needing information on pressurized wood boilers

Fred61 said:

Tell us how your slab heat is constructed.

Edit: and how dry your original hoard of wood was.

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711mhw said:

Like someone else mentioned, have you thought dividing up your load with several (smaller) units? I know my Wood Gun throws off a good bit of heat, they all must, and to put all that heat in an out building seems like it would make much more sense in a bsmt. & the sh

Yes we've thought about dividing up the load into smaller units, but this gets complicated if I can attempt to explain it right. I grew up with a wood furnace in the house basement, this house in fact I now own, and I don't want the wood or furnace in the basement again, I'd rather have it in a separate building of its own outside somewhere, to eliminate the smoke and debris from the house, along with the wood based critters.

Now comes the strange portion, with my insurance company, any wood furnace, once outside the basement of the house, any structure that its in, won't have any insurance coverage at all, nor can I even go about getting insurance coverage on, even if its inspected and installed via codes and such with a new chimney, which seems to be the hangup with them for some reason, they equate anything wood based with chimney fires. And its a waste of time to attempt to go about it with them with the discussion of efficiency and things like exhaust gas temps and stack temps or anything like that, I've tried. It won't matter what furnace we'd buy and install, unless its in the basement they won't cover any other building at all. Toss into the equation, things like waste oil burners, which some have exhaust temps of over 700 degree's due to being a cheap blast tube design, and so far from efficient in terms of heat transfer its not funny, those are not considered a solid fuel furnace and won't even raise my rates over having no heating source in the shop, and those don't need to be inspected nor installed to any code period. Now if your confused on this, I too sat there scratching my head in total wonder, so I called another insurance company I deal with on my business side, same answer, same reasons, so onto the third company I'd consider, again nearly the same answer on some units other than wood based but basically an identical answer on anything wood based.

So about comes the idea and concept of building a heated, partially insulated building with wood some wood storage in it, nobody will insurance that building, but they'll still insure my other ones just fine, it would put most of the heating in one location, bring them out of the cold and snow banks in the winter, I could refill the building with a skid steer and with volume [and no I don't stack anything by hand] for the amount we go through.

We've looked at and considered several smaller units in one building, not saying its not the answer, it has plenty of merit, one being, if I tied all the heating together, with valving, I could start up and shut down units as needed to meet the demand as the temps got warmer and colder, and have a backup if needed.

Right now, I've got a late 80's gas furnace in the basement of the house, which hasn't been even fired in at least four years, we just use the fan off the unit to circulate air through a heat exchanger, there's no heat source in the shop at all but a portable diesel powered space heater, and the furnace in the other house is undersized for the addition we just put on it, but works fine for now, it too is at least 25 years old.

My original hope was to install a chip furnace, with a smaller stick wood to use in the milder weather, but when I priced it last, for everything needed by the time it was all said and done, we were in or near that 50k mark and if it ever went down, the smaller wood furnace wouldn't even get the water to stay warm, let alone hot, so I'm not sure we gained anything. To have several units capable of heating what I need done, if one were to go down or cause problems, like my current one has/is doing, I'd end with an identical one sitting waiting to be used, not that I had any trouble with that, but nothing ever breaks down, or causes problems when its nice out and you could live without it, its always the coldest windy day of the year, with frigid temps expected for weeks.

We've looked at and considered hard, two units, a higher efficient stick wood model, smaller in size, and a larger, much larger in fact non efficient wood boiler, much like what I currently have, use the smaller one all the time, and only fire the big one for a few months in the dead of winter, the only problem with that is, if the big one went down in the dead of winter, I'd be screwed to say the least. My other thought is to have a waste oil boiler in the same building as these two wood burners, if one went down, I could fire that up, it would eliminate the hassles of dealing with the waste oil in my shop, I could switch the valves and bring it on line in the most frigid temps if needed, and that would save my buying such a large unit, I'd have three smaller ones, bring them online as needed, and shut them off as needed, and if I didn't need the waste oil, just keep storing it till it is needed, a major plus for me, because I don't think I generate enough to have that as a sole heat source for my shop. If I did this, it would almost have to be in one location to make it all work to bring online or as a backup system.

Another option is to have a waste oil burner, force air style in the shop, to kick on and blow when we open the doors or bring something in, to warm up the shop faster, which might not run often, depending on the winter temps and what we're doing in the shop.

As you can tell, I'm not sure what to do, costs are always a concern, but to answer the question of multiple heat sources in multiple buildings, if they are wood or solid fuel based as the insurance company states it, they're not going to be multiple buildings or multiple locations unless I can figure out how to do it, and still keep the buildings insured.

Now onto the discussion of efficiency, supposedly the higher the efficiency, the higher the cost for the furnace, keeping in mind my equation I use, I don't buy any of the wood, my cost comes in handling the wood, mainly in the form of time, how much higher priced of a furnace can one afford or justify to gain an unknown, non uniform based efficiency factor? The reason I ask is this, I can buy a supposedly 500,000 btu pressurized boiler setup, from manufacturer x that's no too efficient in my eye's, verses one that looks much better from manufacturer y for 3 times more money. None are trouble free, despite the claims, they all have maintenance issues of some sort and in the long run I save an unknown or unproven amount of wood, which is what, 25%, 40%, more or less ?? Is there anywhere I can get a better idea of how much each furnace would require for wood each year besides an uneducated guess from someone like me who's buying the furnace?

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