Mighty Dunsley Yorkshire Boiler Stove

You may recall I had a rather cold tub of bathwater on the Sunday evening, this was due me running out of heating oil and it being too late to put the fire on to heat the water.
However the next day I still hadn’t had the opportunity to go to the heating oil supplier but I did have the time to try out my Dunsley Yorkshire stove.

The stove was buried in a woodpile that had grown over it, whenever I scrapped a bit of wood it was stacked on the stove. So a bit of digging and the stove was unburdened and ready to go.
Remember that the stove and the heating ciruit hadn’t been used in anger for months, so this was going to be a test as to how well it operated from a standing start. My system is based around a thermal store of some 500 litres of water, there is a convoluted (and as yet uninsulated) pipe run to the back boiler of stove. This circuit is managed by a Laddomat charging pump that senses when chimney is over a set temperature and starts circulating water until it reaches 65 degrees and then it sends the hot water to the thermal store.

The thermal store hovering around 24 degrees at the start and needed to get over 45 degrees Celcius for a nice hot bath, I however was aiming for more like 60 degrees Celcius. This meant that the stove had to heat 500 litres of water by 36 degrees.

Doing the maths it meant I needed to generate 500 x 36 x 4.2 kilojoules of energy.

This meant a whopping 75,600 kilojoules

Starting from rest – and I mean stone cold dead in the water rest – I noted the time and lit some kindling, got it blazing, added more wood till it was a fury of heat and flames and within an hour it had raised 500 litres of water by 14 degrees. This was flipping amazing, my beast of a fire was managing to do this from a standing start, using only timber and through a complex of uninsulated pipework, it was pretty impressive.

Doing the maths – again – this is 500 x 14 x 4.2 = 29,400 kj

Over one hour 28/400/3600 = 8.16 kW which is rather fantastic for a standing start etc…. and way above the rated 7.1 kW for joiner timber to water (which would have not been done over such an uninsulated system working from a standing start).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At this point though I had to leave, I stocked up the wood in the firebox and I left it to blaze and burn down. I knew that it would fade once I left and to get things moving along it should be constantly fed to keep it at fury point.

However….

I returned a couple of hours later and sure the fire was dwindling. I wandered up to the thermal store not expecting much and bugger me it was sitting at 62 degrees celcius. I wibble in the wake of my mighty Dunsley Yorkshire Boiler Stove (multi-fuel and back boiler coupled to a Laddomat charging pump and a 500 litre HTC thermal store) this is a marvellous stove.

It’s built like a brick outhouse, it’s a cracking piece of engineering, it’s green too and plumbed into my central heating it affords a brilliant alternative to the oil fired Worcester Bosch boiler I also employ.

I cannot recommend it enough.