Gasification Boiler

[Gomez]

As part of my planning for a ~30x40 garage, I'm toying with the ideas of adding room for an indoor wood gasification boiler to heat the house, garage, DHW, and the pool. I spend a lot of time at hearth.com researching, but thought this site would have a few members that have these units as well.

My initial thoughts are the Garn seems to be the top dog, along with the top price tag. I like that it has its thermal storage built in.

I currently supplement my oil boiler with a Lopi fireplace insert that keeps the house comfortable, but looking at how to heat the garage has me thinking it's a good way to justify spending the $$ on a system like this.

 

[Hillbilly John]

I'm going into winter number 4 with my garn and I'm happy with it. Very clean and efficient. When considering price, consider efficiency. Not storing your hard-earned heat is very wasteful. You can have an efficient boiler but if there's no place to store the heat when it's not needed, you're just being more efficient at being wasteful.

One other option to consider (I pretty much flipped a coin) is to get a high-efficiency gasification boiler and a separate storage system. A buddy of mine did this by burying a stainless steel milk truck tank under the slab in his garage.

I was lucky that I had room in my barn for the garn and I had my back yard already ripped up to lay the pipes to my house and my garage, both of which I heat with the garn for a total about 5000 sq. ft.

I have a combination of in-floor radiant heat in the new part of the house and an a-coil in the furnace plenum of my old lp gas furnace for the old part of the house. The garage is a combination of radiant in concrete, and radiant stapled to sub-floor from beneath. I can work in my shop in the dead of winter with my shoes off.