wood fired boiler, indoor?

[Paddy]

We are building a home with Radiant heat in a concrete slab. I would like to hear from anyone who has used a wood fired boiler with radiant. I do not want one of those outdoor units! I'm getting to old to be walking out in the snow to feed the beast.

Patrick T

 

[GaryM]

All I know about the indoor units is that This Old House had a series a couple of years back where they rebuilt a house after the indoor wood burner caused it to burn to the ground. That's all I need to know about them.

I'm sure there are some that work for long periods with no issues.

 

[dmccarty]

I looked at the Tarm/Tarn(sp) but decided it was too expensive and we did not have the space for the huge water tank.

Not sure if you have considered it but you could also use Solar to heat the water for the radiant heat. This is what we wanted to do but it was too expensive for us. The price for providing most of the heat for our house, 2525 sq ft, was 7K to 9K. Given that is about what the HVAC was costing and we had to have AC we did not put in the system. The wood stove is meeting our heating needs. HOWEVER I still wish we had put in the solar heat until I think of what it cost.

For our area it did not make money sense to put in a heat pump, wood stove and radiant heat. But it might work in your area. The Feds are giving tax incentives to use solar and your state might as well.

This link should help you see if you state has incentives.
DSIRE: DSIRE Home

This is the NC Solar Center at NCSU. It has lots of good info.
North Carolina Solar Center www.ncsc.ncsu.edu

If you are in the design stage, I would strongly recommend adding passive solar ideas into the house where possible. Our house is not a perfect passive solar house since we did not minimize windows on the non south sides of the house. Nor did we orient or design the house so that it would maximize solar heat gain in the winter. But just using roof overhangs built to allow the sun in during the winter and keeps the sun out in the summer helps keep the house warm. The house is about 5 degrees warmer on the south side of the house vs the north side. And that is just free solar heat.

Our slab is colored concrete. We love it. Easy to clean up messes. We have had a very sick dog that pooped in the house at least once a day. Not fun but not hard to clean up though we went through gallons of Lysol. If we had carpet we would have had to put the dog to sleep sooner because of the cleanup. We do need to find a better way to clean the concrete other than with the vacuum. A mop works it just takes a lot of water...

Later,
dan

 

[yankeerider]

It wasn't a boiler, but I heated my house with an indoor wood-fired furnace for many years, until i converted from forced hot air to hydronic heat. I converted the hatchway into a wood bin and used to dump a weeks' worth of wood there. It sure was nice minimizing the trips outside.

The downside was the need to keep the floor clean of the wood debris that followed from the hatchway to the furnace door, plus the ash dust from the daily emptying of the ash hopper.

We heat the family room portion of our house with a woodstove which uses far less wood (though also heats less of the house.) When I go back to wood-fired central heat, the boiler will be in a small outside building so I can feed it sheltered from the wind.

 

[dmccarty]

Yankeerider's comment made me think of something.

I noticed a guy who has been building an outbuilding. I'm guessing its 20x10ish. I THINK he is putting in an outdoor wood boiler in the building. He has something big sitting on the slab covered in a tarp. Its either an outdoor boiler or a diesel generator. A big one! No chimney yet so I might be wrong on what he is doing but if it is for a wood burner its a nice setup.

On the other hand this particular area was covered in smoke the other morning from all of the outdoor wood boilers. It was real heavy that morning. The smoke and wood consumption is why I don't like the outdoor boilers. There is very little smoke from our wood stove and its at start up.

Later,
Dan

 

[George2615]

Years ago I saw a neat boiler at a supply house. I think it was made by (State) and was a dual fired boiler that had two sides. On one side you could feed in wood (like a wood burning stove) and on the other side was a standard oil burner type furnace. This way you could heat with wood and if the wood fire died down the oil furnace would kick on if needed.

Here is a link to one company that has wood fired boilers.
NY Thermal Inc / Products and technical questions / Boilers / Wood / The WF Series

This unit will interact with an existing oil fired boiler and shut it down when the wood fired boiler is in use.

George

 

[Paddy]

GaryM,

We are building an all concrete/steel home. So fire danger is some what limited. We will have concrete walls, floors and even a flat concrete roof. The wood heat source will be in the basement where there will be zero combustables.

As you might have guessed by now, I too had a house burn to the ground. Not again!

Patrick T

 

[Paddy]

dmccarty,

I noticed they are expensive. I might go with some thing a bit lower tech to heat water. I don't want to be a slave to the stove that cost $8000. Solar has a big appeal and I think having both wood and solar as additional heat sources wood be good. Here in Indiana, we don't have the best Winter solar potential, kwh/m2/day. We have ave 2.71kwh/m2/day in the Winter months, Oct to April. Our only real energy source option is Ele, so we considered Geo, but talk about high cost! So the basic plan is to have an ele boiler with solar and wood heat assist. The basement is 3500 sq-ft so we can find a place for the storage tank. Our house is oriented nicely for Passive solar. South facing, big views to a lake. So lot's of South facing glass. With the concrete stained floors, should have good heat adsorbtion. I want to incorperate insulated shutters on all those South facing windows so as to not lose all that heat gained during the day. We both work out of our home so a hands on approch works for us.

Thanks for the comments and links.

Patrick T

 

[arrow]

Paddy
Go to "woodheat.org" This is an organization that goes right to the skinny on wood heating anything and breaks up alot of the controversial manufacturers claims used on their products just to sell them. (such as an outdoor woodstove guy that told a buddy of mine recently that his stove only uses 3-4 cords per season out here in New England). He's correct of course. He'll certainly use 3-4 cords and then another 3-4 cords on top of that if he wants to continue heating his house with wood this season.

 

[Paddy]

arrow,

I will check them out. Maybe I can look into a simple way of just pre-heating water that enters the ele boiler. The high end wood boilers I have seen are very expensive for just my plan for occasional use.

Thanks for the link

Patrick T