so this was the new boilrt i had custom made right here.
I designed this myself and i sent it away to a stainless steel shop and they produced it for me
and i'm very happy with it. So the first thing you'll notice here is a big black pipe coming
out the side um that is insulated pipe and that is where the steam is going to come out there.
You know kind of looks good doesn't it. So the steam is going to um flow out the end here and
all you do is you plug that into your female connection which is on the steam tank i have
outside. If we turn it around this way now this is the action end here. So if you look down here
that there is an element which is mounted um on one of these one and a half inch tri clamps.
You can mount one element or you can mount two elements. That there is a 2500 watt element,
that's a 4500 watt Dernord element. So if you put these both in, you can take that cap off and you
slot that, in you can run 7000 watts through this. Or if you get two of those you can run 9000 watts,
two of those 5000 watts, one of those two and a half thousand watts. So the choices really are
not quite endless, you've got you know half a dozen to a dozen different combinations of these
elements you can use to get a different power output from this. Through our wall we only have 10
amps at 240 volt so it means we can only use about two and a half thousand watts worth of element, so
i'm just using the one right now. Now if we turn it round to the other end without dropping off the
table you'll see that there's a hole there that's actually a ball valve. We can take the cap off
and inside here there's a ball float valve which people commonly use and that keeps the water level
about yay high there. This cap i've made here for it that's just that's just another stainless plate
and i really love making gaskets out of silicon, and so i've just ran a silicon
bead around there and you just lie that plate on there, gently, and then once that's set you take
it off and you've got a really nice gasket. So what i do is i put that on and then to get a seal
around here when pressure starts building up, i just put a really heavy weight. I've got a 25
kilo round um bumper plate to put on for now, but i've got a kettlebell coming and the keel
bell is like a 20KG if you know what are, and then it'll just be lifted up and set on top. And that's
so if pressure does accidentally start building up it can actually release the pressure out here. To
insulate this i'm just going to use the old PIR board which i love, which is really insulative
and has a really good thermal resistant properties, so it doesn't really melt
when it gets up to about 100 degrees. And i've made this flat for the purpose that you can just
get the PIR board and just have big flat sheets of insulation all around it because the key with
running a good boiler i think is insulation the better it's insulated the more thermal efficient
it is the more steam you can get out of your pipe and get into your sterilization vessel. The legs
are just round pipe and i made them reasonably small because heat will want to conduct down and
out the leg, so i've made them small to prevent as much heat as possible from conducting out that
way. We want to basically keep all the heat inside here so the only way for that heat to escape that
the elements producing is through the end of our steam pipe. So i've got the old man coming around
to help insulate it so we'll get it insulated and we'll get it running and we'll just see how well
it performs. The insulation job isn't that great and that's because i had to get my father to do it
and boomers they may not be very good at uh insulating custom-made boilers but they are
exceptionally good at destroying the local housing market. Really just blowing the value of land
out of the water. so um yeah yeah that's good. This is only temporary once my arm's better i'm
gonna rip all this insulation off and um and put it on there a lot better. We've currently got a
25 kilo weight on the top. Now that sits the top the block of insulation which sits on that plate
and that holds that plate down perfectly and we get no um steam leakage from around there,
and of course the reason for having the weight there is if pressure does build up in there,
it will actually actually be able to lift that weight up this was the new ballcock i got for it,
but i haven't used that because it was a bit late arriving. I actually used my old one um
but that that's the type it's designed for there the ones with the kink in it. That one actually
raises slightly higher than my other one, so if it does intrude on the top you just need to bend this
little arm here slightly down. But we'll get this running now and we'll see just what the output
was. If we remember the output from my old boiler, we're getting something like 58 uh sorry 48 grams
per minute, I think it was.. Yeah, 48 grams per minute of steam coming out of the boiler, which
i think equaled 2.88 liters an hour. So i'm going to get this fired up now. we're going to take a
look at the steam coming out. we're going to shove it in the uh the cold water bath on a scale again,
and we'll take a reading to see how much steam was coming out of this new boiler
in one minute. So we have just turned that on and i will actually measure our time to heat up
as well on my phone here. So we'll see how long that takes to heat up start boiling and start
pumping out steam out here. So it's just starting to fire up now and that took pretty much bang on
30 minutes. There we have it starting there you can see the steam coming out of. It i'm just going
to let it run for a few minutes and work out some of this water. If i leave the hose on after i turn
it off, this float valve when it actually leaks a little bit and so it's over filled up somewhat
and so i think that's why that water is dripping out there. It's just boiling a bit close to the
to the hose. So let all that come out because we don't want that interfering with that reading.
I've also got these parts here which i haven't yet stuck in that's the water safety valve,
not the water safety valve, that's the water level switch there. So that's when we mounted
on the inside and that there is the temperature switch which opens once it hits 110 degrees.
These are two safety devices. I won't be able to put these onto my arms uh better it's just
too difficult it's too difficult to instruct other people to do it. So i've got our container set up
here which we'll measure it in. I've actually got ice in it this time, and the reason is for, i've
tested this once with this boiler here, and we've put a liter in there and when you put the hose in
it actually heated up the water so much that it was letting steam escape
because the water got very very hot. Too hot to touch. So I want to keep that water colder
for longer so it's going to condense that steam more. And i'm going to hold this pipe in..
Then we hold it here for one minute. And there we have it that's 1057ml, So we'll put on
57 grams (mls) that's 9 grams more than our last boiler. So after all that's done,
and we've measured the output our new boiler, what does it leave us with? well we're getting 57 grams
per minute which is 3.42 liters of water as steam per hour. Now if we convert that to kilojoules it
gives us 9152 kilojoules of energy. We do have to minus some of the energy that's already in
the water as it goes in, that small amount of heat that's in there. So if we take that
away we're left with 8865jkJ/h coming from our new boiler. Is that better than our last one?
absolutely. It's actually 18% better. That means simply by building this new boiler and
constructing it the way i have, I've found an 18% efficiency that means. 18% more steam coming out
that pipe, 18% more steam is going into this tank. Now these things aren't exactly energy efficient.
It's got an element in here it's just straight converting electricity
into heat. And i think when you find an 18 efficiency gain you know it's really worth it
i'm really happy with this with this boiler. I'm not too sure how it will go
when we put more elements in with the weight on top. You might even need to add more weight to it.
it's it's really strong, i mean 25 kilos sits on there nicely.
I will have the plans for this boiler available in a link below or on my Oak and Spore website,
the new zealand website. They'll be available for digital download probably for a small fee.
So if you are looking at getting a boiler instead of just buying the round stainless steel barrels.
Which can be a little inefficient due to the volume and how much you have to insulate, you
can have a go at making one of these and just take those plans down to a stainless steel fabricator
and they'll make it for you, and i think it works a treat.