Wood Stove insert or Outdoor boiler

Well...do you want to see the fire or no?

We installed a Kozy Heat z42cd in our new construction (not yet complete). And my dad did the same. We've had good experiences with it. It's a high efficiency zero clearance fireplace.. 2.98cuft fire box.

LOL, it might get pretty cold sitting in front of an outside boiler......

ON the serious side, if you have to do a total rebuild you might consider building for a freestanding stove and go with something like a PE T-6 or Soapstone; to get the looks and the heat.

hartkem said:

I think we would prefer to see the fire.

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I think you have your answer then :D

Some states are starting to regulate OWBs too. NY is one-the stack is supposed to be 18' now or something crazy, plus I think maybe it might have to be one of the EPA phase two units. I'm not certain though, I haven't looked at them for a while (we were looking at a farm with several pole barns, and thought we might heat one as a workshop along with the small house so an OWB seemed like a good idea-but we didn't buy it, so no OWB).

With a properly build fireplace, an insert can most certainly be left "running" while you aren't home. We heat with wood, if it's below 40, the stove has a fire in it whether we are there or not. It's best to learn the stove/insert before leaving it, so you know how far to damp down to, how much and what wood to load, etc. We were lucky in that we got ours in in October so we had time to learn it at night and leave it cold during the day. We get up about an hour before leaving and restart the fire first thing to keep an eye on things before we leave.

I would say read up on the two types of EPA stoves-tube and cat, and the advantages and disadvantages to both when looking. Had I known about it, I would have considered the Woodstock Progress stove when shopping for ours, although I still don't like the idea of a side loader vs a front loader, especially given the nessesary side clearances. I do like the idea of having both a cat and tubes though, and it's a pretty nice looking stove.

I'm in a similar position as you. Our house is costing $3-400 in propane. I'm not sure if I can handle all the work with the boiler so I figured that I would first start with a wood stove to see how that goes. Plus I'd have to do some excavation to make room for a boiler shed. I will be ordering a Woodstock Progress Hybrid by week's end

You may want to consider a pellet insert. I have a Harmon Accentra insert at my rental house (recently lived there before buying current house). Current house is setup for a free standing stove otherwise I would be installing the pellet insert there.

kcZ said:

I'm in a similar position as you. Our house is costing $3-400 in propane. I'm not sure if I can handle all the work with the boiler so I figured that I would first start with a wood stove to see how that goes. Plus I'd have to do some excavation to make room for a boiler shed. I will be ordering a Woodstock Progress Hybrid by week's end

You may want to consider a pellet insert. I have a Harmon Accentra insert at my rental house (recently lived there before buying current house). Current house is setup for a free standing stove otherwise I would be installing the pellet insert there.

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Nice choice, those are some nice looking stoves by the pics I've seen. Plus neat technology.

If you are thinking about pellets (they do have the advantage of load-n-go for a day or so over most wood burners), I'd go to a hearth shop and view one burning. I don't personally like the "look" of the flame in them, although I *think* I would like the Thelin because of it's shape (tall and skinny, so the size of the burn pot vs the firebox would be more in proportion than in the bigger, wider stoves). But no one seems to have them burning in their shop, so I have yet to see one and decide.

Random thoughts . . .

Are you saying you expect to harvest 3-6 cords of firewood off just 3 1/2 acres of land each year . . . either these are face cords, your land is heavily forested or you're planning to clear cut the land . . . or at the very least you will not be cutting that much wood for too many years before you need to find another place to cut. I have two acres of land and there is no way I could take 5 cord of wood off my land . . . well I could, but I would have to cut a lot of trees and would have to find a new source in about four years.

Big house . . . but you say you're just looking to supplement the heat . . . if you were looking at heating the whole house I might suggest the OWB over a woodstove . . . or consider an indoor high efficiency wood boiler or wood furnace.

I actually explored the option of going with an OWB or woodstove in my own case a number of years ago. On the plus side was the ability to heat and easily regulate the temps throughout the whole house and even set up zoned heat . . . heck I could have even plumbed it up so I could have heated my swimming pool. The ability to heat the entire home and use thermostats to control the heat was very appealing.

On the negative side of the equation was the amount of wood I would go through to heat with an OWB (both in terms of cost of time and money to process the wood), the expense of buying and installing the system and just a bit of concern over the regulations that are affecting OWBs . . . but mostly for me it came down to the idea of not wanting or needing to cut up large quantities of firewood just to stay warm.

I honestly believe you know the right answer to this question already . . .

Exhibit A) Paraphrasing here . . . I believe a stove insert would fit into and be a good fit in the spot where the existing fireplace is located.
Exhibiti B) Again paraphraising . . . My wife may not want to trudge outside in the snow and cold to fill up the OWB, but may not mind firing up the woodstove or insert.
Exhibit C) And still paraphrasing . . . I only want to burn on a supplemental basis to help reduce the cost of heating, I don't necessarily want to heat the entire house.
Exhibit D) Yeah, still paraphrasing here . . . We think it would be nice to see a fire as we like the view of a fire in our fireplace.

Again . . . to me . . . you know the answer to your question.

And yes . . . you can leave the fire burning when you leave providing you take the appropriate measures . . . I heat maybe 95% with wood and some members here heat 100% with woodheat . . . and most of us still work full-time so there are times when we leave the house with the fire going . . .

hartkem said:

I think we would prefer to see the fire.

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I'd go with an insert or wood stove indoors, and keep the propane furnace.

Total reliance on wood with access to your land only will possibly cause shortages in the future (already pointed out).

Wood as a supplement, to reduce your propane bills, and give you something decent to sit in front of, now that's a totally different scenario.

You may well find that in Spring and Fall, you don't need the furnace for heat, and in midwinter the wood stove will still put out some decent warmth and reduce the propane bill.

But you are doing that without worrying about how you are going to keep warm if you chop too many trees down....... ;-)

hartkem said:

Thanks guys for your opinions.

I don't plan to cut any wood off my property. I have a friend with 100 acres of wooded land that will let me cut but don't want to wear out my welcome cutting 10-15 cords of wood a year trying to keep up with an OWB. I know I can come up with 3 - 6 cords a year just getting it from people in the city who have trees cut down and need the wood removed. I also have my friends place as a backup. I think the fireplace insert is a smarter choice as you guys have pointed out. How well will my forced air furnace fan circulate the heat? I have a large return in the same room as the fireplace. Maybe the forced air fan could also keep the basement and bedrooms more evenly heated with the fireplace.

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Most folks that have attempted to use their furnace to move the heated air around have had mixed results . . . I would say the majority reporting here seem to indicate the results were not what they hoped for . . .

Rather than using the furnace fan, most have found it is extremely easy to move the heat from one end of the house to the other simply using a small desktop fan. The key is to move the cool air towards the warm stove room rather than trying to move the warm air into the cooler air. A small fan set on low speed can work wonders.

As for keeping a fire when nobody is home, not only is that possible, but for some of us it is necessary. We have no furnace so our wood stove heats us all winter, whether we are home or not. It seems no different to me to leave a home with a wood stove giving heat vs a furnace coming on from time to time. That furnace is a whole lot bigger fire than the wood stove fire is. Yes, at first you may feel odd but you get over that quickly.

I also agree on the OWB. The ones we see around here are terrible and most use almost twice the amount of wood vs an indoor stove. And for what it's worth, the new EPA stoves use a whole lot less wood than the older stoves. However, this comes as a warning: If you want to heat with wood, you should be getting your wood now. Actually, you should already have got wood on hand. It is best to be 2 - 3 years ahead on your wood supply at all times. That will solve 99% of a wood burners problems. Dry wood is the biggest key to a good burn.

We heat our home with a wood stove as well our furnace rarely if ever runs now. I tried using the blower fan on the furnace to move air here is what we discovered.
1 it really only uses the cold air return to move air because cold air settles which means it moves cold air from room to room.
2 if you have an upstairs heat rises so it will get warm anyway.
3 if you move air towards the stove it will then heat that air and be warmer in the rest of the house.
4 the furnace does not move towards the stove but instead to furnace which is off at this point.
Over all it did no good nstead we have found we can keep the whole house warm by using ceiling fans set to suck air up. The cold air moves down the walls naturally so by sucking up the fan is pushing warm air down the walls and warming the cold air. It sounds crazy but it works very well. All that said if you have good insulation try the blower just to see you might be the person the forced air works for you dont know till you try. Personally we get better cheaper heat from the wood stove than the furnace and honestly it is nice to sit and watch the fire. Most burners I know intens to supplement at first then they slowly make it primary and the furnace supplements the wood stove ;-)

Good luck
Pete

Heh heh... open floorplans with high ceilings. They build those kind of houses around here a lot. My house has 7.5 ft ceilings. A lot less space to heat. I know that this group is basically 99% anti-OWB, but I will represent the other 1% here...

At my previous home my ex had already build a very open lofty house with really high ceilings and gobs of windows and skylights. Electric heating bills were about what you pay for propane a month. She had a fireplace insert but it was on one side of the house in the living room and there was no way to pipe the heat to the rest of the house using that. She had no air duct system. She had an electric hydronic floor heating system that worked well, but it was spendy. We opted for a Central Boiler Classic 4036 (no longer made) which I sized by 1) calculating the space to heat and 2) calculating the energy used from the electric bills and multiplying both calculations by a factor of 2. Both came out to nearly the same number for her 2,200 sq ft house, which the 4036 CB matched pretty well. After designing and installing the system and running it for 2 years, it was sized property (maybe a tad large for our needs, and a newer 4030 would be fine). At any rate, the OWB was easy enough to load and keep fired up and my only real imitation for cutting wood for it was if the ex could lift the logs and laod them into the OWB. That was typically about 30 inches long by 8 inches in diameter, or a one foot diameter log split in half. We put the OWB at the edge of the garage which was set away from the house but had covered walkways to and around it. So the boiler was only 2 feet out into the weather, but 8 feet from the garage walls. It worked well, and if I had to do it again I would do the same thing but with a CB E-Classic gasifier OWB (they did not exist then). She has 100+ acres of trees and her property is surrounded by hundreds of square miles of timber land in the central Oregon Coast Range. So a source of firewood was not an issue. We burned on average 10 cords a year of mixed species. That was with an older but better built non-EPA OWB heating a hydronic floor loop and a domestic hot water heater. It is still in use today and my ex has been managing it alone for over 3 years now.

As others have said, a fan of some type will be needed to circulate the heat from the fireplace insert. Your house seems to have a lot of open space though, so it may be hard to keep a house that large warm with a typical fireplace insert. I think the largest ones heat about 3,000 sq ft, but that is factoring for 8 foot ceilings. The advantage of an OWB is that the scale better to larger heating requirements. They can also be designed into your existing heating system to distribute the heat. The newer gasifier OWBs from CB are far more efficient than the older models. With an E-Classic I believe that we would have burned 6 cords a year instead of 10. Rough estimate from the CB site and testimonials of newer OWB-gasifier users. In any case, the issue with eather system is going to be wood supply and keeping the fire going. Neither system is automated. The ex had the original electric hydronic heater and I plumbed the PEX into the floor Hx and the electric heater so that the loop could be diverted back to electric when we were gone in winter for longer periods than 2 days. The thermostat worked using either source of heat. You could fall back on your propane system when you need to go away for extended periods.

Good luck with whatever you do though and get off the propane!

I think for the use you want, an insert or wood stove would fit best.
Supplement & part heat time with back up heat if the power is out.
OWB with pipes running to the house require a pump, water/glycol mix in the system. Not work when power is out with out a back up Generator.
But work well & some rely on them 24/7.

Get your fire wood ASAP regardless which one you go with. It takes a year or 2 for it to season to be good burning dry wood.

When your wife gets used to the warm heat from the stove, I bet she'll tend it if your not there.

Good luck.

Seems like you have your answer....but since I run both an OWB(10 yr old Hardy H4) and a freestanding wood stove inside(Jotul 500) I'll throw in my two cents anyway.
OWB Pros - Will heat the whole house evenly and very quickly, will heat hot water, electric or propane bills will be nil, can burn just about any kind or shape of wood(doesn't mean you should), don't have to split much, during mild weather like this you do not have to load it very often(often only once a day if that in spring and fall), simply toss the wood in and walk away
OWB Cons - If you do throw any old kind of green wood in it will be very smoky, it will use alot of wood, will not do you any good during a power outage, can't kick back and read a book by the fire(unless you want to freeze your butt off and smell like a smokestack)

Woodstove Pros - does not use much wood compared to my OWB, kids can play in the yard without using a gasmask, can't beat sitting by the fire on a winter's night, plenty of heat and possibly cooking during a power outage, rest of family loves it, perfect for part-time burning
Cons - will not heat house evenly or quickly, for most must be tended three times a day(morning, after work, and before bed), some don't like wood mess in the house(can be minimized), if you have any size house you'll need backup or multiple stoves, wood will need to be split, stacked, seasoned(can be a positive if you enjoy the process and need exercise)

I like running both, but to be honest when the OWB dies(could be awhile as these Hardys seem to commonly run for 20 yrs plus) I will not replace it. I'll stick with the indoor stove. The smoke and wood usage cancel out the other positives when compared with the indoor stove.

What about a wood boiler insert.
Check this out hydro-to-heat-convertor.com/fireplaceinserts.html
Staged combustion with catalytic afterburn