Burner Duty Cycle
#1
12-12-13, 06:40 PM
Burner Duty Cycle
Wednesday night was chilly, at least for the second week of December: low of -5 deg F. As is typical in the Midwest, the cold temps were accompanied by high, steady barometric pressure and calm winds, so it wasn't a worst-case scenario.
I have an elapsed-time meter on my gas burner. The burner fired 60% of the available hours during the night. Therefore, 40% of the available hours weren't needed for firing. For last night, at least, the boiler was 40% oversized, right? It would be easy to convert burner duty cycle to Btu/hr heat loss.
I think my worst-case situation occurs when the temp is perhaps about 15 deg, with strong west wind that blows across about a mile of open field before reaching our house. I'm thinking about how I can record such burner data and then boil it down to make sense out of it. Perhaps try to correlate it with heat-loss calculations?
I have an elapsed-time meter on my gas burner. The burner fired 60% of the available hours during the night. Therefore, 40% of the available hours weren't needed for firing. For last night, at least, the boiler was 40% oversized, right? It would be easy to convert burner duty cycle to Btu/hr heat loss.
I think my worst-case situation occurs when the temp is perhaps about 15 deg, with strong west wind that blows across about a mile of open field before reaching our house. I'm thinking about how I can record such burner data and then boil it down to make sense out of it. Perhaps try to correlate it with heat-loss calculations?
#2
12-12-13, 07:54 PM
I'm thinking about how I can record such burner data and then boil it down to make sense out of it. Perhaps try to correlate it with heat-loss calculations?
I should think you would also want to incorporate INSOLATION value too... sunny day or cloudy... all things that affect heat loss.
#3
12-12-13, 08:14 PM
If you are going to try and correlate the wind factor, can't you just do the same thing as you did last night and compare the results for the difference?
I get reminded of my weather station when it conks out, and I then get a computer-generated email from NOAA telling me that they haven't received my data for several hours. So, then, I'm up on a ladder, resolving the problem. How do you young folks ever find time to work?
#4
12-12-13, 08:23 PM
you young folks
My ultimate data gathering system would be all those sensor thingies running into a data acquisition system into a computer program and mashing the data and giving me pretty charts... I like charts.
I think that snow cover on the roof and around the exposed basement walls needs to be calculated too because of the added insulation value. (when I shovel the snow off the walks I intentionally pile it against the foundation. It's nice and warm in my igloo!)
Might as well throw in relative humidity because the wood framing shrinks and swells. More infiltration in drier winter weather...
Yeah, one can easily go nutz.
