Ok, this may not be that environ friendly but it is a solution to getting lots of hot water from burning wood.
I run a wood manufacturing company and on the farm where we process reclaimed timber into useable materials for the manufacturing process we land up with massive quanitities of scrap offcuts. We decided to set up this water heating solution at the staff dorm. This type of system is known as a donkey is SA. Usually it is a tank on top of a fire, but this does not last very long as the tank burns through. I decided to build a system with a small thick steel boiler tank in the fire and a large holding tank above which is seperated from the fire. Hot water
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This was my first atempt to do something like this and I am now working on mark two for my own DHW requirements.
We threw a u shaped foundation and built u shaped walls to about two feet and then cast a slab 100mm thick with steel reinforcing on top of the walls. We then built a tunnel for the fire using overburn bricks. A hole was left at the back of the tunnel for the chimney.
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A tire was used to form the tunnel. The chimney was built on top and walls built up to contain the tank. The boiler tank was made from a 300mm long piece of 150mm 5mm wall steel pipe with a 5mm top and bottom welded on . Through the top of this two 25mm pipes are welded in. one extends to the end of the pipe and one only just goes through (hot). I will draw a diagram of how the plumbing works. Here is what the whole thing looks like with the fire going.
