HELP! plumbing advice needed Esse WD & simple gravity

[northumbriaforestry]

Hi All,

As many of you know, we've been building our house this last year. A simple off grid timber frame & straw bale house in some of the woods we manage. We've had a hell of a time, trying to run our businesses & self build the house, with a tiny budget, difficult location & very limited skills & experience. Anyway, we're getting close to completion now & are preparing to take delivery of our cooker. We need some advice from an old school plumber, someone who understands gravity fed systems without pumps. The design we have is simple but seems to have our local plumber ( a customer of ours) a bit flumoxed, not his area of expertise. If you have the knowledge & time to help us, we'd love to hear form you. So many people told we couldn't do this, & we nearly have, we're tired now & desperate to get in, we really do need some help with this. If you think you can help, drop me a line here & we'll contact you with more info on what we have in mind. Thank you in advance to any wood be helpers! You see what I did there? Wood be! wood be, ok I'll get m' coat, TAXI!

[niftysteve]

sounds a bit like how rayburns used to be fitted they were gravity fed using a header tank and had something like 28mm flow and return pipes for the first couple of metres

[northumbriaforestry]

sounds a bit like how rayburns used to be fitted they were gravity fed using a header tank and had something like 28mm flow and return pipes for the first couple of metres

 

That's right yes.

[niftysteve]

bit like this set up

Wood-burning boiler central heating stoves from FrenchEntrée.com

[northumbriaforestry]

Are you a plumber Nifty?

[teepeeat]

As mentioned on other posts of this sort I would recommend you pop over to a forum that covers this sort of thing as their main course. This forum is excellent when it comes to tree related stuff, but house building is a mid morning snack on here.

 

Two we found very useful were the Green Building forum and the Navitron forum - there are loads of people there doing what you are doing to a greater or lesser extent as well as professionals who regularly offer free advice.

[northumbriaforestry]

Thanks Teepeeat, we're on those sites too & will be posting on them. Just thought it didn't hurt to ask here.

[teepeeat]

Fair enough, good luck and hope you get in soon.

 

Sounds like you are at that stage where its not as much fun as it was at the start, but hang in there, focus on the end result and it will all be worth it.

 

Any pictures to share?

[renewablejohn]

I am not a plumber but managed to plumb our Esse gravity feed in very easily although I would suggest fitting a Laddomat to keep the boiler temperature up and make the stove run efficiently. PM me and I could run through the pipework we ended up with for hot water and a thermal store.

[northumbriaforestry]

John, that's very kind of you, pm on way, well not the real PM of course, that'd just be crazy!