Central Boiler Hookup to Pool/Spa

[stuckpipe]

Has anyone ever tried to hookup a wood burning central boiler to head a pool/spa and pool in the fall and winter? Does anyone have any lessons learned or best practices? I have a 16,000 gal in ground pool and was wondering how it would work?

[Poconos]

As long as the BTU output of your heater meets your needs then I suppose it should work fine. 1 BTU raises 1 pound of water 1 F degree and it's about 7.5 pounds per gallon for water.
Al

[stuckpipe]

I guess this would 16000 gals x 7.6lbs/gal x 30deg = 3,468,000 btu need if I was going to raise the temp 30 degs but I guess that would also need some time of time element in the calculation also. Let me go check my pump model and with gal/min I should be able to come up with a btu/hr I'd need. I may need to see just what the flow rate is to the house is also to see if there is any excess capacity.

[BigDave]

Are you planning to put the pool water directly through the boiler or use some sort of heat exchanger to keep the boiler water and pool water separate?
This may be a silly question but, does the boiler make steam? A condensing heat exchanger could be configured to use gravity to return the condensed steam to the boiler. Such a design wouldn't need a pump to move the boiler water.

Your 3.5M btu would be delivered over time. You would also need to overcome the heat lost to evaporation, convection, conduction, etc. while trying to raise the temperature of the pool. Do you have a heater on the pool now? That could give you an empirical estimate of your losses.

You'll need enough spare (btu/hr) capacity in the boiler to heat the water at the rate you desire and overcome the loss rate. The heat exchanger would have to have the same capacity.

Sounds interesting from a tinkerer / wannabe engineer point of view.