wood burning rayburn

[sandbach-sticks]

i will let him know about the fire bricks and tell you how he gets on, thanks

[davetaz]

We use Pine if we need to get the temperature up quickly as it burns hotter and responds quicker when altering the vents. Haven't had to fiddle around with the fire bricks other than changing between winter and summer settings. His Rayburn may need a good clean out or a service, and needs to check the airflow to make sure there is plenty of draw.

[Sasquatch]

Hi

 

Depends on the model they make a grate for burning wood which is retro fittable into most solid fuel rayburns. If you want to heat more than a few rads and hot water check out this family firm from Wales They make boiler upgrades from stainless to fit various models and guarantee them for 15 years. A Rayburn is more of a life choice and like every solid fuel appliance they all run slightly differently depends on the location, prevailling wind, flue draft, fuel, demand for hotwater / heat etc. Just have to get the hang of it.

[ahannigan]

We had Wood-only Rayburn (345W) fitted just over a year ago, can't fault it.

Ours is connected to a thermal store (along with log-burner in living room). This produces central heating and mains pressure hot water for a 3 bed semi (9 rads). We do 99% of our cooking on it as well.

Couldn't tell you how many logs we get through but it is probably around 15cubic metres, mixture of hardwood and softwood. The 345W will only take logs, not designed for any other fuel such as coal.

We can get it up to 200 centigrade in a couple of hours from a cold start (have had it over 250 when not paying any attention to it). The great thing is, if you like cooking, the oven and hot-plates are on all the time. Gets a good clean out every four weeks so we let it go cold for this.

If you have to buy in your logs it will be quite expensive to run.

 

I'm fascinated as to how you get mains pressure for your hot water. I though you could only achieve gravity pressure from a vented system? Are you using some sort of pump?

 

Thanks!

[rxe]

Yup, take out the summer bricks and throw them away. We struggled with ours for a while (it came with the house) until we discovered this.

 

We find that the harder we run the heating, the hotter the oven gets. On a really cold evening when it is going pretty much flat out, the oven is over 300. The trick to getting the oven to high temperature is to load it, have a good burn for 30 minutes, then shut the flue damper down by about 50%.

 

Don't really know how much wood it uses, but about a barrow a day in winter, and a barrow every 2 days at the moment.

[Stereo]

Mains hot comes from heat exchanger in the thermal store. The body of the water in the tank flows around the central heating so you keep the store hot all the time. Dhw is created by running mains cold through the heat exchanger inside the tank on demand.

 

Sounds dodgy but it totally works. We had to turn the mixer valve up on ours as it was coming out the tap at 80 degrees. We run a mixer shower off it as well and it's like a power shower and will go way too hot.

 

Ours is a gleddhill torrent heat store hooked up to an esse w23 which is like a Rayburn.

 

The only issue we have is when the tank gets cold it drags on the stove and gums it up. Going to fit a laddomat this summer to solve that.

[County4x4]

My mate has recently had one installed and it is logs only, having trouble to get it up to temp. Heats rads up ok but can't get oven hot enough to cook in. I supplied him with a tonne of kiln dried hardwood offcuts and this has got oven up to 180 for the first time. I would advise from what he says to make sure you don't run too many rads off it and get multi fuel, plus spend time researching which is best for you and not cheapest

 

This problem is not at all uncommon mate - friends had exactly the same with their wood only Esse. My installer mate (Fahrenheit on here) diagnosed it over the phone from a hundred miles away in the end! Seems a lot of installers can't be bothered learning all the ins and outs of wet installations - and this was the problem. The stat that controlled the water returning to the stove was set too low by the installer - which meant that the water was circulating too much and never getting hot enough in the stove. In turn, this meant the firebox was running very cool and condensing an awful lot of tar which clogged the flueways, and that made the stove even more sluggish until it would hardly go at all. This process only took a week or two from the stove going in - and they ended up with pools of liquid tar in the bottom oven. Needless to say, as this was their dream stove and they'd paid about £6k for it plus over a grand for a big piece of handmade glass to go behind it, they weren't right happy!

 

Installer had been called back a number of times and insisted the problem was down to wet wood - which was hardly likely as they were using mainly kiln dried offcuts and a few of my briquettes at less than 8%! In the end, the Esse technical guy was called out - and he said to turn up the return stat - which is exactly what Fahrenheit had said from the other side of the country! Installer said it wouldn't make any difference - Esse's fella disagreed with him. I cleaned out all the flueways and swept the chimney (again!) and that was that - oven temp right round the dial, clean flueways - sorted. It's been sound as a pound ever since.

 

Andy

[Stereo]

Is that in a gravity system? Surely having a return stat could cause the Esse to boil? I'm looking at a Laddomat which works the other way round ie it only starts releasing water from the boiler once it's hot which in turn stops cold water returning.

 

Or does the stat just slow down the flow until the return is hot? I'm interested as a Laddomat is going to be a few hundred plus lots of hassle.

[hardtop110]

I've got a laddomat between my Aarow boiler stove and thermal store. The main advantages are:

1. It stops cold water returning to the stove so it heats up quicker;

2. By keeping the temperature higher in the stove, it reduces condensation and subsequent corrosion;

3. We don't have a straight run between stove and store and there is a risk that the gravity circuit would breakdown and end up with the stove boiling without the pump; and

4. We have solar thermal panels plumbed into the store. If the laddomat wasn't there, there is a risk that the stove could act as a radiator and leak all the heat.

 

You can play with different rated stats to get the system right for you. Also, esse do a copy which is exatly the same, but a bit cheaper.

 

Oh and don't forget the flue stat to go with it.

[Stereo]

I'm just a bit concerned about the pipe length to tank as the Laddomat manual seems fussy on this. It's 28mm and goes about 2m up a wall, turns to horizontal and goes another 2m to the base of the tank where it has to turn again. How long is your pipe run from Laddomat to pump?

 

Luckilly behind the Esse is the stairs so we can go straight through the wall and into the space under the staircase to site the Laddomat and then up from there.