Help Please: Wood Boilers

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Firefighter938

Feeling the Heat
Dec 25, 2014
440
Central Indiana
Hi all,

I have been scanning the posts here for a couple of weeks and I believe a gasification wood boiler may be in my future. I haven't decided on a brand yet because I am not really sure what I need yet. A little back history from me.

My wife and I recently had our 3rd child. We have a 2500sq ft house with a 2 car attached garage. We are going to be building a second story addition to add a bedroom and square footage. We currently have all electric heat with a heat pump. I was going to add a second system upstairs and have 2 zones, upstairs and downstairs.

Last year was a very harsh winter in central Indiana and our electric bills were crazy, +$600 a month. We have a wood insert that I burn when I'm home but my wife doesn't mess with it. It has helped this year so far though. Still, the thought of heating another 600 sq feet is scaring me.

I thought about putting a wood boiler in our attached 2 car garage but need to keep enough space in there so my wife can still easily park her car and load 3 children. It also needs to be easy enough that she can load it when I am on duty at the firehouse.

My plan was to get a HD wagon and haul wood into the garage. Then load the boiler before I left for work and hope that she could just load it when she gets home.

Like I've said, I've been scanning these forums for a couple of weeks but much of this info is above my head. I've never had a boiler before. Heating with a wood stove is nothing new to me though. I think a gasification would be better because I live in a neighborhood, houses on 1 acre lots, and like the idea of less smoke.

Attached is a file to help visualize my house. It sits on a crawl.

Thanks for any and all info.
 

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Does anyone burn pine in their boilers? I see that some manufacturers recommend only hard wood and others say you can burn soft. I am going to clear a large wind row of Austrian and white pines. I was planning on using it for camp fires but it would be cool if I could heat the house with it.
 
FF, I have never burned pine in the E Classic but my neighbor has a 10 year old Woodmaster (non Gasifier) and that thing will burn anything that you put in it, especially wood... The trick (I believe with all OWB) is to let it season thoroughly. Pine burns more that twice as fast as hardwoods, and really hot...

The Weimar
 
You can burn pine in a Garn boiler, as long as it's dried one season. Poplar, hemlock, spruce, & tulip work too. Large splits are best, 10" dia rounds unsplit, larger than that I halve up to 16, then quarter them.
 
Welcome, FF. I think the biggest problem with your plan will be location. Generally a wood burning appliance will not be allowed in a garage. Between permitting and insurance I think this would be a non-starter for you. Those who have no way around this issue will usually have to wall-off the garage area intended for the boiler and I believe it has to have outside access (man door).

There are plenty of folks around here that have successfully burned softwoods in their gassers. I myself have only tried a couple loads of pine and it failed miserably. Hardwood only for me and my EKO.
 
I'm new to this too. However, I'm starting to read up on Thermal Storage as well. From what I believe, the concept is:

1. Add Thermal Storage.
2. The gasification wood boiler goes all out to heat the water in the tanks (a.k.a. Thermal Storage).
3. Your system pulls from the tank(s), not directly from the wood boiler.

The idea here is that a well insulated tank full of extremely hot water takes a long time to cool down.
This means that you have less stop-and-go burns with the hot water boiler, which means less creosote.

Read this sticky here:

https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/biomass-hydronics-training-pdf.137252/

Someone please correct me on this if I am wrong. I'm a newb.
 
Neighborhood, wife with her hands full, firemen I know have strange schedules. You sound like a great candidate for a pellet boiler. Hopefully one of the Pros will chime in. Lots of happy pellet burners here. Can you come by wood easily or would you have to buy most of it? Enjoy the research. Welcome
 
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Neighborhood, wife with her hands full, firemen I know have strange schedules. You sound like a great candidate for a pellet boiler. Hopefully one of the Pros will chime in. Lots of happy pellet burners here. Can you come by wood easily or would you have to buy most of it? Enjoy the research.

Welcome

I thought about pellets but wood is easy for me to get and free. I just have to go cut it.
 
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Neighborhood, wife with her hands full, firemen I know have strange schedules. You sound like a great candidate for a pellet boiler. Hopefully one of the Pros will chime in. Lots of happy pellet burners here. Can you come by wood easily or would you have to buy most of it? Enjoy the research. Welcome


Yes, this, check into a pellet boiler. If your wife won't use it, and you can't be there and load it regularly ...

First, sit down and do a thorough heat loss calculation for your house. I had electric and replaced it with a combination of panel radiators on the second floor and retrofit underfloor for the first floor, and a couple of radiators in the basement. You will need a good calculation if you expect your replacement heating system to work.
 
I will send you a pm with my phone. Feel free to call me and talk about gasifiers and what I have learned after 4.5 years running one with a firefighter schedule.

One thing I will tell you is you need area to process and store wood.

gg
 
Thanks cityboy. I am in Shelbyville, about 20 minutes south of Indianapolis. Laporte is a haul.

I am having a hard time finding dealers of indoor wood boilers in this area. Who did you buy yours from? Everything I am finding is for OWBs. I do have a 30x32 detached pole barn about 20ft from my house. The problem with putting my burner out there is my wife wouldn't go load it. If it was in the garage she could just put a few logs in when she comes and goes and I think it would work.
 
I am about 45 minutes south of you on I74, St. Leon - Lawrenceburg exit if you want to look at a complete system, how much wood they use etc etc.

I put a Thermo-Control 2000 conventional boiler in a detached garage in 2008. Heats the detached garage via radiant heat and the house via water to air heat exchanger. Ordered it from Thermo-Control off their website after talking with them over the phone. My father has had one from the late 70's so I know they were built good.

That being said if I were you, and you have a basement, any wood boiler you choose needs to go in the basement and NOT in the house garage. Or in a detached building/shed. I had some issues with insurance putting it in the detached garage that we worked through but no way were they going to let it in the house garage.

I used 10 full cords last year. I have used as little as 7. Like you said, last year around here was bad and my highest wood usage year.
 
Thanks rwh442. I was kind of in your area last night. We went and ate chicken in Enochsburg. I will give my insurance agent a call tomorrow. I have put in a few hours researching this. I don't want to waste my time if it is going to be shot down by them. I have a neighbor who has a wood furnace in his garage so I didn't give it too much thought. Just because it is there doesn't mean his insurance knows about it though. Thanks for the heads up.

It doesn't seem right that it would be okay for a boiler to be in a basement and not a garage. Most garages are finished with drywall and a lot of basements aren't. I have been on numerous house fires where someone pulls their car/lawn mower in and it catches fire. Most of the time it is contained to the garage mostly. Basement fires not so much. Those things are HOT!!!! and dangerous.
 
It has more to do with solid fuel appliance and flammable vapors in the garage from items like gas cans, snow blowers, cars.

gg
 
Does anyone burn pine in their boilers?
Absolutely Yes. Pine is just about the only wood I have burned beginning with the 2007-08 heating season: red pine, jack pine, white pine. All dried 2 summer seasons. No issues at all, chimney brushed once before the start of each season, only fine fly ash dust in the chimney. I burn 4 full cords of pine in the boiler for a typical long, cold MN heating season to heat my 1500 sq ft shop with the Tarm -- in floor radiant heat.
It doesn't seem right that it would be okay for a boiler to be in a basement and not a garage.
My Tarm Solo Plus 40 gasification boiler is much safer than the wood stove we have in the living room of our house - the only real hot surface on the boiler is the black steel flue pipe from the boiler to the Class A double wall stainless chimney ceiling thimble. The wood stove front and top is super hot.

As others have said, an open flame stove/boiler in any structure, garage or other, with the potential for gasoline or other flammable vapors to be present is the danger, and garages, even those attached to the house, typically have that kind of stuff present. That's the safety danger, not the boiler itself.
 
I thought about pellets but wood is easy for me to get and free. I just have to go cut it.

But, then you have to process it and get it dried & ready to burn. That should involve at least a year of sitting in an exposed area so it will dry good, after it is all processed. And you should be 1-2 years ahead in your wood supply. Which all takes time, and lots of space, and work. Not saying it couldn't be done - just that lots of folks don't realize what they're really in for until they're knee deep in it. So make sure you fully & realistically evaluate your personal situation. If you don't have next years wood all processed & stacked & drying now, you're kind of up against it already - just a bit of reality. I would seriously consider the pellets if you have a decent supply around - you could still cut wood & sell it to friends to fund the pellets. That way at least if you get behind in doing wood, you won't be without fuel or stuck with fuel that isn't fit to burn yet. And won't have to worry about your wife keeping a wood fire going. Then if doing the wood gets going pretty good, you could always switch to wood later or add a wood stove later. There are also boiler units that can do both. Mine has a pellet head option - although things get pricier, of course.
 
Uh not yet - long as I'm still able to do wood. But it could be an option for the future I guess.

I could also do just a little re-plumbing and add a control and do time of day electric with the electric boiler if the power company would consider putting in an off-peak meter.

Never know what the future will bring - always gotta try to keep thinking ahead. And diversify your redundancy-ability. lol...
 
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Part of me is wondering if you're asking the wrong question here. The real question should be "how can I reduce what I pay for heating" rather than "how should I fit a gasification boiler" - the boiler may be part of the solution, but I think it's the wrong place to start.

The thing is, you're looking at doing major building work to add an extension on top of the garage. Because you have builders, architects, etc. in anyway now is probably a good time to take stock of how well insulated your house is at the moment and what could be done to improve it. How thick is the loft insulation for instance? It may well be that super-insulating the extension (i.e. replacing one potentially badly-insulated wall with three insulated walls, and an insulated wall and floor) actually leaves you with lower heating bills. The Green Room on here is very good for that sort of thing, and you'll find many people there who have been through the process of radically cutting heat losses in their homes (I live in the UK normally, so my own experience isn't terribly relevant due to the differences in construction types). It may well be that you're better off spending the money on more insulation which would then increase the proportion of heating coming from the wood stove, the two combined potentially cutting your bills as much as if you installed a wood boiler.

It's rather hard to estimate exactly what the effects would be without a lot more information, and in reality you may well be best off discussing this with your architect - they should at least have more details than we do. It's certainly worth considering though.
 
Thanks for all the help everyone. I cut 3 cord a year now but I mostly just give it away and burn some in my insert now. I started thinking of the possibilities for that wood and I started salivating. I was thinking almost no electric bill during the heating season and a boiler sounds great. I was figuring on close to 6 cord a year. Storing it won't be an issue. My mother and father live on acreage and I store most of it there now. I simply cut split stack there and bring truck loads over in the fall. That is a lot of handling though and it will be on a much larger scale of course. The plan was to build a wood shed by my pole barn and store one years worth in it. Then keep a face cord or so in the garage.

I also thought about putting a fireplace upstairs, but there is only one stairway up and I think it would be a pain to truck wood through the house. I really like the idea of the mess in the garage.

Would a wood furnace be a cheaper/easier option? Then later possibly upgrading? The only problem I see with that is running air duct vs water line. Water lines would be much easier. Plus I like the gasification and little smoke.

I figured I would save ~$2000 on the low side a year if I burn wood. That is heating from Oct thru April.

I have done some upgrading on insulation. All my windows have been replaced. A few years ago I wrapped and resided the entire house in hardy board. Then I had all of my duct work in the crawl replaced with insulation board. It has helped but the electric prices keep going up and it offsetting any gains we make.

This is the first year I have seriously been using my insert. I will know if it has helped when our next electric bill shows up.

Thanks everyone.
 
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