Quote Originally Posted by brdad View Post
Properly plumbed, you can use any boiler to heat or help heat swimming pool water. In fact, it is not uncommon when you have a wood boiler that there is an excess amount of hot water which can be "dumped" into a large load such as a swimming pool, large radiators or storage tank in the basement, or driveway heaters.

In most of these cases, you would want to use a heat exchanger, which isolates the boiler water from the dump load. There are wood fired boilers designed to directly heat pools without a heat exchanger, which probably work great for that purpose since they plumb directly into the circulator line with PVC, but they are not designed to heat your house as well.
Hmm . . . another aspect that would be intriguing for me. We have a pool, but swimming can be limited in the Spring/Fall or even in the Summer after a few days of weather like we had last week and the temps just aren't quite warm enough to go swimming. If I could get a boiler plumbed for heat in the winter and possibly to heat up the pool just a tad in the shoulder swimming months. . . . intriguing . . . very intriguing.

I'm also thinking that having any excess heat either dump into a heater in my garage (currently uninsulated though) or in a storage container in the crawl space (fully enclosed . . . just a bit tight on space unless you're four feet tall) might work out as well.

I assume there must be a way to plumb such a system so that in the winter the wood fired boiler could heat the house and excess heat would dump into the aforementioned garage or a storage container in the crawl space and not dump into the pool . . . and then in the fall/spring the excess heat could be dumped into the pool rather than the garage/crawl space????