DIY Wood Stove Water Heater Plans

Follow these tips to construct a wood stove hot water coil heating kit and save on utility bills. Includes a diagram and wood stove water heater plans you can set up in your own house.

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by AdobeStock/virgonira

Follow these tips to construct a wood stove hot water coil heating kit and save on utility bills. Includes a diagram and wood stove water heater plans you can set up in your own house.

One of the advantages of heating with wood is the variety of needs that just one stove can meet. Besides keeping us warm, a woodburner can cook dinner, dry clothes, and toast chilly toes. But wouldn’t it be just dandy if that black box would draw a nice hot bath, too?

Actually, domestic woodstove water heating is nothing new . . . many cookstoves had water-tank attachments more than a century ago. The advent of the “airtight” woodburner and pressurized water systems has left most of those old batch-heating techniques by the wayside though, and new methods based on closed circulation have been developed.

Modern Woodstove Water Heating

The majority of water-warming attachments employ heat exchangers that are fitted inside the firebox or the chimney of the appliance. The best commercial examples of this approach work very well indeed. If the stove is run most of the day, they can supply a whole family’s hot water. For safety’s sake, however, these devices are usually made from stainless steel (an expensive commodity) and must be pressure-tested to insure that they are able to withstand the very high temperatures they may encounter inside the heating system. As a consequence, quality internal heat exchangers carry pretty hefty price tags. Homemade internal devices, on the other hand, have developed a nasty reputation for scalding steam explosions.

  • Updated on Sep 12, 2022
  • Originally Published on Jan 1, 1984
Tagged with: burning wood, emergency power, energy savings, hot water heaters, wood stove
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