New boiler options

Hi all.

I have been reading everything on this site, and everything I can find online for the last couple weeks. I live in Northern Iowa, only a couple miles from Minnesota. We just purchased my grandmothers house and moved back to where my wife and I grew up. It's a great house, 2100 sq ft on main level with about 1500 finished in the basement, nice big garage and sunroom. Built in 1979, insulated OK, I will add some attic insulation, but have many vaulted ceilings where "it is what it is". We will live here for 30+ years unless something drastic happens in our families lives.

I need to start looking at replacing the only source of heat in the house currently. It's a 30 year old LP boiler, it works good yet ,but I'm a little weary of it, has output of 120,000 btu and keeps up no problem. The house has hot water baseboards. I have done some remodeling already and added some in-floor heat in the kitchen and soon to be bathrooms.

I first started looking at corn boilers as I farm and have plenty of corn. After a lot of research, I was veering away from corn. Seems like the corn has to be very dry for most burners to work well, trying to dry down a special batch just for the corn burner is not done very easy. They also have a lot more moving parts and things that can go wrong.

I then started thinking of staying with a corn/ pellet burner and buying pellets, they burn cleaner, are pretty competitive with corn. I would still have to have a bulk bin at my house which I'm not to thrilled about, and still have many moving parts.

I live on 20 acres of trees, and have another 7 acres of solid mature oak trees at my disposal. When I look out my front window I see five 150' oak trees that need to be taken down soon. I'm to cheap to hire it done. So I started to research wood burners, first OWB, then I found gasification boilers, I had no idea the advancements in burning wood. Once I read about thermal storage, it solved a lot of the problems I saw with a wood burner.

I have a concrete floor, 15'x18' room with 10'6" ceilings attached to the backside of my garage. It was just used for storage which I have no need for. I would make this my new boiler room if I went with a biomass boiler, if I added a garage door it would have good access to the backside of the house, so I could keep the mess mostly outside but yet have ample storage inside.

There are no dealers near me except for aquatherm, which I think I ruled out as I haven't read many positive things to say about them.

I am very handy and will do most of the install myself with the help of my plumber/carpenter neighbor.
There are scrap propane and NH3 (ammonia) tanks all over around here, so acquiring one or two for storage should be fairly cheap.

What would you do if you were me?

About me-
Im 31. Married with a 14 month old.
Have plenty of downtime in winter.
Gone 18 hours a day April-May, and Sept-Nov. Work normal hours through early spring and summer.
Have access to bulk bins, augers, conveyers, skid-loaders, tractors, trucks, trailers, 500? mature oak trees.
Wouldn't mind cutting/splitting/ hauling wood.
Wouldn't mind burning corn I produced.

stee6043 said:

Your heating season will ultimately be December through March based on your work schedule, right?

I'd do a rough ROI calc on your system before you decide on anything. You'll be $15k +/- into a proper gasser system with storage (or a Garn +/-). Can you justify the expense with a limited heating season? Do you get too much snow in the winter to process your wood? Based on your heat load calc do you know if you can support your heat load with 27 acres?

I'll share some "first year lessons" a lot of us have learned. This may or may not be useful for you:

• A true cord of wood.....is a lot of wood. I had dreams of knocking out multiple cords in a day when I started planning my system. The reality, at least for me with my MS310 and 27 ton splitter, is that processing wood for a gasser (small splits) is a part time job.
• Running a boiler like we do can sometimes run your life, depending on the month of the year and the weather outside (reference Polar Vortex and wanting to grab a beer after work during said Polar Vortex).
• I have yet to find comfort in involving my kids (they are very young still) in any part of wood processing other than stacking. For me, for now, time processing wood is time spent away from my kids.

All in I still love heating with wood. But it's surely not exactly what I expected when I got into it. I wouldn't change a thing though...

Click to expand...

Just for reference. I used about 600 gallons LP from Sept1- December 20th. I've used roughly 450 gallons from December 20- Jan 26.
This is heating the upstairs to 68, and the downstairs to 60, unless I'm down there. My garage is 25x30 and well insulated, though it's on the north side, and is kept at 33 degrees.

From what I can tell. One 2'+ diameter oak tree is over 1 cord. Is that correct?

If I went with a woodburner, I was looking at eko 40, econoburn 150, or tarm innova or froling. With storage, I was hoping to get by with one burn until Mid November, and then I would be home more often and would probably have to go to two burns a day.
If I went with a corn/ pellet burner it would probably be an amaizing/ LDJ boiler.