lost in the radiant/ sand. BUT, it takes forever to heat up, I like your idea better
I love the different solutions that people come up with... I love even more that two people in a row have not just called me an idiot and said I was right, lol.
It's awesome to be able to capture the heat rather than let it go to waste, but like you said, it will take all day to heat up. Someone pointed out to me that you can just use the air inlet of the heater to draw air through the exchanger, meaning that you don't' need an extra fan or extra electricity.
Idea for a part two. Run the SS exhaust pipe thru a water path made with a drywaller mud pan(s). Make the water flow, by gravity (hot to cool circulation, can be done passively), or worst case use a small hot water circulation pump from a house boiler (about a hundred $). Water flows around exhaust pipe absorbing the heat efficiently, runs to your heat exchanger fan assy, then back to the mud pan(s). You already have 90% of the set up now. If you want build a top to the mud pans, plexiglass would work nice for showing in a video. probably need an expansion chamber in the fan radiator loop to allow for water in the closed system to expand when heated. Probably just a verticle leg of bigger pipe for an air compression chamber.
That would be cool. I do have a video where I heated a bin of water using the exhaust, but it wasn't very visually satisfying , haha.
Radiators and LPS are *consistent* heat. They are definitely not the most efficient, and boiler maintenance is always hot dirty work. I have a cantankerous Gordon-Piatt burner on one that won't ignite and locks out if the ignitor isn't obsessively centered and really clean. Best part is it always happens at the coldest part of the morning, and by the time I get there it's working. Learned to brush it out, fight the electrode to the center, and enjoy half a season of proper operation. 😂 I prefer air handlers with HX 7 days out of 7.
LOL... yes, your heater always stops working on the coldest days.
I recently got a Beckett that I'm planning on making a boiler for... we'll see what happens with that plan.
Could you make a trap for the condensate to drain like is on an LP or natural gas furnace? That way you could run a line to an inside drain so it won't freeze.
I was sure I responded to your comment.... Hmmm. Yes, that would work. You would need to install a water trap just like in a sink drain, to ensure no exhaust leaked out.
👍😎in my shop the 4 inch exhaust runs about 15 feet horizontal on ceiling then exits the building. The 4 inch inside of the shop is surrounded with 8 inch with a fan attached just before the 4 inch exits. The fan blows air through the 8 inch back to the stove where the air is blowing out from behind the stove. Exhaust from building is same as shop temp. This works great but I have to run a draft inducer . When burning wood or pellets I get a lot of condensation I had to install condensation drain and 1 gallon jug to catch liquid smoke.
Awesome. I think you told me about this before. It sounds really familiar.
@ sorry about that I guess that’s what happens when you’re old ! lol and maybe I should put the pipe down 😎
@@RUredE2go LOL... I talk to so many people that I sometimes forget who is who, who said what, where they are and so on. It's all really confusing talking to someone online. I'm sure if you had told me face to face, you would have remembered..... Maybe, haha.
If it helps, transfer of thermal energy is the interface area multiplied by the square of the difference in temperature.
Read: Double the difference in temperature is four times the rare of energy transfer for the same area.
Affiliate relationship aside, that HX and fan seem grossly oversized. For a not too dissimilar heat scavenging purpose, I've used a junkyard heater core and electric radiator fan from a 90s Ford E series van. $25US and about a half hour to pull. The fan was overkill for my purpose, for your ~8kW (my best guess) heater, I doubt that anything bigger than such junkyard scrap would be worth a tiny efficiency improvement. Might be worth checking if your affiliate has something a little more budget friendly, especially if a crossflow HX with inlet on opposite corner from outlet was available simplifying the condensate draining issue.
Great info. I used these components because I purchased them for another project, and people requested that I do this test. It is very much overkill and $$$
A scrap yard radiator would be very cheap and have a built in fan, or at least an easy to source and cheap 12V fan... That could easily be throttled down.
I might get around to testing a more practical solution, some day. Like I said, I used these items as I had them and many viewers have requested this.
If you over cool your exhaust you’ll generate sulfuric acid due to the composition of oil. It’s why on a residential system or any oil you want a stack temp > 350 if not you’ll eat your chimney liner or even that heat exchanger
Thanks for the comment.
This is true, and why I tested the PH of the exhaust condensate. It is a lot less of a problem how that they make ultra low sulphur diesel.
Home heating oil may not he ultra low sulphur... I know that aviation fuel is not low sulphur. The more sulphur, the more sulphuric acid. aka acid rain.
These little diesel heaters burn MUCH cleaner than home oil furnaces. It's sort of insane how well they actually work, considering how basic they are.
Have a think- imagine a heat exchanger for the combustion air... extract all the heat from the burner exhaust to only heat the incoming air.
Then only rely on wasted or leaked heat. It works amazingly well.
I'm not sure I'm picking up what you are laying down.
We are talking about the primary heat exchanger (body of the heater) or a secondary one like I am using in this video ?
I think you might be saying to use the inlet air side of the heater to pull heat out of the secondary exchanger ?
Very cool experiment! Did you "mouth blow" through the heat exchanger (when it was brand new) to see if it has much restriction for the exhaust flow that might plug up heater eventually? Do you think the condensation water has an easier path to exit with the exchanger horizontal like you have it versus vertical with ports facing down? Thanks! PS.....might be time to wash the sheets....lol
I did blow through it and there is some resistance, but it is hard to tell because resistance is related to flow and these don't have a lot of flow. Nothing I saw during my testing (CO readings, color of condensate, temp of heater) makes me think that flow is a problem.
I ran it for 2 weeks and it ran well and has no signs of blocking up, at all. CO is a great indication of what the future holds.
Laying flat is the best (perhaps only) way for the condensate to get out, due to the routing of the passages in the exchanger. I put a lot of thought into this and almost called the test off because of what I saw.
Perfectly level, laying flat is the best position. Any other position could cause enough water to be trapped that it bursts the exchanger. This is a pass cooler so the pipes actually go from the inlet side, to the other end and back a few times. It would trap water and start gurgling and shut off if you put it any other way.
@@loweredexpectations4927 Thanks for feedback! Great channel for us tinkerers. Hope you come up with something you could patent and make money with, maybe bring a product to market.
My homemade exchanger is 1" black pipe in a downward grid pattern with aluminum fins (3"x5") every few inches .
Inside a box with a grid pattern the same as the pipe. A 7" fan sucks air in the bottom and out the top. currently my
fan kicks in at 40C and out at 35C, any cooler than that i had a ton of condensate dripping out the exhaust exiting the
garage wall and thats a problem in that location , so i raised my set points up untill i had almost 0 drips.
Thanks for the comment. There are lots of ways to do this for sure. I like how creative people are. y
I believe condensate starts to form at around 80% efficiency, but there are other factors that come into play.
If you are trying to get every bit of efficiency possible, then you need to deal with condensate. If you are willing to allow heat to escape, then you have a lot less to worry about.
Enjoyed the video Joel !!
The one test I would like to see is measure the air temperature the fan kicks out. Thnx .. .. 👍
Thanks for the comment and suggestion. I did think about measuring the air temp, but it is actually kinda tricky. An inferred meter will just give the temp of what the air is hitting.
I should have put the fan probe in the bin, suspended in the air.
Good ideas.👍👍👍
Thanks.
You should use platinum fluff it's good for removing incomplete combustion it's used in fireplaces and it's good for being used as a Cadillac converter
I have been looking into catalytic converters for another project. I wasn't able to find "platinum fluff" in a google search.
In these heaters, unless you do something to mess them up, I'm pretty sure that they run too clean to keep a catalytic reaction going.
I thought the vevor heat exchanger was made for water to air. It’s not normally as efficient for air to air, that’s a different design. Like a furnace plenum. So this was a good experiment. I was wondering about the exchanger filling with water, but I stay till the end!
Yes... this is intended for water to air. I'm surprised it works as well as it does.
I'm sure you have seen now, but it does keep some water. It doesn't "fill" but some stays in there.
Use a automotive fuel injector with an arduino pwm control. Also use an air pressurized tank ( old propane tank) to supply oil, no pump required .
It's possible that that could work, but a automotive injector operates at about 60 psi with gasoline. They need to operate at 100+ when using oil, due to the increased viscosity. In fact, 100 psi is for diesel.
Most people who try to mist oil preheat it to thin it out.
The pressurized tank would would work, but it would need an air compressor attached to the tank to maintain the pressure.You would also have to depressurize the tank before adding oil to it. A small tank would have to be filled often and a large tank would take a long time to fill, with both oil and air.
Ideally It would also have a oil level sensor to shut down before the oil ran out, or you would blow a lot of air out of the tank when it went empty.
@loweredexpectations4927 just use a larger injector. Once pressurized very little air is needed to maintain at 2L / hour. Very steady pressure and flow. A 100 lb propane would be good. A ball float drain would block flow when empty
For piping/tubing maybe try borosilicate glass, it can withstand up to 3000°F and the heat will escape the glass into the air most efficiently and no rust, corrosion problems in the glass parts.
I really don't understand complicating all this with a heat exchanger, any long enough pipe will exchange the heat until it gets to a certain temperature then that is where you end the exhaust pipe/tube and exit the building. When the pipe is 80°F you've extracted the most heat you need the rest is just going to cause a loss of the main heat if you try to go too low your other heated space will try to compensate to balance and end up using more energy.
I don't understand the added expense of a heat exchanger when any pipe/tubing that can withstand heat can be used as your exchanger to the length of where the temperature hits 75° then you end the pipe at that length and exit the building at that point.
That would be really cool and I would love to try it !! I do question if it is really good at transferring heat tho... seems like it would be a good insulator.
I'm wondering what the cost of this would be and how you would make corners, instead of having one very long piece. I would love to see that tho. Neat idea.
You are both right and wrong, but you admitted that you don't' understand. It all has to do with surface area...
I'm not going to do the math, but you are welcome to. "If you have a long enough pipe" = enough surface area. A heat exchanger like mine is about 300 inches of pipe, laid out in such a way that it is compact. Then it has aluminum fins on it to create even more surface area.
Not 100% sure what you are trying to say about "cause a loss of the main heat". As I said in the video, you can only cool the exhaust off to room temperature. If somehow, the air in your heated space is above the exhaust temperature, then you would be heating the exhaust. That is not possible unless you have two separate heat sources.
@ Glass is a poor heat insulator, ask any window manufacturer.
Copper is resistant to acid/base attack but only in the absence of oxygen. So, while pH=5.5 isn't *that* acidic, it's more acidic than you'd expect in a household water supply, for example. I'd keep an eye on it, but it's not going to dissolve-away any time soon.
Thanks for the comment.
That's interesting. Probably not a lot of oxygen in there when the heater is on, but once it is shut down, that could be a problem. I don't plan on running this long term, but that's good to know.
Quality heat exchangers should use silver solder and not lead based solder.
Silver solder is stronger and has a much higher melting point.
You can run just about any flammable liquid through a diesel heater (except gasoline/ petroleum or other highly inflammable liquid) also it doesn’t really need to be liquid at room temperature as long as you can safely warm it to liquify. Used cooking oil is the cheapest and you only need to filter it a bit.
Yeah. The lead solder that I mentioned was the reducer and elbow that I added after the fact.
Not sure if you have seen any of my other videos, but I have tested lots of other fuels, including some that didn't work sowell, like gasoline and alcohol. I tested varsol, and some paint thinners, ATF, and cooking oil.
Cooking oil will cause issues if you run it more than 50/50, regardless of how well it is filtered. I really enjoyed those videos and would like to try more in the future.
@ . I may have seen your other videos on fuel or it may have been someone else’s.
The closer to petroleum something is the faster it burns with less thermal energy transfer so you go through more of it with greater risk of explosion because diesel heaters are not designed to burn those types of fuels.
There are things that the various military organisations used that could burn those fuels safely, but they are mostly for cooking equipment.
@@anomamos9095 They do make diesel heaters that are designed to run on both diesel and gasoline. I have not owned one, but some of the high end companies sell them. I assume the chamber design is quite different.
It was nerve racking burning the diesel... especially when it flamed out and was still pumping fuel into the hot chamber...
Another great video, thank you.
Thanks for the comment.
53 minutes isn't all that long for good information. I, for one, look forward to your videos.
Thanks Dusty ! I appreciate your comment.
Yeah I must admit I was surprised I didn't get bored at some point but there was the right amount of stuff going on and information to keep my interest throughout.
@@charmio I was also surprised ... I watched it twice myself after uploading it, haha.
I skipped through anything ph based because I don't need to know anything about it since I know enough
@@dn7783 Yeah. Making videos is tricky, editing videos is tricky and deciding what you want your video to be, is ... you guessed it ... tricky. Some people tune in only for the info.
For those people, they get annoyed by an introduction. They just want the facts. Other people just want to see something neat come together. Others want to feel like they are along for the journey with the video creator...
Much of my audience tunes in to hear me say "garage" and to see my cats.
I hope you didn't miss the part where I poured acid on my hand, haha.
Isn't comparing cast iron to the exchanger similar to heat storage compared to heat recovery? I plan to go this road in the near future. Also to help when using a old cast iron rad, couldn't a fan be used as well when the rad is brought up to temperature ?
Hey, thanks for the comment.
If you have access to a cheap or free cast rad, use it and create some air flow. That will help a lot.
There are a lot of problems with heat storage, and when I talk about it I always end up ranting... so I'll try not to. With this small copper exchanger, (or a similarly sized car radiator) heat recovery will be as close to perfect as you can get. Over 90% efficiency.
This means that if you want it to be 20C, you can run your heater at a lower setting and conserve fuel for later... instead of conserving heat for later. I could just end here.
When trying to store heat in cast iron, the reason it stores heat is 1. it's thermal mass, and 2. because it does not absorb or release heat quickly. Not absorbing heat quickly means that it will not capture all of your heat. So, you are still burning fuel to heat now, and fuel to store heat, and a lot of the fuel you are burning to store heat is being lost, as it is not being absorbed quickly enough.
To make things worse, as the cast stores heat, it will increase in temperature. As it increases in temperature it becomes even less efficient, so now you are dumping even more heat out to the atmosphere.
I just realize that I probably could have just said "if you are using a fan to strip heat out of your cast rad, you are not storing it for later" and you would have had a "hmmmm, good point" moment, haha. If the fan actually works, the cast won't get (very) hot and therefor won't be storing heat for later.
It sounds like you could get away with a much smaller heat exchanger. Perhaps you could divert the heat to a sand battery once your room is up to temperature, then turn off the heater and pump the air back through the same small heat exchanger until that is exhausted (no pun intended). That would need some soot-proof valves though.
All the best with your Arduino stuff 🙂.
Yeah... it would be interesting to see how small it could be. The smaller it is, the more power will be used by the fan to keep it efficient, so that could end up being diminishing returns.
A sand battery after the exhaust could be a way to capture more heat energy. The "problem" is that the sand would have to be below ambient temp to absorb energy, meaning that it would also pull heat from the air. In my little tent, this could actually work out if I took the time to run exhaust through the ground. It is already a sand battery, but pulling heat from the air instead the exhaust.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I was thinking you could switch the sand battery in parallel (or now I'm thinking before the heat exchanger, depending on how you it interfaces with the air) which you could later run in a loop with the heat exchanger to discharge it using a small pump.
You might be able to pump air directly through the sand instead, and it might be much easier.
@@ThisRandomUsername All things that you can do. In the end, you have about 800 - 1000 watts of heat. If you use all of it to charge a battery, then you can't use it now. If you put half of it into a battery you can use the other half now. If it is being put in the sand, it's not heating you now.
In my opinion, using storage tanks with water or antifreeze, as a battery, makes the most sense, but only if you are producing excess energy. If the heater and the exhaust is making 6000 watts and you need 6000 watts to keep the tent warm, then putting any into a battery means you're not as warm. If you only need 3000 watts and are making 6000, you should put the extra 3000 into a battery.
The thing is, I was bringing the tent temperature to 25C and then opening the door and windows to purposely cool it off. In real life , you would turn the heat down so that it maintains 20C, and burn less fuel. Instead of trying to store excess heat in a battery (of any sort), just don't make excess heat.
This exchanger saves you about 20% of your fuel. You can then decide to run your heater for 20% longer or keep your heater running when you would have normally turned it off. Why not store the energy in the diesel fuel at no extra expense or bother, rather than burning the fuel now and storing the energy for later 🤷♂
@@loweredexpectations4927 Ah, that makes perfect sense. Quite right, diesel is much more dense than any thermal battery. I guess if you're burning some wood or something that's difficult to start up it would make sense to store heat in water or some type of thermal battery.
@@ThisRandomUsername Exactly.
Larger heaters / burners tend not to like being turned on and off, and other heat sources are harder to throttle... some can't be tended to all the time and aren't automated, so there still are lots of reasons to use some sort of thermal storage. It's just not as practical as one might assume at first glance.
31:22 yes you can with a wet heat exchanger. evaporation sucks heat.(water being same temperature than ambient air)
try it with few shot from a water mister on your fan.
this is why wind feels cool on skin.
31:43 haha. Said it right there. Evaporative cooling would not put more heat into the air though, so it doesn't make sense here.
@@loweredexpectations4927 how do they keep water cool in desert?...
@@loweredexpectations4927 gasoline on skin, does it cools? same with water.
@@qwertymnbvc-k9x I'm not sure, in a refrigerator... Kidding...
@@qwertymnbvc-k9x I think that you think I'm disagreeing with you... At 31:43 in my video, I point out at evaporative cooling would cool the temp of the exchanger down. Yes, evaporative cooling 100% works. That is what wind chill is, and yes, that's why water or alcohol feels cold on your skin.
This, however, is not a good solution for extracting heat from the exchanger for the purpose if heating up the tent, or for collecting the energy. The heat energy from this process is used to evaporate the water, and is therefore of no use to us. If we used evaporative cooling on the exchanger, the heat from the exchanger is used up changing the state of the water and therefore cannot also be used to heat the air space in the thent.
Hopefully that is clear.
Just some info, ph and acidity are different things. Acidity refers more to the strength i think.
PH is the scale is how acidic or basic something is. Acidity refers to the strength of an acid and is lower on the PH scale. 7 being neutral. Not at all acidic or basic. Some people use the word "alkaline" instead of "basic".
A property of carbon monoxide many people don't realize is, it's not only the concentration but also the duration of exposure. Carbon monoxide binds onto hemoglobin more tighter (???) than oxygen or carbon dioxide. The results are even at a low concentration, with a long enough exposure it can reduce the ability of blood to take up oxygen.
Yea, I have talked about the dangers of CO in previous videos. Friend of my family passed away after building a home made camper with a faulty heating system.
People generally don't die from CO poisoning unless they are sleeping, because the symptoms become hard to deal with long before that point. I'm sure I have had mild CO poisoning, at least once, and could feel it the next day.
From everything I've read, the upside (if you can call it that) is that it is not cumulative. The hydrocarbons and VOCs are much more harmful in this way.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I once had an automotive instructor that said he was particularly sensitive to CO because he had been exposed to it too many times .
Great another Video im always happy When you make another Video 🎉 hope you are doing better than Me right now. Im going through some stuff but it will always get better 😊
Thanks for the comment. Much appreciated.
I'm sorry to hear you're going through stuff.... I'm okay, but am also dealing with some terrible stuff. That's why there wasn't a video last Sunday.
Take care.
Hey Joel, I saw the same model "Eskimo" shelter set-up in my local Peaey Mart yesterday (which is closing forever in April!). I'd never seen a quilted tent before, and I guess I've been living under a rock.
That sucks that Peavy Part is closing... Eskimo tents / shelters are really good and well known. This tent is over 10 years old. Andy bought another one a few months ago so that we could use this old one in the yard.
Vevor sells tents like this now, as well as others, but I think the Eskimo brand is top notch.
@@loweredexpectations4927 The only really good "deal" at Peavey here has been the bulk fasteners, which I've taken advantage of quite a bit over the last several years. But they've let that stock run-down over the last year. Now I know why....
Hey Joel, it's like a car exhaust, condensate only whilst the pipes are cool... 😂👍
Yeah, I get that, but I'm kinda keeping it cool all the time by using the exchanger and the fan. I know it condenses more when it's cooler though.👍
That exchanger is probably overkill. I had no doubt that it would cool the exhaust to ambient. My quest is to find something at low cost. looking for a few scrap hydronic baseboard units.
I almost bought a few of those baseboard hydronic things a few years ago, but couldn't justify the cost to scavenge 800 - 1000 watts, at best. I did this test because this exchanger will be used for other projects. It is very much overkill.
Look into what they call a stratification chamber in the rocket mass heaters making one out of a corrosive resistance metal Barrel maybe something like a beer keg I would be real curious to see how that would work so I would not require any electricity
Thanks for the comment.
A viewer pointed out that I could have used the return air / air inlet for the heater to pull air through the exchanger, and that would mean no extra fan and not much extra power, if any.
Stratification chambers are interesting and I was going to build one out of a 55 gallon drum... I still might as I'm just curious. Stratification depends on the surrounding material being able to absorb the heat energy before the entire chamber is full of hot air. If the chamber surface does not absorb air fast enough, it will essentially overflow with hot air and it will spill out the exhaust.
What it comes down to is surface area. A very small copper heat exchanger can have a very large surface area. It does this by having large manifolds connected to several small pipes. There is over 64 feet of 3/8 copper tubing in a 16x16 inch exchanger. That's equal to 80 square feet of surface area. So an 8x10 foot surface squeezed into a 16x16 space... and that's not including the aluminum fins.
I have a few steel drums that I could use, maybe I will give it a go.
Yes that should work as well @@loweredexpectations4927
I have never heard it called base before. Im just so use to( acid to alkaline ).
Doing long vids suits you. You should really do more of them.
I've always used acidic and basic. Not sure if that's what I heard in school or on the interwebs. When I heard "alkaline" from people describing soil here in parts of Alberta... I was like ... "I've heard that word before .... oh... basic" haha.
Yeah... I should probably just give in and do long videos. Thanks for your support.
Where do you live because I have always heard/used and continue to see Acid/Base- Acidic/Basic.
@@91maxpower I'm in Canada. Grew up on the east coast, but now live in Calgary Alberta.
I might be wrong Joel, but does the heat exchanger not act as a recipient of 'wind chill'? If you stand outside and it is 0 degrees, you can measure and everything will be 0... However when the wind blows (or Joel turns the fan on) then you can measure that the temperature will be lower than 0, will it not? This is from motorcycle experience not from my school physics lessons 😁
The answer to that is both yes, and no. The air moving over the exchanger will strip heat off of if, much like wind chill. So this is the yes part.
The no part is because wind chill is caused by evaporation. I had mentioned evaporative cooling in the video. If you have 0C air the wind hitting a piece of aluminum will not cause it to cool more than 0C. If it hits your skin, it strips moisture out if your skin and actually causes it to be colder than 0.
A piece of aluminum that is 100C will cool off much faster if it is windy, but it will not cool below the air temp. I hope this makes sense. 👍
@@loweredexpectations4927 I have just done some actual research and of course you are 100% correct 😁👍 Everyday is a school day! And I just need better motorbike gear for winter...
@@OurITManager 🤣 The important thing is, I managed to convey the information without sounding like a dick, and you did the hardest thing on earth and admitted that someone else was right.... I didn't even know that was possible in the internet !!
Well done. I learn MOST of what i know from getting things wrong and messing things up. Get some better gear and stay warm !!
hey run an experiment with a car catalytic converter to see how much it helps
Hey that is a smart idear maybe use a diesel dpf particular filter 🎉😢
I kinda tried that in one of my earlier videos... except the cat was in the burn chamber...
There are 2 main issues with using a cat on a diesel heater.
1. Cats need to be really hot to operate and cars typically dump extra fuel at startup, to get them up to temperature. The exhaust from a diesel heater may not be enough to get them up to operating temp.
2. Cats stay hot because engines are very inefficient, and dump a lot of unburnt fuel out the exhaust. This unburnt fuel burns in the cat and keeps it hot.
These diesel heaters, as you may have seen from this video, burn really efficiently and produce almost no CO. You would have to purposely dump extra fuel into the exhaust to get the cat to work... if you could get it to work at all. Diesel heaters run clean enough that a cat or DPF would likely do nothing.
There are 2 main issues with using a cat on a diesel heater.
1. Cats need to be really hot to operate and cars typically dump extra fuel at startup, to get them up to temperature. The exhaust from a diesel heater may not be enough to get them up to operating temp.
2. Cats stay hot because engines are very inefficient, and dump a lot of unburnt fuel out the exhaust. This unburnt fuel burns in the cat and keeps it hot.
These diesel heaters, as you may have seen from this video, burn really efficiently and produce almost no CO. You would have to purposely dump extra fuel into the exhaust to get the cat to work... if you could get it to work at all. Diesel heaters run clean enough that a cat or DPF would likely do nothing.
I do believe aluminium is a much better conductor of heat than copper is. How much more efficient an aluminium one would be, I don't rightly know, since a lot depends on the construction of the heat exchanger and the resulting flow (constriction) of the exhaust gasses
Energy efficiency must also take into account the amount of electrical energy you consume (to run the fan e.g.). I think I made the remark a while ago that, if you ran your fan on a battery recharged with a (small) solar panel, you could increase the overall energy efficiency quite a bit. How about using a thermostat on the fan to switch it on or off as needed to keep a certain ambient temperature?
Copper is actually a little better than aluminum. I believe the only thing better than copper is gold and silver, but I might be wrong about that.
Yeah, luckily, the exchanger doesn't require much air flow, so the amount of power is minimal. Better yet, a few people pointed out that you can use the air circulation fan on the inlet side of the heater.
It might draw a few extra watts due to the extra load, bit it wouldn't be much. You could use a thermostat on the fan, and that could save you some power.
Hi Joel, I checked it, and indeed copper is roughly twice as efficient in heat conductivity as aluminium is, but it is also much more expensive than aluminium. That would explain why heatsinks and car radiators i.e. nowadays, are often built rather from aluminium than copper. Shaving off pennies is all the rage in industry I'd say ;)
@@TechneMoira Yeah, for sure. Corporations are always trying to give us less and charge us more. Aluminum is a little easier to machine and shape compared to copper, so that also helps... it's also much lighter weight and alloys with other metals. I didn't think of all of those things till I started responding, haha. The benefit of chatting with people.
Empirical data trumps intuition, supposition and opinion always. Intuition would lead one to believe that the hot exhaust contains an amazing amount of wasted heat and reclaiming it would double the efficiency of the heater. In reality, I am not convinced that the added expense, complication (with its effect on system reliability) and maintenance are worth the effort for the average guy with a diesel heater heating an occupied space.
My plan is to simply use a 10 foot 1 inch diameter copper pipe as an exhaust, exposed to the space being heated. Totally passive with perhaps a flapper valve on the outside. From previous comments, corrosion may be my greatest concern...Time will tell.
Great videos, always learning something new and I appreciate your effort and testing. You are a clever and tenacious boy my friend🤗 Love the cat inclusions also!😺
I agree... as I said at the first of the video... the max you have to gain is 800- 1000 watts, and that's without power for the fan. This may not be practical for most people.
I have almost pulled the trigger, several times, on the long 1 inch copper pipe. If you do it, let me know how it works. My assumption is that the exchanger will work better due to the massive surface area. You can get those aluminum things that go on the outside of copper pipe for heat transfer... that would help.
Either way, I want to know what happens. Thanks for the comment !
@@loweredexpectations4927 I will for sure let you know how it goes. I am thinking (hoping) that by time the hot exhaust travels through 10 ft of copper pipe that it will be close to ambient inside temp by time it reaches the outside. If that doesn't completely work like I am hoping I will try installing a T to go to two 10 ft 3/4" pipes....More surface area and the same or better internal exhaust gas flow. Trying for a completely passive system without heat exchangers or fans. I am sure that the heat exchanger will be way more efficient with the resulting expense and system reliability Issues I am trying to avoid. My system should be up and running in a couple of weeks . Keep up your great work!
@@markmetzger5430 I agree, a passive system would be nice. Someone did point out in the comments of this video, that I could have used the air inlet of the heater, to pull air over the exchanger... That seems like a great solution, but I also like totally passive.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I like the air inlet Idea of pulling air through the heat exchanger and I wonder if it would also increase the efficiency of the burn as it is raising the temperature of the incoming air to the burn chamber? 🤔 Gosh it's easy to go down a rabbit hole with these heaters and efficiency😂Which totally suits my nature 🤗
@@markmetzger5430 Haha, yes, it is easy to go down many rabbit holes.
To be clear, I'm talking about using the exchanger air / return air and not the combustion air. The combustion air would not have enough flow. While using the return air through the exchanger could increase heat slightly, I don't think it would have an effect on overall efficiency other than in very cold conditions. In this situation, preheating the air for the heater could have an effect.
These heaters are fun and easy to get lost in. Take care.
You got like 98% energy recovery from the Exhaust... but HOW MUCH IS IT ?
Would you make another test to calculate the Energy in Watts ?
You could heat water with it and measure the increase of temperature in 1h for a specific amount of water.
This is a good point, and I tried to address this at the first of the video.
Trying to calculate this using air would be incredibly difficult. Even if I had my tent in my garage, the "natural" fluctuations in temp would make it really hard to figure out the difference between real data and quirks.
I also mentioned at the first of the video that I had used water to test the BTU of the exhaust and that it was 800-1000 watts. The reason for this gap in wattage is because the bin of water I used was NOT insulated, so it would have had some heat loss.
Heat loss, when measuring such a small amount of watts leads to readings that can be wildly off.
ruclips.net/video/rJ3vVSXvS4Q/видео.html
Check out the Aspligo split dual brushless motor heater. It runs 400f cooler exhaust temp then my other one.
And the best exhaust recovery exchanger I have found is a 10' ¾"diam copper pipe I annealed, filled with sand and coiled it around a 5" pipe. Removed the pipe dumped the sand out and go straight onto the exhaust outlet.
Interesting. I had heard others mention brushless motors and thought it was complete nonsense. I see they are running one motor for the combustion air and one for the heating air.
The results that you are suggesting here could be due to lower combustion air speed / volume and increased exchanger air flow. Interesting.
If I didn't' already have 10 too many projects on the go I'd give this heater a test. I might have to do it anyway.
If you were curious at all I have done a spreadsheet on the operating parameters based on the mode and selected level.
@@theslicksteve For real !? That's awesome. So you tracked setting, exchanger temp, exhaust temp ?
After I saw your comment yesterday, I found one on amazon (for way too much money) and bought it.
@@loweredexpectations4927 I not sure how to share the spreadsheet other than I posted it on my RUclips account You should be able to see it there I think.
Question, what would the heat recovery be if the diesel heater was in one room and the radiator in another room . How much heat out of both individually .
That's an interesting idea. A little trickier to do, but interesting.
I did a test before where I used water to capture the heat from the exhaust. That makes it much easier calculate, as you have a known volume of water and can accurately measure the temp increase over time.
I determined in that test that the exhaust produces about 800 to 1000 watts, so it would be enough to heat a fairly small space. A single room of a house.
I think if you ran low sulphur diesels then the potential for sulphuric acid to form would be reduced..
Absolutely. I probably should have talked about this but the video was already pretty long, haha. Do not be running Jet A fuel... lots of sulphur.
Bring the air up from the floor, you know what that will do ?😅😅
I you were indoors that would be ideal... using the coldest air in the room. In the tent it would have an endless supply of cold air, haha. (probably draw in outside air)
Iron may suck but it's durable. Won't see a 120 year old copper aluminum coil still in like new condition would be my guess.
Cast iron is insanely durable, they will still be around in a hundred years.
Aluminum and copper can last for a long long time, as well, but doesn't take as much abuse, and you need to make sure that your water is just right.
Joel, almost every pic I send to my friends of "here's the cool thing I'm working on" is taken on my bed. Fortunately, my GF visits me infrequently, and she's required to give me 24 hours notice, so I can "de-bachelor" the house and my bedroom.
LOL.... Good to know I'm not the only bed project worker, haha. My bed represents my life and my mind. An entertaining disaster 🤣
@@loweredexpectations4927 My bedside table currently feattures a multi-meter. A couple of wrenches, bits and pieces of RF plumbing, and a digital caliper. At the foot of my bed, there's a para-grid antenna, and on my "shelf of artifacts" there's a memory board from a Cray X-MP that was once owned by CSE (Communications Security Establishment). Am I ill? Do I need help? :) :)
Interesting..That probably is the most efficient way to collect exhaust heat...I'm sure there is a woman out there that would be comfy in that bed snuggled up with various electronics and the cat..
I was shocked at how efficient it really was. I knew it would be good, but it's really impressive.
Haha... I'm sure there's one out there too. The point to this was supposed to be something like .... The mess of this bed accurately depicts the rest of my life and ESPECIALLY what it's like in my head, haha.
hey i found a super cheap centrifuge for waste oil ..Omega Fruit And Vegetable Juicer Model 1000 ..drill holes to make it not hold so much oil on the top... aint no thing like a chicken on a string
Thanks man !! I've seen a few videos about these but didn't know what brand or model they were... I just got 800L of oil today so maybe I'll look into that, haha.
I don't know, what kind of magic people are interpreting into cast iron radiators, but there are some basics without any magic. These heat exchangers don't have many fins, so they are low performance. That didn't matter at all with the high temperature steam, they were used with.
Even later, when steam heating was widely replaced with water, they were run with high medium temperatures and were never meant to cool this medium down too much. The usual steam or water heating circuit needs high return temperatures - you realized the resulting problems, when the heat transfer medium returns too cool, remember that?
With that in mind an old style low efficiency radiator works like intended. If you need more heat, install more radiator surface.
Cast iron does indeed have an advantage to the more modern high efficiency radiator made of sheet metal - cast iron is way more corrosion resistant.
That's the real reason, why you may combine this type of radiator with combustion exhaust gasses as a heat medium, which is inevitably kind of chemically aggressive, when cooled beyond condensation, this gas is also carrying some amount of H2O as part of the carbon combustion process - cast iron will simply last much longer than a modern radiator in this case.
If it isn't efficient enough, no wonder with that little surface and just thin hot air to heat it, use a larger one.
But you won't find them any more, they do bring good scrap money for decades now.
And they are from Victorian times, - so, if a rare survivor shows up, it's a sought after steam punk item today.
Good video 👍
I knew that you would have some sensible, in depth things to say about this.
I went to school with cast iron radiators and you learn quickly not to touch them. To work well, they need to be hot, just like you say.
Yes. It is more corrosion resistant and stands up a LOT better to abuse than many other materials. We used to he able to find them or cheap or free, on the East Coast of Canada... but here in Alberta, they are a collectors item.
Due to the size required, you need several of them and they are over 100 KG each. It would be interesting to see how long this exchanger will last. I have had peopel tell me a few months or several years. Who knows.
Hey im wanting to hook 2 heaters to one controller. Have you tried that yet?
I haven't tried that... I can't' say for sure, but I don't know if it could be done, without building your own system.
The issue is that the ECU or controller is going to be getting different feedback from each heater. If one is giving a temp of 200C the other may be giving 190, so for the display on the controller... I'm not sure what would happen.
The ECU would have issues with this as well, as it is connected to the fan, glow plug and heat sensor. Some ECUs do health checks on these things and if one is out of spec, it will give an error code and shut down. Two glow plugs would look like a bad glow plug.
So... now that I've talked to myself about this... the way I would try it is to see what happens if you use one controller and 2 ECUs ... it might do nothing, or it might work okay except for returing nonsense for some of the data. Some ECUs dont' care if you disconnect the controller after start up, and others do... so yeah... Basically, a long way of saying "I don't know" haha.
Maybe this has been covered but firing up a carbon monoxide detector inside the environment may be a bad tip. Most have self calibrating at start up and you must do that in a clean environment then bring it into where you are checking. Otherwise it can calibrate the dirty air and give false readings.
Yeah. I am aware of that, but thanks for pointing it out. They tell you that in the manual and tell you if it is in a high concentration for a while, also not to trust it until removed and restarted.
I appreciate the heads up.
Is the Vevor Heat exchanger sold as both an air to air heat exchanger and a liquid to air heat exchanger?
It is intended as a water to air exchanger. I have used this one to heat my house with water in it.
I'm already looking forward seeing this. Under 2 duvets and 2 cats in my bed,,have pizza and Pepsi max. I'm all set.
Haha... Sounds like a good time. It was a long one so good to know you were prepared.
Excellent videos! 🍻🍻
Do I detect a southern Ontario accent? 😁
Thanks !!
Southern Ontario is pretty close. New Brunswick.
The hottest air should be on the leaving side of the heat exchanger
Thanks for the comment.
I think you are probably talking about counter flow ? That would only be possible if a water to water type exchanger was used. There's no way to have counterflow with this setup.
That being said, it is working at well over 90% efficiency.
Is heat exchanger neutralizing the exhaust?
I'm not sure I understand the question. Neutralizing as in condensate PH, noise level or perhaps something else ?
25:24 distiled water, neutral, you also prove it does not contain polluants.(dust isn't a polluant)
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here.
What fan are you using on the heat exchanger? I tried looking and couldn't find that one
Hello again. While the fans are listed in the description below, a viewer pointed out that a person COULD use the inlet air on the diesel heater, to pull air through the exchanger... I think this is genius. I'd like to try it that way.
You would have to create some sort of duct work for this to work, but I think it's a great idea.
@loweredexpectations4927 I saw there comment and I put a thumbs up on it but I scroll through many many comments and I didn't see the link for the fan
@@lisforlifer The description is kinda hidden just below the video where it says how many views and how long ago it was posted. You have to click on that area to expand the description.
@loweredexpectations4927 now I see it, that fan is very versatile I think I should have one of those lol
Thanks for showing me where the link was I did not know that you could expand it by clicking more.
Great video, thanks for uploading
Thanks for the comment !!
People don't understand emissions that well. Too rich or too lean cause dirty combustion and poor emissions. That's why automotive systems have become more and more complicated over the years. Keeping something running efficiently, with good power or in this case heat output, and managing emissions and clean air can be a complicated task.
Yeah, it's a lot more complicated than most people appreciate.
hmmm... sand or cast iron as a second exchanger after the vevor?
I've been trying for two years to get a cast rad... I suppose I could use a bin of sand. The "issue" is that the sand, or cast, will only absorb heat energy if it is colder than the exhaust. Currently, the exhaust is exiting at 24C, so the sand would have to be cooler than 24C. This also means that it would be absorbing heat from the air, so it's sort of a catch 22.
Hey Joel looking brighter and a bit more up beat my man.
Keep the vids coming.
Thanks Martin ! Gotta keep moving. Life isn't going to stop and wait for us.
Doesn't copper catalyze carbon monoxide ?
Yes, and no... and no, haha.
Yes, but it is not copper like a piece of tubing. I believe it is copper 2 oxide that will catalyze at room temp. Other copper compounds can also react but at much higher temps.
Stay warm everyone! It's Polar Vortex season.
I hear that !!! I was going to work on a few projects today, but opted out as it is -17C ... YUK.
It's miserable in WI, I'm sure you have it worse!
The Ending....BEST WAY TO LIVE!
(I'm exactly same!) 😂
Edit : Hey, don't forget to incorporate backing music (in btween scenes),in your videos. the last one was perfiict, not too loud.
Haha. The mess that you can see is also the mess in my head, that isn't as obvious, haha.
@@loweredexpectations4927 Like I said. :), but it's fun bumbling along wiff stuff, like solar, scooter, heaters....just can't focus on single project here. doh!
53 minutes ?!?!
I've got sh*t to do.......... You're going to have to sound like a chipmunk at 1.25x speed. 🤣
Haha... I get it. I thought about breaking it into 3 parts, but decided against it.
Strange, just the other day some ol' pommy dude was using and old propane cylinder (using same concept, less fan)
I suggested maybe use a fan forced radiator... 🤔
😂👍
Haha... Genius.
I have suggested something like this to a lot of people over the years but never had the opportunity to test it myself. I plan on using this exchanger for something else in the future, but figured I would take advantage of having on available, and test it in this scenario.
I have a bench that looks like your bed. And I kinda took over the kitchen table working on the trains...lol
I started on the programming but I need a better teacher.
LOL... don't' teach yourself how to do things because you don't know how 🤣
Got more oil to day 800L
Yaaay diesel heater! I have used fuel pumps before they don't last long unless you think the oil. Hydraulic pump is the way to go.
If your fuel pump was a gasoline fuel pump, it's probably why it didn't last long. You'll need a diesel pick up pump That'll pick up something with higher viscosity. Fuel filter type makes a huge difference too.
@bikerboymc54 yes some diesel pumps are gear style but not all
Check out the cheap 12v marine diesel or scavenge pumps that can be had being 12v you can speed control them. They are a bit high flow for the application but can be made to bypass they hold up well in this application.
Unless you thin the oil ? I kinda worried about the longevity of these pumps.
I had an old power steering pump that I was going to use but wanted something quick and off the shelf. We'll see where this goes.
I bought one of these before getting the one I showed, but the one I got recommended to run for no longer than 30 minutes or something.