Biomass boiler

[muttley9050]

pics of boiler system

[richardwale]

Wow. Impressive. Surely that heats a serious amount of water and radiators?????

[NI Tree]

how well dose the system work as i am looking putting i a very simular set up and size, in a big old farm house, condering a combanation of systems, gassifing log boiler with solar pannels, and woundering if you could describe how you have it set up/configered, what problems you have had with it and any thing you would do differently if you were too do it again,

 

i wood love to have a 2 log boilers 1 gassifing and one like skyhucks again as they brillent for rubish wood (fence post, stumps, brash, dead chickens, woody rubish) ie any tat i would not cut up, i miss it but it was installed over 30 years ago and lasted over 20 years

 

ps it dose look like a nice set up though

[muttley9050]

Marcus, i see your point and yes most plumbers are idiots. our boiler was partially grant aided and was also classed as commercial due to being owned by a housing co-op and the size of it, this left us with little choice over allowed installers and as you can guess are installers were idiots, its all plumbed in steel due to the bore of the pipe,and i think this is why they recommended inhibitor which was included in the £65000 cost. They were idiots,when they fitted the expansion to the 3 hot water tanksthey just bolted to floor, when they filled system and it got hot the rods they were onfell over,water everywhere, proper numptys. we put the angle up to hold em up ourselves.

Edited January 18, 2013 by muttley9050

[muttley9050]

how well dose the system work as i am looking putting i a very simular set up and size, in a big old farm house, condering a combanation of systems, gassifing log boiler with solar pannels, and woundering if you could describe how you have it set up/configered, what problems you have had with it and any thing you would do differently if you were too do it again,

 

i wood love to have a 2 log boilers 1 gassifing and one like skyhucks again as they brillent for rubish wood (fence post, stumps, brash, dead chickens, woody rubish) ie any tat i would not cut up, i miss it but it was installed over 30 years ago and lasted over 20 years

 

ps it dose look like a nice set up though

will repely to you later gotta go now.

[openspaceman]

pics of boiler system

 

Any particular reason for 6 discrete expansion vessels?

[difflock]

I were mulling that over as well.

Perhaps cheaper?

Perhaps easier to configure within space constraints?

There is always a reason why, or there should be.

PS

Re the mild steel/black iron pipework instead of copper, vis-a-vis the need for treatment.

No odds as the accumulator tank and boiler are mild steel anyway.

Treatment should not be needed for a sealed/unvented system.

PPS

Since I got the threading dies for BSP pipe I had the notion of plumbing (well re-plumbing after I re-installed myself) boiler flue and accumulator tank myself.

Except when I priced (gulp!) the steel/black iron pipe I re-used most of the otherwise scrap copper 28mm pipe instead.

[openspaceman]

I were mulling that over as well.

Perhaps cheaper?

 

Yes but he mentioned dhw tanks as separate volumes. I wondered if that was significant.

 

I need to add a second expansion vessel as the new accumulator tank increases the volume such that I've had to reduce the temperature.

 

 

Re the mild steel/black iron pipework instead of copper, vis-a-vis the need for treatment.

No odds as the accumulator tank and boiler are mild steel anyway.

Treatment should not be needed for a sealed/unvented system.

PPS

 

 

 

That's my view as long as there is only iron and copper in the circuit, mind he says he spent £65k on his so an extra 600 quid for inhibitor is minor. I'm working on a fraction of that budget.

 

Since I got the threading dies for BSP pipe I had the notion of plumbing (well re-plumbing after I re-installed myself) boiler flue and accumulator tank myself.

Except when I priced (gulp!) the steel/black iron pipe I re-used most of the otherwise scrap copper 28mm pipe instead.

 

I used a couple of 6m lengths of 2" barrel which my old boss came down, designed, cut and threaded just for the bends and connections. I think the black iron came to over 500 quid. I wouldn't want to try and tap threads on that by hand. Then 2 8m lengths of heat main into the barn where the accumulator sits. The small load I have on is run off 28mm ersatz hep20. I see I poked 1.5MWh into the system last week.

[muttley9050]

The dhw tanks are seperate volumes so you heat them in order, sun gets first up to temp and then starts next one ,if its out long enough, and you use tanks in order too, basically english sun is unreliable so capture as much heat as you can whilst its out, and use when its not, it also means that if theres no sun you can just heat up 1000L with the gas or p.v.powered immersion not the whole 3000l, hence each tank is seperate and needs its own expansion. I must admit theres aspects of the system im still getting me head round, this being our second winter using it. The system was designed by a company called british eco, i think they did a good job, but thats all they did a good job in. They subbed installation to another company, they got it done inthe end, but start to finish was 10months. I dug the service trenches from the stables(new boiler room) to the house myself to save money, did it over a week, lots of trenches and the worst dig ive ever done for the amount ofservices and unknown water pits in the way. They were meant to come lay the pipe the following week. They didnt come for 2months. needless to say trenches werent trenches by then!

I see your point on inhibitor, maybe just covering all bases. Do you guys pump straight into your rads or do you heat exchange? U should now, the house it heats is massive 27occupants and one ancient c/h system all plumbed in steel with big old cast column rads, so we heat exchange coz theres no way we were power flushing.

Regards costings, 65k including solar thermal and connection to a secondary building which is used part time(we rent it to groups, run courses from there etc)This means loads of buried insulated pipes and they cost loads.

We were able to secure 35k funding but we had to jump through some massive hoops, the most interesting of which is allowing local schools to use as energy project. One ofthe techie guys i live with designed and built hardware and software connected to all our renewables(solar thermal,p.v,boiler) and internet, it gives instant readouts of energy produced, historical figures, and basic conversions to units of energy kids understand like miles driven in average car, light bulb hours, cups of tea u could make etc. This gets sent to 2 touch screen units in our house and to web address anybody(like theschool kids) can access. Its really neat(and way beyond me). School havent done a project yet but hoping they will this year. Its great to be able to see on a screen exactly how much energy you produce and direct difference between cloudy/sunny day,softwood/hardwood. Cant remember what web address is right now, but will post soyou can look if interested.

Posted some pics of our new shed here:http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/firewood-forum/24086-show-me-your-firewood-storage-shed-rack-please-4.html

Anyway time for bed, enjoying this thread. Sorry if i waffled.

Edited January 19, 2013 by muttley9050

[openspaceman]

The dhw tanks are seperate volumes so you heat them in order, sun gets first up to temp and then starts next one ,if its out long enough, and you use tanks in order too, basically english sun is unreliable so capture as much heat as you can whilst its out, and use when its not, it also means that if theres no sun you can just heat up 1000L with the gas or p.v.powered immersion not the whole 3000l, hence each tank is seperate and needs its own expansion.

 

So you have 3 100 litre expansion vessels for the three DHW tanks and three in parallel for the space heating? Do you manually switch the solar heating?

 

I worked on a sandler system in Brixton that used one 3000l tank for DHW and underfloor with super insulation and solar thermal input. The backup was 25kW pellet boiler. System was a disaster because it used a stratified tank with a diffusion tube, The heat wasn't metered so the 12 tenants controlled their temperature by opening windows. This meant the underfloor pump worked constantly and quickly ruined the stratification, the DHW plate heat exchanger pumps were cut out at 50C so no hot water. The design was also daft in that the solar thermal and boiler both fed into a common header, effectively the solar thermal circuit diluted the 75C water from the boiler. They should have switched solar heat to just pre warm boiler feed when there was no chance of solar reaching 50C in a day.

 

Apart from discomfort there was a safety issue in that the housing association did not appoint a service contract, I was freelance snagger for the installation company which went bust, and went to fix minor problems when called by the housing association handyman. The solar system leaked and no one noticed and an automatic pump refilled the system. With no solar input the boiler ran 24/7 with a switch off every 6 hours to automatically de ash.

 

Consequent to this with no chimney sweeping and a gas cowl terminating the flue, draught was lost because the cowl was blocked with soot. By this time the boiler internals had burned out in 4 years of constant use.

 

This was all made worse by the housing association people being an uncaring bunch of jobsworths.

 

Against my advice they replaced the boiler like for like instead of going for FIT under the RHI with a new bolier.

 

 

 

I see your point on inhibitor, maybe just covering all bases. Do you guys pump straight into your rads or do you heat exchange?

 

I have only one circuit, a simple fan coil unit running straight off the accumulator. As it's running on arb arisings I have lots of feed problems so it generally only runs when I am at work.

 

Its great to be able to see on a screen exactly how much energy you produce and direct difference between cloudy/sunny day,softwood/hardwood. Cant remember what web address is right now, but will post soyou can look if interested.

 

 

Yup I'd be interested in looking at the site.

 

Woking BC crow about their renewables ( big CHP scheme and lots of PV but don't allow one to see what is being produced.