Wood Boiler Advice needed

[magicalmagoo]

looking for some advice from anyone that has or has planned installing a wood boiler, im currently renovating my house and as part of this im moving my gas boiler out to the shed along with the megaflow hot water tank. i was thinking of intsalling the wood boiler as the main source to heat for my heating and hot water and use the gas boiler as a back up/top up source. i dont even know if this can be done so im hoping someone on here can help, ither with personal experience or knows someone who can advise me further. is there a local contractor that deals with these? any help would be greatly appreciated

thanks in advance

[daviddd]

Once you plan outside the norm it can be expensive, but it can all be done I expect. Are you planning to burn whole logs or woodchips? The work of keeping the boiler supplied with logs could be a round-the-clock exercise (and going out to the shed in the night in the winter?!) but automatically-fed woodchip burners and the chips are available locally. Bettyhill swimming pool runs on woodchip heating but not sure if there are any others in Caithness (assuming you live up here lol).

[molly]

We have a log boiler which heats a large tank of water called an accumulator. Our accumulator is 2500 litres. The accumulator is the heat store for the following 24 hours (winter) or 48 hours (summer).

In the winter, the log boiler is lit at 4 pm and once it is going, it is filled up and then maybe topped up again 3 hours later. The accumulator will then provide enough heat for the following morning. I repeat the process 24 hours later. In the summer it would be 48 hours later.

We have a megaflo and radiators. The water from the accumulator heats both.

We also have an oil boiler which we can use to heat the megaflo and radiators during times when we don't have wood or when we are away.

The log boiler uses quite a lot of wood and there is a fair bit of work with it. You can buy logs, ready cut and split, but I have found that the cost of this is similar to running the oil boiler. If you have access to free/cheap wood and you are prepared to put the work in, then this is a very good system.

You can view a similar system to ours on www.accumulatortanks.co.uk, under the case studies. It was Peter de la Haye that advised us and he is very knowledgeable (and patient!).

[mrlennie]

The accumulator sounds like a good energy saving device.

Generally these are all the extras you will need if installing a solid fuel boiler (vented system as oppose to megaflow - unvented)

http://www.stovesonline.co.uk/central_heating_wood_stove.html

You probably already know that you cannot link a wood boilers heat output directly to a megaflow. If you have any more questions, feel free to PM me.

[Red]

We have a large multifuel stove which heats both radiators and hot water tank, through a Dunsley neutraliser into which we also have an oil boiler to cut in as and when necessary. We also have an immersion heater in the hot water tank for if we don't want boiler on during the summer but we also have a spare coil in the hot water tank to allow us to put in solar coil when we can, to save using the immersion heater during the summer.

Forss Engineering installed our system for us. We told them what we wanted and what we had seen and they did the rest - it is absolutely fantastic we can't praise them highly enough.