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Domestic biomass heating.


lewiswood
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Has anyone had a domestic biomass heating system installed. Specifically a log boiler.

I’m looking to buy a house with no central heating and was thinking instead of installing a gas a system, why not put in a wood system to make use of arb waste and wood that I could source myself.

 

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You say gas, do you mean mains or a tank (or bottled!)?

 

Is there many grants/rhi available for log boilers with you?

Up here it seems most schemes have come to an end or not paying much. You'd get an interest free loan, but you'd be paying more as it would have to be done by approved contractors etc.

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My findings when looking at similar 6 years ago was that a house on a log burning RHI system was too labour intensive - depending upon your work / social patterns and the size of the thermal store.  A commercial log RHI boiler on a larger scale with a big thermal store (serving a B&B for example where there is high demand over short periods) was a good combo provided you have access to plentiful cheap log and have the time to stoke the baby up morning and evening.  

 

Pellet boiler, coupled with solar thermal, allowed more automation and less direct input so that's the route I took.  Been very happy with it too. 

 

I would have favoured the wood burner / back boiler combo, but existing wood burners in the house were not compatible for retro-fit and the cost / benefit of changing out for a decent back burner wood stove didn't make it worth the effort.

 

The sales bods will give you all the patter about cost savings and payback rates etc (consistently over exaggerated) but the most important factor, in my view, is how the system fits into existing / anticipated personal circumstances.  Most systems require some personal behavioural change over the established convenience of gas / oil, it's just the degrees that differ but it can make for quite an important decision.  

 

 

 

 

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I've a good few customers who have had wood gasification boilers installed and on the whole they are happy with their systems, but if they had the chance to do it again they would have installed an air source system instead.
Wood is becoming scarcer and as such the price is going up.  Keeping ahead of the seasoning is fine if you've got the shed space to store a lorry load at a time.  
The cost of softwood has almost doubled here in the past year, and is still rising, as many more places are now installing commercial biomass boilers. Our local sawmill is about to bring a biomass plant online and when this happens, much of the softwood marked for firewood will be consumed by that, leaving the small (one load a year) customers having to search further afield for wood. 
This whole biomass thing has been ill thought out from the start and we are now starting to see massive pressure to cut more wood than is sustainable, but that's a story for another day

 

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We have a 60kw log boiler that heats a largish 3 floored house. It has a 4000ltr accumulator which in retrospect should have been bigger as the boiler can easily over cook it if you are too generous on the loading of wood.
Our boiler was too large to qualify for the domestic RHI but we are still pleased with the cost savings as I generally cut my own wood supply.
One burn a day in the winter, and once every three days recently.
That is because our system is fitted with a weather compensator.

We used to use some oil heating supplemented with back boilers in log burners in some rooms. Absolute waste of time for a house of this size as it involved continual topping up of wood burners in the house as well as paying for oil.
Our system is fully programmable and costs me bigger all in money to run, whereas we used to have substantial oil bills and used more wood in stoves than we do in the efficient biomass log boiler[emoji1303]

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Have a 45 kw log boiler and a 3000 ltr Buffer and its been great so far. If there was no RHI i would have been hard to justify the 25K the system cost! Wood not a problem up here yet but its coming as the forestry are now removing the hag from clear fells for biomass! I also fitted a H/E so my original vented system for the stove in the house still works. The only advice I could give you is put in the biggest buffer tank you can fit.

 

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For me the  main gripes were;

(o) The very poor unbiased information available, like the standard link between boiler kW capacity and heat-store capacity, not , more correctly between the boiler firebox capacity and heat-store capacity.

i.e. they were always recommending minimal heat-store sizes to keep the cost and footprint as small as possible, plus the stupid short flues to keep installer costs down.

(i) The grant monies simply going to line the pockets of the mostly snake-oil salesperson type suppliers, via grossly inflated installation quotes.

(ii) The absolutely shite Government/Council run admin, with zero balls or interest in tackling dodgy suppliers, or dishonest applicants.

(iii) The daily grind of sourcing and stocking firewood and firing the boiler.

(iv) The lack of on-demand heat in our very fickle changable climate.

 

I had toyed with installing a ground source heat pump system, under our RHI system, which with our underfloor for base-load heat demand topped up with a good woodstove, would have been a better fit.

But hey!, we had 40 acres of  "free" timber to burn.

And as part of that GSHP install I would have paid for a 3PH power connection, which would have been useful for various electrically powered pieces of machinery.

I might yet go down that GSHP route.

sigh.

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7 hours ago, CallumA said:

Have a 45 kw log boiler and a 3000 ltr Buffer and its been great so far. If there was no RHI i would have been hard to justify the 25K the system cost! Wood not a problem up here yet but its coming as the forestry are now removing the hag from clear fells for biomass! I also fitted a H/E so my original vented system for the stove in the house still works. The only advice I could give you is put in the biggest buffer tank you can fit.

 

Very good advice concerning the biggest buffer tank fit/afford.:thumbup1:

 

Our insulated buffer/accumulator tank only loses a degree or two C a day if it's not utilised, so it appears to be very efficient. If I was to add an additional tank of say 2000 ltrs to my existing 4000 ltrs it would mean that I wouldn't often overcook the tank on 9% of my burn.

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For what it is worth my system is a 14.5kw stove that is plumbed into about 8 radiators in a 4 bed semi with very poor insulation.  I have no heat store and it doesn't heat the hot water, just the rads.  In really cold weather it takes a good hour to get the rads nice and hot, and it needs genuinely very dry firewood.  At this time of year it has to be turned down quite low and copes easily.

 

My system is simple but is very limited by having no heat storage capability.  So we use other means to heat the house for an hour or so in the morning before going to work.  Also on chilly evenings when I get home the house is chilly for the first hour or more.

 

I would say if I was buying all my wood it would not save money compared to natural gas.  Financially I think it only works for me because I can burn offcuts from work.  It is not free wood, as it has to be cut and dried.  And it is rarely decent chunky stuff as I can always sell this!

 

I personally think the most important thing about any heating system is the insulation of the house.  If I could get my house insulated to modern standards I could turn mine down by about 80%.  In fact I would get a smaller stove as any stove turned down low results in incomplete combustion and therefore more smoke and pollution and soot in the flue.   In fact often I hear people who live in super insulated houses (e.g. straw bale) say they need almost no heating, maybe a small woodburner for the entire house.  After all humans, televisions, computers and so on all produce quite a lot of heat; the only reason we need extra heating systems is that most properties are not well insulated.

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